Standard & Poor.

• Position: RatingsExpress - Statistical Data Included

Credit ratings are going high-tech. Since April, Standard & Poor's has been offering RatingsExpress -- realtime ratings data in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), enabling users to download and customize information, then disseminate it to back-office operations, Web sites, online financial exchanges and corporate intranets.

S&P said the service gives secure access to detailed ratings on more than 645,000 issues and 30,000 users worldwide -- including current and historical data. Data can be delivered either by push or pull technology, by downloading from the S&P site or having S&P send the data directly to the company server.

The information covers the breadth of S&P's...