Mumbai, 3rd June 2025: CRIF High Mark, a leading provider of credit solutions, rebrands its flagship credit assessment tool, CRIF India MSME Rank (CIMR), to CRIF India Business Rank (CIBR). This move reflects the company’s commitment to simplifying its offerings and expanding the tool’s applicability across a wider spectrum of businesses.
Originally developed to assess the creditworthiness of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), the evolved CIBR retains its core strengths while better reflecting its utility in evaluating a wider array of businesses. The change aligns with CRIF India’s broader mission to deliver integrated credit insights across commercial domains.
Speaking on the enhancement of the tool Ramkumar Gunasekaran, Director of Sales at CRIF High Mark said “Enabling credit flow to MSMEs is not a distribution issue but essentially a risk assessment challenge. Credit Institutions are often challenged with risk assessment of these MSMEs due to unavailability of rich and relevant data due to their less formal nature of business. CRIF India MSME Rank (CIMR) is a behavioural risk indicator designed to predict the probability of default of entities with less that INR 50 Crs aggregate credit exposure. Now, with the evolution of CRIF India MSME Rank (CIMR) into CRIF India Business Rank (CIBR), we are expanding the tool’s relevance to a broader array of businesses that extends beyond MSMEs, while maintaining its core focus on creditworthiness and risk differentiation. Banks and NBFCs can effectively implement CIBR in various use cases including but not limited to application evaluation, borrower selection, process differentiation, pricing strategy, line assignment, renewals, early warning signals, customer retention and collections. CIBR is the most comprehensive tool for risk separation of businesses with any size of credit exposure”
Key Features of CRIF India Business Rank (CIBR):
CIBR draws on CRIF’s commercial credit data and scoring expertise to provide lenders with a robust evaluation of an entity’s creditworthiness. Notable features include:
- 13-Tranche Rank Framework: CIBR offers 13 distinct ranks, enabling lenders to differentiate credit risk with greater precision across various business profiles
- 36-Month Observation Window: Ensures stability and robustness in credit behaviour monitoring across a reasonable business cycle, allowing it to account for seasonality. This is combined with a 12-month forward looking performance outlook
- Advanced Analytics Engine: Leverages a powerful analytics engine, incorporating advanced indicators and classifiers to enhance the precision of credit risk assessments
- Objective and Data-Driven: CIBR is a behavioural model that can support lenders in objective risk categorization of businesses and enable to manage large scale processing.
- Early Warning Capabilities: Enables identification of potential delinquency risks, helping lenders mitigate defaults proactively
- Wide Lender Adoption: Over 100 financial institutions already leverage this tool to streamline MSME and business loan evaluations
CIBR Structure: A Robust Foundation for Business Risk Assessment
CIBR gives each business a rank from 1 to 13, with a corresponding risk classification. CRIF leverages its commercial credit data and performs risk assessment basis repayment behaviour, credit acceleration, utilization of credit and credit vintage of borrowers among many. Lenders also get the granularity of Commercial Risk Score from 300 to 900 along with the rank, which enables sharper risk differentiation and helps them make faster and more confident loan decisions, especially when evaluating small and growing businesses.
