Who is Merritt Research?

Merritt Research Services, LLC is an independent research and data provider focused on credit information related to municipal bonds. Our goal is to maintain an active database of financial information for the universe of municipal borrowers.

What does Merritt Research do?

1. Merritt Research collects and aggregates continuing disclosure information from municipal borrowers. We do this by actively requesting annual and quarterly financial statements from the borrower, NRMSIR or other delivery agents.

2. We standardize the financial statements and enter the information into our database. This time-saving feature provides a wealth of analytical opportunity to review financial ratios without entering the raw data points into a spreadsheet. Examples of these benefits include looking up the Debt Service Coverage number for the Long Island Power Authority or screening the database for all hospitals with more than 200 Days Cash on Hand.

3. We scan the documents into our database for automatic retrieval by our clients. In addition, we catalog documents by common names. There is no more need to track down the name and address of the CFO, instead Merritt users type in a borrower name and can immediately download the annual and quarterly statements.

4. We provide immediate support. Our clients interact with our financial statement analysts on a regular basis. Consider us an extension of your own research staff, we’ll help you find information from a borrower or explain what we included in the Board Designated Assets.

5. We aggregate meaningful information in one place. Use our products to look up a borrower, retrieve annual/quarterly reports, and obtain financial and other credit defining qualifiers such as key statistics, current event memos and socio-economic indicators.

Why consider Merritt Research?

Over the past fifteen years Merritt Research has developed and refined our practice to provide the most accurate financial statement data available. Our analysts typically have accounting or finance backgrounds and are groomed to rigorously evaluate and analyze financial statements. We are continually assessing our approach to the analysis by regularly incorporating new accounting standards and other changes in statement presentation. Our analysis goes beyond the balance sheet and income statement; we continually peruse the financial notes and when necessary, will call the CFO or auditor to clarify the financial presentation. This expertise and focus on the analysis of financial statements ensures our ability to standardize and present the financial condition of municipal borrowers consistently and accurately.