Tiers & Suitability
How 0-10 scores map to Prime, Core, and Edge tiers and to institutional suitability labels.
Tier Mapping (Score-Based)
| Tier | Score Range | Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Prime | 8.0 - 10.0 | Strong relative resilience under current evidence |
| Core | 5.0 - 7.9 | Moderate resilience with meaningful constraints |
| Edge | 0.0 - 4.9 | Elevated or unresolved risk pressure |
Tiers are relative classifications, not guarantees or recommendations.
The Prime cutoff is set at 8.0 to ensure that reaching Prime requires genuine strength across all three vectors; a vault cannot land in Prime purely on the back of one dominant vector when the others are mediocre.
Suitability Labels (Policy Layer)
Alongside the numeric tier, the methodology emits a suitability label that captures governance and evidence requirements on top of score:
| Suitability | Rule |
|---|---|
| institutional | reviewed + final score ≥ 8.0 + no hard-fail flags + high-confidence evidence |
| qualified | reviewed + final score ≥ 5.0 |
| speculative | reviewed or provisional but below qualified, or constrained by caps |
| not_assessed | unreviewed |
Suitability is distinct from tier:
- Tier describes score range.
- Suitability adds governance and evidence requirements on top of the score.
A Prime-tier vault can still fall short of institutional if evidence confidence or review status is insufficient. Conversely, institutional requires both a Prime score and clean governance/evidence state.
What Forces A Lower Outcome
Score-limiting constraints are explicit and explainable. The following may pull a score below what the weighted dimensions alone would suggest:
- cap cascade on asset scoring (
review_status, hard-fail flags, overrides, staleness) - unresolved address fallback to strict unreviewed behavior
- portfolio-level concentration, correlation, and wrong-way penalties
- asset-quality drag and hard cap for non-prime assets
- fail-safe operational mode (
degradedorfail_closed)
Practical Reading Guidance
- A Prime tier can still be non-institutional if evidence confidence or governance criteria are insufficient.
- A Core or Edge tier often indicates one or more binding caps; check the explainability fields (caps, flags, freshness, provenance).
- When fail-safe is
fail_closed, no score is served by design.