Moody’s will no longer wait until all issuers have provided it with data before publishing its quarterly monitoring overviews so that it can publish them on a more timely basis, the rating agency said when releasing its latest such report yesterday (Thursday).

The rating agency has hitherto waited until it has the relevant data from all issuers before releasing the overviews, but this has resulted in a time lag of around six months between publication date and the information contained in the overview.

“Going forward, Moody’s aims to publish its covered bond performance data on a more timely basis,” said the rating agency. “This applies both to the more detailed individual deal-specific performance overviews as well as this monitoring overview report.”

This means that the overview will be published closer to the period the information relates to, even if this comes “at the cost of completeness”, in Moody’s words. The rating agency said it will not delay publication “to accommodate issuers that are less responsive”.

The next overview will therefore be for the first quarter of 2011, even though yesterday’s related to the third quarter of 2010, meaning that the rating agency will skip a publication dedicated to the fourth quarter of 2010.

Moody’s said that it will also publish deal-specific performance overviews on a first-come, first-served basis.

The overviews provide listings of key numerical credit measures used by Moody’s for more than 180 transactions.