Moody’s Investors Service and Torto Wheaton Research will team up to develop software analyzing the risk of commercial mortgage whole loan portfolios. The software — to be called Moody’s Commercial Mortgage Metrics (or CMM) will help banks, life insurance companies and other holders of whole loans analyze credit risks.

CMM metrics will be similar to those used to analyze other fixed income holdings. "Commercial real estate lenders will now have access to a credit processing software for loan level risk that includes a sophisticated array of metrics such as profitability of default and loss given default," says Tad Philipp, managing director of Moody’s CMBS team.

A Web-based version of CMM is expected to be released during the first quarter of 2004.