Credit Benchmark today announced that Donal Smith, co-founder and executive chairman, is to become CEO.
Smith started Credit Benchmark in 2012 with fellow entrepreneur Mark Faulkner, who remains actively involved as a Director with responsibility for data acquisition and innovation; Elly Hardwick, who led the company as CEO since its inception, will step down at the end of this month.
Credit Benchmark, based in London with an office in New York, is a financial data analytics company. It is trusted by the world’s largest banks to aggregate in-house credit risk estimates in order to build a robust consensus data platform.
Smith said: “Elly and I have worked together multiple times, in multiple contexts, and may even do so again in the future. We wish her all the best.”
Prior to founding Credit Benchmark, Smith was CEO of financial data company Data Explorers. That company, founded by Faulkner, was acquired by Markit in 2012. Smith previously worked at Thomson Reuters as CEO of Thomson Financial’s businesses in Europe and Asia, CEO of FT.com and Director of Electronic Publishing for the Financial Times Group. He is non-executive chairman of BISAM S.A.
Credit Benchmark
Credit Benchmark is a financial data analytics company. It gathers credit estimates from market participants in order to create a new source of credit risk data: banks’ consensus credit views. The company supplies credit data on sovereign, corporate, bank, and non-bank financial entities to a growing number of contributing banks.
The company has raised $30 million since 2013. The Series A was led by Index Ventures and the Series B by Balderton Capital.
