Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The purpose of this article is to identify important aspects of the development of creditworthiness in the post-crisis period. The customer’s creditworthiness was and is one of the main valuation objects in the practice of banks in the world and in Latvia, determining the usefulness and types of credit relations. It is important for both the lender and the borrower to make an objective, complex assessment of the potential borrower’s creditworthiness in order to make an informed decision. More than a decade after the global financial crisis, the financial sector is still considered vulnerable. An analysis of the borrower’s creditworthiness is a mandatory step in the credit granting process. Because the borrower’s creditworthiness depends on many factors, determining a change in all the factors, causes, and circumstances that will affect the creditworthiness in the future is a significant and rather complex issue. Consequently, the purpose of the borrower’s creditworthiness analysis is to conduct a comprehensive examination of his / her performance with a view to making a reasoned assessment of the possibility of returning the resources granted to him. The complex analysis of the borrower’s creditworthiness uses different types of economic analysis. The article analyzes the theoretical and methodological aspects of the borrower’s (legal entity’s) creditworthiness and compares the empirical research of the real practice of Latvian commercial banks in 2011 and 2018. The author investigates the choice of borrower’s creditworthiness analysis methods in Latvian commercial banks, their ranking by importance, the importance of credit policy in the lending process and the main signals that indicate the low creditworthiness of borrowers, thus confirming the likelihood of credit risk.