Support vector machines (SVMs), a machine learning technique, has been applied to not only binary classification problems such as bankruptcy prediction but also multi-class problems such as corporate credit ratings. However, in general, the performance of SVMs can be easily worse than the best alternative model to SVMs according to the selection of predictors, even though SVMs has the distinguishing feature of successfully classifying and predicting in a lot of dichotomous or multi-class problems. For overcoming the weakness of SVMs, this study has proposed an approach for selecting features for multi-class SVMs that utilize the impurity measures of classification trees. For the selection of the input features, we employed the C4.5 and CART algorithms, including the stepwise method of discriminant analysis, which is a well-known method for selecting features. We have built a multi-class SVMs model for credit rating using the above method and presented experimental results with data regarding S&P 500 companies.