The Libyan economy is beginning to gain momentum, so the need from both domestic and international investors for business services such as information about Libya's business sector and companies is growing.
Sanad Credit Rating Agency, a Libyan company, is the first to launch its services to fill this long existing void.
Libya Herald conducted a Q&A with its founder and owner, Monder Shahoumi
What was your motivation for starting the company?
It began with a question I kept returning to: what would actually motivate a Libyan company to publish its financials, govern itself properly and follow best practice? The law barely asks it of them — there are no clear guidelines, no benchmarking process, and the state does not enforce disclosure even where it is required. Waiting for compliance to produce transparency is waiting forever.
Markets solve this differently: they reward it. I spent more than twenty years inside London’s financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, Schroders and Man Group among them — where disclosure and benchmarking are simply the water everyone swims in: the firm that opens its books earns cheaper capital, stronger counterparties and a reputation its competitors have to answer.
Later, serving on the board of a Libyan bank and chairing its audit committee, I saw the other side — capable institutions with no benchmark to be measured against and no reward for being better than the rules require.
Libya was missing the institution that creates that incentive. SANAD is that institution: we exist to make transparency pay.
Are there any other competitors?
We are not the only licensed agency — the Libyan Capital Market Authority has issued a small number of rating agency licences.
We are the first to activate ours and operate: published methodologies, live ratings, research in the market. The distance between holding a licence and running an agency is the whole business — the analytics, the verified data, the committee process, the track record.
As for the global agencies, they have never covered Libyan entities in any meaningful way. I hope the other licensees come to market; competition would prove the sector is real. Our job is to set the benchmark they will be measured against — and it would be a poor rating agency that feared being compared.
Where is Sanad’s official headquarters?
Benghazi — by design. Financial infrastructure built for all of Libya should not be concentrated in one city, and from Benghazi we cover the whole market. We plan to open branches in Tripoli, Dubai and London; today our presence in those cities is purely relationship management, keeping us close to the domestic institutions and the international investors and banks whose decisions about Libya our ratings are meant to inform.
Under which Libyan law is Sanad formed?
SANAD is incorporated as a Libyan company under the Commercial Activity Law No. 23 of 2010, and licensed and supervised as a credit rating agency by the Libyan Capital Market Authority under the capital markets framework, including the Authority’s regulations governing rating agencies. Both halves matter: a Libyan company under Libyan law, answerable to a Libyan regulator — applying methodology built to international standards.
How large do you think your targeted market sector will be?
Measured properly, the addressable market is the formal economy itself. Within months of activating our licence we have published more than forty ratings covering Libya’s banking sector, alongside a Banking Stress Index and quarterly sector research. Behind the banks sit the insurers, microfinance institutions, state-owned enterprises and large corporates — none of them benchmarked today. And as Libya’s sukuk (Islamic bonds) and debt-market framework matures, every issuance will need a rating as a matter of course.
I won’t offer a headline number; what I will say is that ratings are infrastructure, and infrastructure grows with everything that gets built on top of it.
Who are your target customers?
Three groups. Issuers — banks, insurers, corporates and, increasingly, sukuk issuers — that need a rating to raise funding, reassure counterparties or satisfy regulators. Users of credit information — investors, treasury and risk teams, trade-finance counterparties and international institutions — who subscribe to our ratings register, data feeds, research and the Banking Stress Index. And institutions preparing themselves for assessment, which we support through advisory, governance and ESG work. There is also a customer we never charge: the market itself. The public register and our methodologies are open to everyone, because a benchmark only works if everyone can see it.
What are your short and long-term aims?
Data first. Data is the foundation of a successful economy, and Libya’s is scattered, inconsistent and unverified. Our central aim is to build the most comprehensive and accurate fundamentals database for the Libyan economy — starting with the banking sector we already cover, then extending across the financial system and the major corporates. The byproduct is the point: when companies know their numbers are being collected, verified and benchmarked, transparency, accuracy and the timeliness of financial reporting improve on their own. Alongside that, we want to help bring the Libyan financial sector in line with international best practice — KYC, AML, governance and disclosure, the adoption of Basel standards and IFRS, and AAOIFI standards in the case of Islamic financial institutions — and to raise the quality of auditing and financial reporting across the market. These are key drivers in our rating methodology, so every rating we assign rewards the institutions that get there first.
Longer term: ratings underpinning a working sukuk and bond market, a bench of Libyan analysts trained inside SANAD to international standards, and SANAD as the reference point for credit risk in Libya — and, in time, the wider region.
How will you sell your services?
By being believable — nothing else sells a rating. Our methodologies, rating definitions and performance statistics are published, our committee process is documented, and we operate under the supervision of the LCMA.
That transparency is the sales engine. The commercial model on top of it is the established one: solicited ratings commissioned by issuers, subscriptions to data and research, and advisory engagements — with a strict wall between the commercial and analytical sides of the house, so no fee can ever touch a rating outcome.
Finally: Why the name “SANAD”?
In Arabic, ''sanad'' means support — something you can lean on. In classical scholarship it is also the chain of transmission that establishes whether a report can be trusted. That is exactly what a credit rating is: a documented, verifiable basis for trust. The name is a daily reminder of the standard we have to meet.