Great. Just in the interest of time, why don't we get started? I think we saved the best for last. We've got FactSet here. We've got Linda Huber, CFO, Kendra Brown from IR. We're thrilled to host FactSet. Just by way of background, I'm Kevin McVeigh. I'm the Information Services Analyst here at Credit Suisse. Covered FactSet for a long time. We actually recently became much more constructive on the stock. You know, I think FactSet's had a really strong history of strong senior management, and Linda's only enhanced that. I think most of you folks know she really has had a storied career on Wall Street with, you know, time at Moody's, MSCI. It's actually coming up on two years in August at FactSet, which I can't believe just how quick the time goes, right? It's just amazing.
I try to keep these as iterative as possible, so I'm gonna open it up to the audience. Anyone listening on the webcast, if you have questions, if you wanna email me, I think most of you folks know my email address is Kevin dot McVeigh, M-C-V-E-I-G-H, at Credit, C-R-E-D-I-T, and then there's a dash Suisse, S-U-I-S-S-E.com. If you email me questions, I'll try my best. Again, in the interest of time, why don't we get started? You know what I've done, and we've been on the road a lot, it's been really, really fortunate.
Where I always like to start with these, particularly given, you know, what we think has been a really meaningful shift in the rate of growth in ASV, Linda, is talk about the competitive environments across the three businesses you have. We've tried to take much more of a holistic view, kind of disaggregating it based on ASV across the market data versus the analytics business versus the CTS. Maybe just help us. I know that it sounds very, very basic, just the opportunity, I think it really helps underscore why there's been such a incremental shift in the ASV in addition to the investments you made, maybe we start there.
Yeah, sure. Thank you very much, Kevin, for inviting us down to the warm weather.
Sure.
We greatly appreciate that. I think we can describe each of the three businesses at FactSet as doing quite well right now. Starting with the traditional R&A business, which is our research and analytics business, research and advisory, excuse me. The former workstation business. That's now a much broader thing. That business also encompasses our wealth business, and that is the largest chunk of ASV in that group, as you know. We've had a number of exciting changes and some big wins. You may have seen the win with the Bank of Montreal, wealth win, which has been very important to us. Several thousand desktops. The guidance for the businesses, for each of the businesses is high single digit ASV growth, except for CTS, which is low double digit.
Moving on to the analytics and trading business has also been doing very well. They focus on the portfolio life cycle. We feel that we have a number of products that have really come to the fore with those offerings, and we're pretty excited about what's going on there. Still looking for a few places where we could fill in some gaps, but doing very well there. The CTS business, really great things going on as well in that area. Those are our large scale data feeds, also providing data lakes for customers, which is an increasingly growing business. We've had real success lately in the real-time space, where we're partnering with BMLL, which is a British company, to provide Tier data, which is a differentiator. We found real-time to be an attractive opportunity, so we're putting some investment dollars there.
It's super helpful. Linda, one of the things I think that's always been, created a lot of opportunity for FactSet longer term is, you know, how moded the relative market share is. I think you've got the traditional market data business, and then you've got the software as well as, to your point, the CTS business. Maybe talk about some of the investments because, you know, there's been a lot of hard work behind the success, some of the recent success.
Maybe talk about some of the investments. It's been a three-year process, and I think initially there was a lot of surprise on the market, but you folks had been really, really in front of the need to really architect into the cloud a little bit. Then just maybe the investments in content that have really, you know, fueled some of the incremental growth. You know, it's not just you're seeing the benefit of it today, but it's been a really three-year exercise.
Yeah, you're absolutely correct about that. If you rewind to 2019, we announced the decision to invest $100 million in the business, which was a brave announcement at the time. I think it was one that that was a bit surprising. The main impetus for that investment was to move the company to the cloud and to do it relatively quickly. As we moved on to three years later and had Investor Day, we described that that $100 million investment paid off in $150 million in ASV. Very good payoff. The move to the cloud has allowed us to react much more nimbly to what the clients want. We can very quickly drop a demo or spin up a product for a client.
Do that in a very short period of time for something that used to take weeks. That was a smart investment, but we were also quite lucky, Kevin, because we invested during a period of time in the pandemic when others might have, more likely, they decided to pull back. We kept going and stuck to our knitting while we worked through the pandemic. At the end of that time, we found that all the advantages we had hoped for, had really come to pass with the move to the cloud. Recently, our new Chief Technology Officer, Kate Stepp, who's been at the company quite a long time, very impressive, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon.
Kate has tweaked it a bit, and so we're gonna keep particularly our in-house applications on the premises as opposed to in the cloud. That reduces the operating run rate just a bit. We'll save about $20 million over five years, thanks to Kate's leadership and decision. There are certain things like our general ledger that we don't need to run in the cloud. We can do that on-prem, and everything will be fine. That big investment in technology has really paid off. In terms of content, we bought the BTU business, which is an energy information business based outside Denver. We bought Truvalue Labs, an ESG business.
Perhaps, most notably, about a year ago today, we did the financing for our CUSIP acquisition, which was $1.925 billion, biggest acquisition to date. CUSIP has performed really incredibly well and better than we had even expected. It's been a great year since we issued bonds, blended rate of 3.25% for a five-year and ten-year paper. It looks beautiful in hindsight, given where rates are today. We really feel that CUSIP has provided strong revenue growth for us, a bit in excess of what we had expected, the margins that we had expected, and it's held up very well even though the capital markets have been a little bit weak.
Interestingly, 85% of that business is subscription revenue, 15%, new issues. We hear a lot of questions about perhaps, the new issuance market is weak, how can that part of CUSIP be doing okay? CUSIPs' any number of products, some less glamorous but very popular, like certificates of deposit, which as rates have moved up, have become obviously very important, and also municipal bonds is another example. CUSIP team's been busy. We come off our technical services agreement on March 1st, and we remain delighted with the acquisition.
You know, it's interesting you say luck, but it's the timing's been, whether it's CUSIP or the initial investments in the tech stack, I think really underscores how you folks have been able to really frame where the industry is going. Maybe talk a little bit about, Linda, you know, I know when you reported most recent quarter, you know, preparing for some macro uncertainty, to the extent you can maybe frame that a little bit. One of the things that we were always focused on was your ability to really manage the expense while really not sacrificing the top line. Part of that's the subscriptive nature of the business, part of it is just, I think, some of the cost flexibility the cloud brings you.
You know, maybe talk to that $24 million-36 million a little bit within the context of, you know, how you think about that today. You know, I know there's another incremental $20 million savings on the data side as well, and how we think about the reinvestment as opposed to maybe, you know, margin expansion.
Sure. I think when we did first quarter earnings, we were coming off some of those very high inflation numbers that we hope are starting to abate now, and maybe the curve is coming down, which would be great. Given the uncertain macroeconomic outlook, we put into place some of the components of the downturn playbook. That required that we be really cautious with T&E, travel and expense money, that we think very critically about our hires, and that we think about the ones that are most needed given what we're facing right now. We had also looked at making sure that our four big cost buckets were under control. As you said, with the downturn playbook, we can move the lever on about 2%-3% of expenses.
If you look at our four big buckets of expenses, which would include people, technology, real estate, and third-party data costs. With people, we expect we'll have a little bit of an increase in that. We have a lot of engineers. The market for engineers, while not quite as on the boil as it was last year, is still very, very strong. We've tried to do some good things for our employees, pushing down a bit more equity, making sure that we've got salaries correct. All of that has gone quite well. Attrition levels have dropped dramatically, which is interesting. Moving over to technology, we talked about there we're building more in-house software, so our amortization line's going up a bit. You'll see capitalization going up a bit.
That line should start to bend a little bit here in a few years. That's our second-biggest bucket. We would go to third-party data costs. We're watching that really carefully. We are careful with the renewals of data that we get from others. We're looking at where we own databases, do we need to rent everything that we do from others? And being very careful about cost negotiations there. On real estate, last year, we wrote down $88 million worth of real estate. We have a hybrid work model. Most of our employees, 70%, are working hybrid, generally three days a week in the office. We don't need all the office space we started out with. The employees have reacted quite well to that.
I think we provided very good communication on it. The employees really like the hybrid arrangement that we have. We've been able to put about $10 million-14 million more back in the P&L with those real estate changes that we've made. I am proud to say we were on the forefront of some of those changes. I think we got that done before some other companies did. Feel pretty good about where we are with the cost base. We've got to manage it, obviously, quite carefully. You know, the investments that we've made, as you said, have paid off quite well. We're happy.
Maybe talk a little bit to. Anyone in the audience have any questions? I mean, I've got a ton of questions, but I wanna try to keep this as collaborative as possible. Okay, I checked my email too. Nothing's coming online yet, but, you know, feels like there's been a structural shift in the growth of ASV. You all on kind of a new target of 8%-9% at Investor Day versus, you know, probably mid to little bit higher single digit. Maybe talk to the components of that a little bit because, again, it's been something that you've built up over time and, you know, clearly feels more sustainable as opposed to luck.
Luck, hoping, not a great strategy.
Right.
We thought about three components there for the 8%-9% growth. I think the biggest component of that would be our retention and expansion. It's much easier to add to ASV with clients that we already are working with, who know us, who like us, and who feel very favorably toward FactSet. That area has been growing quite well recently. New logos would be second. New logos may be a little bit less of the balance than perhaps that retention and expansion category that I just spoke about. The third piece would be price. FactSet has done a much better job under the direction of Helen Shan to really bring about price, systematic price changes for specific bundles of products, really much more effective discipline.
Yet our pricing is not a leader in that area. It's one place where we don't want to be a leader. Others are the price umbrella. We price underneath some of those other providers. Now our price realization has moved up quite a bit. If we're asking for 4%, we're able to realize much closer to 4%. That has really allowed us to build that top line in a much more solid way. If you wanted to think about it, you know, maybe 25% for new logos, 50 in retention and expansion, and maybe the rest in price. We think our price changes are very reasonable given the much better nature of the product, the increased technology, and the increased product offerings. That would get us to the 8%-9% top line.
When you disaggregate that, there's clear differentiation between the market data business, the CTS and the analytics. Maybe talk to that in terms of the build-up on that 8%-9%.
We don't generally go into that much detail on how we price those different businesses. I think one urban myth that we should really dispense with is for the R&A business. There has been a view that that's based on seat count, and that is not true anymore for the most part. We have enterprise contracts for our various businesses. Generally, they're 3 years in length. About 96% of the business is recurring revenue, which is a very strong business model, obviously. There's a lot of discussion about what happens due to some of the very well-publicized reductions in headcounts at particularly on the sales side, which is only 15% of our business. The bulk of that is the banking business.
Most of those contracts have floors and ceilings, so and greater 90-day cancellation periods. Things don't change that dramatically. What's most important to us is the incoming analyst class size for the big banks, and we found that those numbers look about the same as what we've seen in previous years. Some of the trimming and pruning has been more in the middle levels of those banks and kinda catching up for changes that weren't made during the COVID period. For us, not such a big deal. We very much are focused on those more junior employees who come in, get trained up on FactSet, and then love to take FactSet wherever they go, whether they stay at that bulge bracket bank or go do something different.
I remember even during the times of Covid, you folks actually increased your client service and really shepherded your clients through a lot of uncertainty. When you talk about the uncertainty, the kind of class size, it never really ebbed and flowed. That was one of the big debates is as you went year in and year out as to how Covid would impact and you really didn't see it in the numbers, which really just underscores the point you made. Maybe you alluded to this a little bit, but I think it may be worth just following up a little bit. You know, when they were able to bring you on board, Helen Shan, really, your predecessor, did a wonderful job in the CFO seat.
Absolutely.
Just super individual and CFO at the time, went over to be the Chief Revenue Officer. I think the yield on the rate card is... You know, I think the big debate we hear now is companies really pushing price. It feels like it's more of a realization for you, which is a nice outcome. Again, that goes back to the investment in content, which was a three-year process, and just, it feels like there's a lot more value in the product you're delivering, which enables maybe some of that yield if it was. I think that's, you know, pricing on yield as opposed to just a generic 3%-5% or whatever the numbers are. I think Helen spearheaded a lot of that, which again, has been a multi-year process that just is coming to surface.
Yeah. absolutely great partnership with Helen and it's just such a blessing to have someone who's been CFO in the Chief Revenue Officer seat. Bit of a nontraditional career path.
Yep.
You know, the world is open to CFOs these days, I guess. She's done an amazing job, ensuring that we have our price bundles, correctly priced to deliver value to the customer. It's been well-received.
Maybe we talk a little bit about some of the partnerships with Snowflake and Aladdin and what the open architecture's allowed you to do, because I think it's, you know, part of the opportunity you see too is to capture more share of wallet with your existing clients that helps drive the growth as well. Maybe talk to that a little bit just within the context of...
Sure. The partnership with Snowflake has been very, very exciting. We won Partner of the Year last year with Snowflake. The award was given by the mascot who's dressed up as a big snowman. It's a great picture. That business is partnered with our CTS business run by Jonathan Reeve . What we found is that allows people to look at availability of FactSet products on Snowflake's marketplace, so people can drive trial very quickly and very efficiently through the Snowflake portal, which is very helpful to us. We found that allows people to take a look at all the different things they can do with FactSet products. They can try them. They can look at programming frequently with Python to work within those products.
We've had some really great partnership results with Snowflake, which has been terrific. Also with Aladdin, you're right, which allows us to work with clients who may have Aladdin as their backbone system and then be able to test out some FactSet products as well. Our open platform is really important, though. I think we were one of the leaders in that area. That allows people to mix and match. They don't have to replace the entirety of their end-to-end system, which is a big undertaking. I think many CIOs now like being able to pick best-of-breed of products. We hope that they pick us the majority of the time. The open platform is really seems to be the best way to go and one in which many of the competitors have followed us.
We're very proud of that open system, and we think it was the right strategic decision.
No, it's definitely been well-received by the market. Again, to your point, what we find on the vertical software side is a lot of best-of-breed point solutions and having the efficient tech stack allows them to really tie in the APIs pretty efficiently. Just because you mentioned earlier, maybe talk about CUSIP a little bit within the context of the timing of the debt issue, which was just really remarkable, but just your ability to de-lever was maybe even more remarkable and how we should think about that within the context of capital allocation overall. I know you've been out of the market from a buyback perspective, but how we think about that in the back half of the year. You know, as you think about gaps within the existing portfolio today, any thoughts maybe more broadly as you think about needs versus wants?
We took on the CUSIP debt, took up our gross leverage to 3.9 x. With that degree of leverage, though, and some heartfelt promises that we would de-lever over the next year, we were able to secure investment-grade ratings, both from Moody's and from Fitch. For those who are interested, S&P sold us the business, made the choice not to rate FactSet as a result. What we've been able to do is we paid down $125 million each quarter in the term loan that we have outstanding. We've done just what we said we were going to do, and our leverage will come back inside 2.5x gross leverage here as we finish the second quarter.
At that point, we have two conversations, one with our board of directors and the other with the rating agencies, talk to them about our plans, kind of get those squared away on both sides. Then, you know, we can go back into the repurchase market, or at least that's what we would plan to do. We have $181 million left on our repurchase authorization from the board. We will speak about what we're going to do after that as well, but we haven't had those conversations yet, so I can't provide any firmer details about what we're doing, but would ask everyone to stay tuned. Second quarter earnings call will be toward the end of March, and we should have more to say about that.
The de-leveraging plan went just as we had expected it to. Chai Suh , who is our treasurer, has done a great job with that. We're right on schedule as we had hoped to be. Good flexibility. The investment grade rating right now as rates have gone up is really money in the bank should we decide that we wanted to do another acquisition. I think given the fact that we've been out of the markets for a bit and our share count has gone up a little bit as we've issued more equity to employees, would be nice to get back into the repurchase market and more to a cadence that Helen had established just how we handled share repurchase. Coming soon.
We constantly look at any number of deals, opportunities out there in the marketplace. CUSIP has set a very high bar for us, though, in terms of revenue growth, which has come in exceeding our expectations, margins which have met our expectations. Everything about the business has performed really well. We find we're seeing a lot of very smaller early-stage companies and then some very large public companies, which is not where we wanna go right now. I think we continue to look. We'd love to think about acquisitions in the wealth space. We continue to look in the real-time space. We're finishing out our build-out of the deep sector offering, that we've talked about quite a lot of different industry verticals that'll provide deeper and broader and a bit less expensive coverage, many different industries.
We're kind of in the beta process of that right now with two big banks. We've got a lot of exciting stuff coming and a lot of exciting new products coming to the fore. We keep our eyes open, but as I said, CUSIP set a high bar. As CFO, I like businesses with both good revenue growth and good margin, and they're more challenging to find at a reasonable price.
Sure. Thank-
Price expectations between buyers and sellers, still a bit unsettled at this point. Hopefully as the market calms a bit, maybe we'll get a little bit more in sync.
Well, it's interesting too, because, and you alluded to this earlier, but, you know, CUSIP's highly recurring. There's certain transactional component to it, and I think there was some concern when the IPO market slowed a little bit that maybe the transactional side would slow, but the offset, it just really shows the diversification of the model, which has been pretty amazing. In terms of, you know, as you think about kinda the core business as opposed to wealth, you've had some amazing wins on the wealth side, like very, very large wins. Maybe talk to that a little bit. I think there's been four in particular that have had some really outsized success from a seat perspective, and maybe what's driven that as opposed to, you know, why there's just been more...
I wouldn't say The other side hasn't suffered, but it's just you've had some really, really high profile wins in wealth.
Yeah. The ones where we've done press releases along with those clients, started out with Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Raymond James, Royal Bank of Canada, now Bank of Montreal, I'm forgetting one. We've found that we have provided, in head-to-head comparisons, what is viewed by the clients as a better product at a reasonable price. We find that the head-to-head trials, often with more junior employees, FactSet provides them with the look and feel and ease of use, which really is very helpful and much more familiar to this new generation. The Gen Z employees are not so interested in punching in specific codes, they're used to the type of technology that they see on their phones every day. We've had some very good wins there.
Many of those are thousands of seats at a time, as we said. We think we've been able to take share from some companies that are far larger than we are. Very, very pleased about all of that and the pace continues.
It's been a rapid pace. I'll go back out to the audience. Anybody? Okay.
I just have a quick question. You talked about price FactSet, but just going back to your earlier comments about how you put the price umbrella over you. That was historically not true. What's changed?
I'm not sure that's hasn't been true historically. I think FactSet has been a bit more reticent on pricing than some of the other competitors have been. Again, there are others who provide that price umbrella, as you had said, and we are able to move under that price umbrella, provide really good products for clients, but also hopefully save them some money in that effort. That seems to be a strategy that works for us.
Like who? Like I said, when we looked, you were the high price, so that's what I'm asking you on.
I find that to be surprising. Some of the incumbents who are our larger competitors, I don't think it's probably a good idea that we name them, but some of the larger providers who have been around for quite a while. Surprised that you would say that. Be interested to hear more about that afterward.
Sure. Three years old.
Okay. Perhaps a bit longer in the tooth. Proceed to motion to adjourn.
I'm curious from a sales cycle perspective, when you talked the last quarter about elongation, have your senses changed at all this quarter?
We've been surprised, the first half is looking good. Right now we're working on reloading our pipeline for the back half of our fiscal year. A little trickier to see out to our fourth quarter, but that's very typical of how this process works, and our ASV tends to be a little bit more back-end loaded. We were concerned when inflation was at the peak, that we would see a very significant elongation of sales cycles, but we have not seen that and been particularly pleased that Europe has continued to move apace. Asia has been a little bit slower, and the various markets there really depend on which country you're speaking about.
For example, Japan with issues regarding the currency and so on, that's been a bit more of a challenging situation, which we hope now remedies itself. Sales cycles have been okay, but we wanted to be very cautious, very prudent as we went through our first quarter earnings call.
Linda, maybe we'll talk about the competitive environment a little bit just as, you know, you even had some partnerships with Snowflake and Aladdin, things like that. Have you seen any shift in the competitive environment, whether it's on the analytics side, the market data side, or the CTS? It, it feels like there's some real opportunity within all three kind of verticals to capture incremental share. Just from a competitive perspective, has there been any shift?
I don't think we've seen that much shift. Other companies have been busy, whether they've been acquired or whether they're merging. Some of those conditions make it a little tougher to keep an investment program in place as those companies might prefer. I think we've seen as we've stuck to our knitting and just kept at it, and with the good fortune of the timing that we had starting this process in 2019, I think we were able to zig while others zagged during the pandemic, if you wanna use that expression. It's been very helpful to us. The competitive marketplace, you know, has continued to be about what we've seen recently.
We like to think we punch above our weight for the size of the company in terms of the market share, so we're optimistic.
I agree. Again, we've been very constructive on how relatively rigid we think the market share is and how the data really differentiates you folks. There's also been a lot of... Some of your competitors have gone through kind of or in the process of going through meaningful infrastructure upgrades, which feel like it really endorses what you folks have done several years ago. You know, you've always been kind of one to stay at the forefront. We think, in fact, its best days are ahead of us. Anything we haven't asked, just as we kind of close it out here or?
I would like to, put in a word for the ever popular, subject of the margin.
Yes.
We've talked about 50-75 basis points of margin expansion on average, per year. We're committed to that. This year, Adjusted Operating Margin guidance of 34%-35%. Wanna make it clear that the margin is much more impressive and cheerful in the first quarter. Tends to move down as we move through the quarters, as you see the impact of more employees coming online. Also, you know, we may have to, if we're lucky again to have a strong year, we may need to increase our bonus pool funding. That was quite the case last year. We'll see what happens this year. Margin commitment, we think we can increase our productivity and efficiency, grow the margin, not dramatically.
There are a lot of people who would like us to move a lot faster, but, investing in the businesses is kind of, is what we're about. We think that the lead that that has provided us and the quality of the products is something we want to continue to maintain. We're happy with those margin levels. We're quite enthusiastic about doing a bit better for the shareholders. That comes down to our guidance over the medium term of low double-digit EPS growth.
Again, Just remind folks that, you know, the margins tend to sequentially shift down over the course of the year, to your point.
Yeah.
That's very typical normal seasonality as opposed to anything that's business specific.
Right. Exactly.
Great. I think we'll end it there.
Okay.
Thank you so much. Kendra, thank you so much. Unless anyone else or? No. We'll end it there. Okay, awesome.
Thanks very much, Kevin.
Thanks.
I appreciate your hosting.