Three Agencies and How They Are Structured

Nepal’s credit rating industry is a three-firm market, and each of the three licensed agencies is an outgrowth of an established Indian rating institution rather than a purely domestic creation. ICRA Nepal Limited, incorporated on 11 November 2011 and licensed by the Securities Board of Nepal (SEBON) on 3 October 2012, was the country’s first credit rating agency; it operates as a direct subsidiary of ICRA Limited of India, whose own largest shareholder is Moody’s Investors Service, giving ICRA Nepal an indirect line of descent from one of the three global rating houses. CARE Ratings Nepal Limited followed, licensed effective 16 November 2017 and backed by CARE Ratings Limited of India, a firm registered with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and recognized as an External Credit Assessment Institution by the Reserve Bank of India. Infomerics Credit Rating Nepal Limited, licensed in March 2022, is the third and youngest, operating as a subsidiary of the SEBI-registered and RBI-accredited Infomerics Valuation and Rating Private Limited, with a stated focus on banks, non-bank financial companies, large corporates, and small and medium enterprises.

The common thread is that all three operate under formal technical agreements – a Technical Support Services Agreement in ICRA Nepal’s case, Technical Services Agreements for the others – through which the Indian parent supplies rating processes, analytical software, methodologies, research, and analyst training. This structure is significant for understanding the industry’s capabilities: the agencies did not have to build rating methodologies from first principles, but instead localized mature frameworks developed and tested in the larger, more liquid Indian market. Each maintains a deliberate separation between analytical staff, who prepare financial spreads and operational models and take rating decisions through a committee, and relationship contacts, who handle client acquisition and fee collection, a structural firewall intended to keep commercial considerations away from analytical judgment. All three are fully operational, headquartered in Kathmandu, and – as the following sections show – apply broadly convergent rating scales and methodologies, a convergence that itself reflects their shared regulatory environment and common regional lineage.

From Equity Gradings to a Diversified Rating Market

The industry’s evolution tracks the broader modernization of Nepal’s capital market, moving through three licensing milestones that correspond to three distinct competitive structures: a single-agency market from 2012, a duopoly from late 2017, and the current three-agency market since March 2022. But the more consequential evolution has been in what the agencies actually rate. In the earliest phase, rating activity was concentrated almost entirely on mandatory equity work – Initial Public Offer (IPO) gradings, rights-issue gradings, and public debenture issuances driven by SEBON’s disclosure requirements. Over time, and especially as bank credit expanded, the centre of gravity shifted decisively toward Bank Loan Ratings (also called Bank Facility Ratings), which evaluate an entity’s capacity to service specific fund-based facilities such as term loans and working-capital limits and non-fund-based facilities such as letters of credit and bank guarantees. Bank Loan Ratings now represent the largest single category of rating activity in the country. A further diversification came with the development of the mutual fund industry, which created demand for Fund Management Quality Ratings assessing the governance and process quality of asset management companies.

This expansion was propelled by a combination of regulatory mandates and macroeconomic cycles. On the regulatory side, SEBON’s rating requirements for public issues created a baseline of mandatory demand, while Nepal Rastra Bank’s directives requiring commercial banks, development banks, and finance companies to multiply their paid-up capital drove a wave of equity and debenture issuances that all required rating. NRB’s shift in monitoring frameworks – from the credit-to-core-capital-and-deposit ratio to a credit-to-deposit ratio, and the introduction of the Working Capital Loan Guidelines in 2079 (2022) – forced corporate borrowers and banks toward more formalized credit assessment. On the macroeconomic side, demand for ratings surged during major credit-expansion cycles, most notably post-earthquake reconstruction between 2015 and 2019 and the COVID-19 era, during which bank loan portfolios grew at a compound annual rate of roughly 19.91% and the credit-to-GDP ratio climbed from around 64% in FY15 to around 97% in FY22. The same forces that expanded rating demand, however, also seeded the asset-quality stress that would later dominate the industry’s surveillance workload.

How the Agencies Assign Ratings

Across all three agencies the analytical architecture is broadly the same, built on published, sector-specific methodologies that separate business risk from financial risk and then combine them into a single opinion. For non-financial corporates – manufacturers, traders, real estate firms, healthcare and consumer-goods companies – the business-risk assessment examines scale of operations and market standing, promoter background and the financial flexibility derived from the parent business group, industry cyclicality and exposure to raw-material price volatility and import dependence, and the concentration of the customer base and order book. The financial-risk assessment then works through capital structure and leverage (gearing, total debt to gross cash accruals, total outside liabilities to tangible net worth), profitability margins, and debt-coverage indicators such as the interest coverage ratio and the debt service coverage ratio, with particular attention to working-capital intensity and sensitivity to Nepal’s floating interest-rate regime, in which lending rates move with each bank’s quarterly base rate plus a margin.

The agencies draw a clear line between rating an entity’s general creditworthiness and rating a specific obligation. Long-term facilities and instruments – term loans, subordinated debentures, and bonds maturing beyond a year – are rated on a scale running from the highest safety (CARE-NP AAA, [ICRANP] AAA, IRN AAA) down to default (the corresponding D grades), with plus and minus modifiers marking relative standing within a category. Short-term facilities such as working-capital loans, overdrafts, and trust receipts are rated on a separate A1-to-A4 scale, and non-fund-based contingent facilities such as letters of credit and bank guarantees are assessed for the likelihood of drawdown and the borrower’s capacity to cover crystallized liabilities. Structural features – subordination, repayment profile, collateral, and debt service reserve accounts – feed directly into instrument-specific outcomes. For financial institutions the methodology shifts to sector-specific criteria centred on capital adequacy against NRB minimums, asset quality (gross non-performing loans, net NPLs to net worth, provisioning), earnings sustainability (net interest margins, return on net worth, cost-to-income), and the stability and cost of the deposit base. Infrastructure and power projects attract their own methodologies addressing construction and completion risk, and – for hydropower specifically – hydrological variability, the terms of the Power Purchase Agreement with the Nepal Electricity Authority, and the single-project concentration that leaves cash flows exposed to a landslide, a grid-connection delay, or a poor monsoon. A distinct Fund Management Quality Rating, issued principally by ICRA Nepal, evaluates asset managers on qualitative grounds – governance, research capability, fiduciary standards – and expressly disclaims any comment on the future performance or returns of the schemes managed. Governance statuses complete the framework: Rating Watch flags a rating under review, Issuer Not Cooperating marks a failure to supply surveillance data, and Rating Withdrawal follows maturity, cancellation, or a sustained period of non-cooperation.

What Gets Rated, and the Recent Turn in Credit Quality

Ratings in Nepal fall into five principal categories, and their relative weight tells a story about the market. Bank Loan Ratings dominate by volume, spanning long-term and short-term facilities across sectors as varied as hydropower, construction, steel, cement, and trading. Standalone issuer ratings, carrying an “(Is)” or equivalent suffix, provide a general creditworthiness opinion and are used by conglomerates, non-bank financial entities, and microfinance institutions seeking visibility. Debt-instrument ratings cover subordinated debentures and Tier II capital bonds issued predominantly by commercial and development banks to meet NRB capital requirements, along with a nascent set of sectoral bonds such as energy and agriculture instruments. Fund Management Quality Ratings, graded from AMC1 to AMC5, track the growth of the mutual fund sector, and IPO and rights-issue gradings, scored on a one-to-five fundamentals scale, remain a regulatory fixture of public equity raising.

The volume trajectory follows the credit cycle closely. Through the 2012-2022 decade, demand moved from IPO and rights-issue gradings toward Bank Loan Ratings as bank credit expanded, accelerated by the four-fold paid-up-capital increase NRB mandated for banks in 2015 and by pandemic-era lending. What followed the 2022 policy tightening is the more striking development. As contractionary monetary policy, the expiry of COVID relief, and the enforcement of the Working Capital Loan Guidelines took hold, the credit quality of rated entities deteriorated visibly. ICRA Nepal’s surveillance data as of mid-May 2024 showed roughly 85% of rated bank borrowers in non-investment-grade categories, with only about 15% investment grade. The direction of rating actions confirmed the stress: downgrades rose from 13% of actions in FY2021 to 17% in FY2022, 27% in FY2023, and 33% in the first ten months of FY2024, while reaffirmations fell from 79% to 55% over the same window.

Surveillance action	FY2021	FY2022	FY2023	10M FY2024
Upgrades	9%	21%	14%	11%
Downgrades	13%	17%	27%	33%
Reaffirmations	79%	62%	60%	55%

Underlying this shift was a broad deterioration in banking asset quality: gross non-performing loans at Class A commercial banks climbed from 1.2% in mid-July 2022 to 5.41% by mid-April 2026, while capital adequacy moderated from 13.53% to 12.53%; Class C finance companies fared worse, with gross NPLs reaching 11.05% by mid-July 2025. Elevated interest rates and cash-flow squeezes drove a parallel rise in default ratings and in entities moved to Issuer Not Cooperating or placed on Watch with Negative Implications for failing to furnish disclosures. The entities receiving ratings span the full cross-section of the economy – commercial banks rated for issuer standing and Tier II debentures, hydropower developers financing 12-to-15-year project loans, Class A construction contractors on government infrastructure, manufacturing and FMCG firms tied to the country’s major business houses, import-dependent trading and dealership firms, and hospitality, aviation, and capital-market intermediaries – but the recent surveillance record makes clear that the rating book as a whole has been absorbing, and transmitting, the pressure of a tightening credit cycle.

The Business Model

All three agencies operate on the issuer-paid model that prevails internationally: the entity seeking a rating – the borrower, corporate issuer, or bank – pays the fee directly, with the fee scaling by the quantum of the facility or instrument rated and by its type, so that a large long-term term loan attracts a higher fee than a small short-term limit. The model is not built on one-off transactions. Assigned ratings carry a recurring annual surveillance obligation over the life of the rated exposure, and issuers are contractually bound to supply updated financials for that surveillance, which generates a recurring revenue stream layered on top of the initial rating fee. The Issuer Not Cooperating mechanism doubles as a revenue-protection device: an issuer that stops furnishing data or paying surveillance fees has its rating moved to INC and placed on notice of withdrawal, which both preserves the integrity of the public rating and creates a strong incentive for issuers to remain paying, cooperating clients. Beyond rating fees and surveillance, the third structural revenue-relevant element is the technical agreement with the Indian parent, which governs the sharing of software, methodologies, research, and training. Notably, the agencies do not appear to offer advisory or consulting services to the entities they rate – a restraint consistent with the regulatory design, which keeps rating firms at arm’s length from their clients precisely to avoid the conflict that bundled advisory work would create.

Technical Capacity in Comparative Perspective

Measured against international practice, the Nepalese agencies are best understood as competent localizers of imported methodology rather than independent developers of proprietary analytics. Global rating houses rely on proprietary quantitative platforms, real-time market-implied signals such as credit-default-swap pricing, and integrated multi-jurisdictional databases; the Nepalese agencies import their analytical infrastructure through parent technical agreements and apply it to local conditions. Their methodologies match global standards in structure and rating definitions, but the analytical emphasis is on fundamental credit analysis – debt service coverage, interest coverage, gearing, promoter track record, and bank-limit structure – rather than on the market-implied indicators and structured-finance models that feature in mature markets, largely because the instruments those models address (collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, asset-backed securities) simply do not exist in Nepal. The human-resource model is correspondingly lean: small domestic analytical teams whose members cover multiple sectors, supported by parent training, in contrast to the specialized sector economists and quantitative engineers of global agencies.

Two data-environment features mark the sharpest divergence from mature markets. The first is the ongoing transition from general accounting practice to Nepal Financial Reporting Standards, which requires analysts to restate historical metrics – for example, moving interest-income recognition from a cash to an accrual basis – and complicates period-to-period comparability. The second, and more consequential, is the high prevalence of issuer non-cooperation during surveillance: where developed markets enjoy continuous public disclosure through liquid securities markets and mandatory exchange filings, Nepalese agencies depend heavily on client-submitted management reports and bank disclosures, leaving periodic surveillance vulnerable to non-disclosure and forcing agencies to rate on “best available information” when cooperation lapses. On research infrastructure, the agencies publish transaction-specific rationales and methodology criteria with the same disclaimers found internationally – that a rating is an opinion on credit risk, not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell – but they do not maintain the extensive macroeconomic-forecasting and sector-default-study research divisions of the global houses.

The Regulatory Framework: SEBON and the Credit Rating Regulation, 2068

The industry’s regulatory foundation is the Credit Rating Regulation, 2068 (with its 2074 amendment), issued by SEBON under Section 116 of the Securities Act, 2063. The Regulation makes licensing mandatory: only an organized institution whose main shareholders meet the qualification criteria may act as a rating agency after obtaining SEBON’s permission, and no person may conduct ratings or offer related opinions without a licence. Entry standards are substantial. An applicant must be a limited company with minimum paid-up capital of NPR 20 million and net worth of at least 75% of that figure; it must employ at least two staff holding a master’s degree in economics, commerce, finance, accountancy, or commercial law and at least two chartered accountants recognized by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nepal; and its promoters and directors must be free of convictions for fraud, forgery, or moral turpitude. The Regulation deliberately accommodates the foreign-parent structure that characterizes all three agencies: a qualified foreign rating institution may hold between 51% and 75% of a Nepalese joint venture, and a “main shareholder” (defined as holding at least 10%) must be either a local institution with net worth of NPR 1 billion or a qualified foreign entity with at least NPR 500 million net worth and three years’ experience – criteria that in practice describe exactly the Indian parents backing ICRA Nepal, CARE Ratings Nepal, and Infomerics Nepal.

Governance and operational obligations run throughout the rated relationship. Every agency must form a Rating Committee, whose members meet the same qualification standards as the CEO and directors, to take all rating decisions; must appoint a Compliance Officer empowered to report non-compliance directly to SEBON if management fails to act; and must execute a written client agreement specifying rights, duties, fees, and the client’s commitment to truthful disclosure. Critically, the Regulation imposes a minimum three-year continuous surveillance obligation on every accepted rating, requires immediate public disclosure of any rating change through press release and website with simultaneous notice to SEBON, and – where a client withholds cooperation – requires the agency to review the rating on best available information and, if the rating becomes meaningless, to place it under surveillance for at least six months before withdrawal. The conflict-of-interest architecture is explicit: an agency may not rate itself, its promoter or main shareholders, or its parent or subsidiary, and any financial or associate relationship with a client must be disclosed in the rating announcement. SEBON’s supervisory reach is correspondingly wide, running from pre-licence infrastructure inspection through quarterly reporting, annual audited-statement submission, on-site and off-site inspection powers, and a graduated sanctions ladder – warning, corrective directive, partial or full business ban, and licence suspension or cancellation – supplemented by fines of NPR 50,000 to 200,000 for reporting failures and by AML/TFS obligations that classify rating agencies as securities-market participants required to screen clients against sanctions lists.

Where Ratings Are Mandatory: The Regulatory Demand Base

Much of the industry’s revenue rests not on voluntary demand but on regulatory triggers, and these operate across two regulators. On the securities side, the Credit Rating Regulation’s Rule 3 requires a rating before an organized institution issues shares to the public or by rights where the issue is NPR 30 million or more, before any issue of debentures or other debt instruments, before any issue of preference shares, and before any public issue, further public offering, or rights issue priced at a premium to face value. The Securities Registration and Issue Regulation, 2073 broadens this to require a rating of the institution before essentially any public securities issue, and layers minimum-grade conditions on top: a premium issue requires at least an “average” grade, and the book-building method requires an “average or higher” grade. The Issue and Allotment Guideline, 2074 sets a still higher bar for first-time issuers, requiring a rating at least one notch above the minimum grade, and ties the extent of mandatory underwriting to the grade achieved. Mutual fund offer documents must disclose the rating agency and grade assigned to the fund manager or scheme, and international financial institutions issuing bonds in Nepal may satisfy the requirement with an international rating.

The banking side supplies an even larger mandatory base. NRB’s Unified Directives require licensed Class A, B, and C institutions to use an external credit rating as a basis for credit evaluation whenever they extend or renew facilities to a borrower using NPR 500 million (50 crore) or more – with a specific extension to construction-sector borrowers at the same threshold – and impose the same NPR 500 million rating trigger on the Infrastructure Development Bank (NIFRA). Ratings also feed directly into capital adequacy: under the Capital Adequacy Framework, domestic corporate claims are risk-weighted by rating (50% for AAA, 70% for the AA band, 80% for the A band, and 100% for BBB+ and below or unrated, subject to a 50% floor), so a borrower’s rating affects not only its access to and pricing of credit but the capital its lender must hold against it. NRB reinforces this with anti-cherry-picking rules – where two ratings differ, the higher risk weight applies – and with supervisory penalties, increasing risk-weighted exposure by up to 5% where risk assessment is judged inadequate and up to 3% for disclosure failures. This dual regulatory dependence, securities-side and banking-side, is the single most important determinant of the industry’s size, and it is why rating volumes track regulatory thresholds as closely as they track the credit cycle.

The Contribution to Financial Market Development

Ratings contribute to Nepal’s financial market development along several reinforcing channels. Most fundamentally, they reduce the information asymmetry between borrowers and lenders by replacing opaque, unrated borrowing with a standardized, comparable risk scale, giving both institutional and retail investors a common benchmark. In the equity market, SEBON’s mandatory IPO and rights-issue gradings function as a retail-investor protection at the point of public capital raising. In the bond market – the segment where ratings arguably matter most for the country’s long-term development – compulsory ratings on the subordinated debentures that banks issue to meet Tier II capital requirements have created the fixed-income issuance that exists, and specialized infrastructure financiers such as NIFRA depend on ratings to raise long-term resources through bonds and mezzanine debt for public-private-partnership projects. In credit pricing, because bank lending runs on a floating base-rate-plus-margin regime, the rating provides the objective risk benchmark for setting the margin: higher-rated borrowers command lower spreads, while weaker or INC-status borrowers face elevated spreads or debt-servicing stress in tight liquidity. And in long-term project finance – above all hydropower, which requires 12-to-15-year tenors with ballooning amortization – ratings that evaluate construction, hydrology, and PPA risk are what allow banks to underwrite very large facilities, with rated hydropower exposures running into the tens of billions of rupees for single projects, and with mandatory IPO ratings later serving as the bridge that lets developers raise public equity to pay down bank debt and lower gearing.

Nepal in Regional and International Context

Placed against regional and global markets, Nepal’s rating ecosystem is young, structurally tied to Indian methodology, and shaped by domestic constraints that its parent markets have largely outgrown. The industry is roughly fourteen years old, against parent agencies operating in India since the early 1990s and global houses with more than a century of history. Its revenue is driven by bank loan ratings and mandatory regulatory issuances rather than the balanced mix of corporate debt, commercial paper, and securitization seen in India or the corporate-bond, sovereign, and structured-finance depth of global markets. Its surveillance environment is marked by high issuer non-cooperation, against the moderate non-cooperation of India’s stricter disclosure regime and the low non-cooperation of markets with continuous public reporting. The methodologies and rating scales are regionally aligned – national-scale symbols such as CARE-NP AAA and [ICRANP] AAA mirror the parent conventions – but the asset-class scope is narrower: structured-finance products, sovereign and municipal debt, credit default swaps, and ESG or sustainability ratings are either absent or nascent. Two local features stand out as structural constraints on rating analytics themselves: the floating interest-rate regime that transmits base-rate volatility directly into borrower debt-servicing capacity, and the complete absence of derivative hedging instruments, which deprives fund managers and corporate treasurers of the tools their regional counterparts use to manage risk and which directly complicates the fund-quality assessments the agencies are asked to make.

The Ecosystem’s Weaknesses

For all its methodological credibility, Nepal’s rating ecosystem carries a set of structural and operational weaknesses that limit its effectiveness, and the findings are unusually candid about them. The most pervasive is issuer non-cooperation. A substantial number of rated entities fail or refuse to supply the audited financials and operational data that annual surveillance requires, forcing agencies to rate on best-available information and to move ratings into the Issuer Not Cooperating category on notice of withdrawal – a pattern visible across a long list of named entities spanning finance companies, hydropower developers, construction firms, and trading concerns. The agencies themselves flag information-availability risk as a key credit-risk factor and warn that INC-category ratings may not adequately reflect an entity’s actual credit profile, which is a direct statement that a meaningful slice of the public rating stock is less reliable than the scale symbol alone would suggest.

A second cluster of concerns goes to independence and conflicts of interest. Shareholder overlaps exist between rated entities and the agencies that rate them – e.g. shareholders of NIC Asia Bank and of Global Trading Concern also hold stakes in CARE Ratings Nepal, prompting explicit conflict-of-interest disclaimers in the relevant press releases – and beneath the firm-level overlaps sits a systemic one that ICRA Nepal’s own research identifies: because most of Nepal’s major business houses are themselves involved in banking, there is no clean demarcation between borrowers and lenders, a structural blurring that creates standing conflict-of-interest potential across the whole financial system. The issuer-paid model compounds this, since the agencies depend financially on the very issuers whose creditworthiness they assess. Transparency and communication issues surface too: rating-watch actions are sometimes misread by market participants and media as outright downgrades, to the point that Infomerics Nepal had to issue a formal clarification in April 2026 distinguishing a placement on Credit Watch from a downgrade, and credit evaluation is hampered where major state-owned entities such as the Nepal Electricity Authority carry qualified audit opinions. Market structure imposes further limits: NEPSE is heavily concentrated in financial-sector stocks (historically around 61-81% of capitalization) with hydropower the main recent entrant, the corporate bond and fixed-income market remains shallow, and the total absence of hedging tools constrains the fund-quality assessments the agencies produce. Finally, retail investor awareness of ratings, risk frameworks, and mutual fund structures is low – a disconnect reflected in close-ended mutual fund schemes routinely trading at 10-20% discounts to their reported net asset values.

Strengthening the Ecosystem

The reforms point toward follow directly from these weaknesses and cluster around governance, information discipline, coverage, and market depth. On governance and independence, the clearest measures are to enforce shareholding ceilings and prohibit cross-shareholdings between rated banks or corporates and the rating agencies, to require that rating committees be composed of a majority of independent external experts with no shareholding or board ties to the agency’s promoters or bank clients, and to keep the existing restriction on agencies providing advisory services to rated entities firmly in place. On information discipline – the industry’s binding operational constraint – the most impactful step would be a joint SEBON-NRB enforcement protocol under which entities classified as Issuer Not Cooperating are automatically barred from loan renewals, interest-rate concessions, dividend-distribution approvals, and permission for public equity or rights issues, converting non-cooperation from a low-cost choice into a genuinely penalizing one; a complementary measure is to require that borrowers be evaluated against financial statements verified through the Inland Revenue Department and other government portals.

On coverage, the findings point to full integration of microfinance institutions and cooperatives into the Credit Information Bureau to close the gaps that have allowed over-leveraging and multiple-line borrowing among non-bank intermediaries, and to a gradual lowering of the mandatory Bank Loan Rating threshold from NPR 500 million toward NPR 250 million together with mandatory surveillance on multiple-banking arrangements that currently escape consortium-level oversight. On market depth – the precondition for the industry to mature beyond bank-loan rating – the recurring recommendations are to diversify NEPSE beyond its financial-sector concentration by incentivizing real-sector listings through book-building and premium pricing, to introduce the derivative hedging instruments and fixed-income products (interest-rate swaps, index funds, municipal and corporate bonds) whose absence currently constrains both risk management and fund-quality rating, and to operationalize the pending market-infrastructure reforms around margin trading, short selling, an SME platform, and non-resident participation. For infrastructure and hydropower finance specifically, the emphasis falls on synchronizing plant construction with transmission-line completion to avoid take-and-pay revenue losses, and on expanding fixed-rate long-term energy bonds and concessional foreign credit lines with foreign-exchange shielding – the RaghuGhat Hydroelectric Project’s USD 67 million concessional line from the Exim Bank of India at a fixed 6% is cited as the model – to protect long-tenor project cash flows from the base-rate volatility that the floating-rate regime otherwise imposes.

References

Securities Act, 2063 (2006), ss.87, 90, 101, 116. Credit Rating Regulation, 2068 (2011) (and First Amendment, 2074), Rules 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37. Securities Registration and Issue Regulation, 2073 (2016), Rules 9B, 25, 25C, 35. Issue and Allotment Guideline, 2074, ss.3, 17. Securities Listing and Trading Regulation, 2075, Rule 6. Securities Board Regulation, 2064, Rules 3, 14, 28. Mutual Fund Guidelines, 2069, ss.1.5, 4.9. Small and Medium Organized Institution Securities Issue and Trading Regulation, 2081, Rule 8.

Nepal Rastra Bank, Unified Directives, 2081 (Class A, B, C BFIs), Directive No. 2, Clause 34; Directive No. 16. Nepal Rastra Bank, Unified Directive, 2082 (Infrastructure Development Bank / NIFRA), Directive No. 2, Clause 24. Nepal Rastra Bank, Capital Adequacy Framework, 2015, s.3.3. Nepal Rastra Bank, Working Capital Loan Guidelines, 2079 (2022). Bank and Financial Institution Act, 2073 (2017) (BAFIA), ss.6, 22, 40, 99, 100.

Companies Act, 2063 (2006), ss.34, 60, 86, 89, 93, 99, 101, 105, 108, 109, 164, 176. Insolvency Act, 2063 (2006), s.57. Income Tax Act, 2058 (2002), ss.13, 88, 92.

Nepal Rastra Bank, Bank Supervision Reports, 2007/08, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24. Nepal Rastra Bank, Annual Reports, 2018/19, 2020/21, 2023/24.

ICRA Nepal Limited; CARE Ratings Nepal Limited; Infomerics Credit Rating Nepal Limited – rating rationales, press releases, and methodology documents. ICRA Nepal Limited, credit rating surveillance statistics (as of mid-May 2024).