Japan's regional banks are turning to a tried and true method of conveying bad news: asking a foreign third-party to do it for them.
Banks desperately want to raise interest rates to reflect the risk of their loans. But bankers are human -- they sometimes fret getting tough with longtime clients.
Enter U.S. credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's and databank consortium Risk Data Bank of Japan, Ltd. The two have jointly developed software that estimates the probability of a company with total sales under 10 billion yen defaulting on its loans.