ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to identify modes to which the banks can resort to in order to attribute a rating to business networks established through a network contract, as well as to the individual participants in this aggregation, considered on a stand-alone basis. The issue of ratings, i.e. of the prospective solvency of a given debtor to be summarized by alpha-numerical values expressed on ordinal ranges, has been widely researched by the scientific-academic literature. It is evident that, in practice, within a formalized, highly integrated industrial group, in which the holding company exercises activities of governance and direction the rating assignment process appearing as the more suitable is the one centered on the parent company. The development of the phenomenon of business networks gives rise to the problem of defining a new paradigm in which to frame the relations that are established between them and the banking system.
