International Non-Profit Credit Rating Agency

The International Non-Profit Credit Rating Agency, known as INCRA, was a proposed nonprofit alternative to commercial credit rating firms, intended to reform how states' creditworthiness is assessed. It was presented in 2012 by the Bertelsmann Foundation in the United States and the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Germany, in response to criticism of Fitch, Moody's and Standard & Poor's after the 2008 financial crisis. INCRA was designed to incorporate socioeconomic indicators alongside traditional macroeconomic factors in sovereign creditworthiness assessments, and it would have been funded through capital stock rather than rating fees, requiring roughly 400 million dollars in initial funding. The project drew significant media attention but failed to attract enough backing from governments, companies and foundations, and it was abandoned by 2015. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/