All right, good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here at day three of our Financial Services Conference. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Manav Pattnaik. I'm Barclays Information Services analyst, and I'm very pleased to have with us here Moody's new CFO, Noémie, and I got permission not to butcher her last name, so just Noémie. And so Noémie, thank you for being here. Really appreciate it.
Thanks, Manav. Happy to be here.
So this is your first public conference, I believe. It's been about six months, I think, since you've joined. So maybe, I think a good place to start with is just to get a quick background-
Mm-hmm
of yourself and, you know, where you came from.
Yeah, thanks, Manav. So it's the first public conference here at Moody's. Happy to be back in a jam-packed hotel room for a day. So I joined Moody's as of April first, so a little bit less than six months. My background has been mostly in tech. I've been a CFO at SAP for over a decade in different business units, first in Europe and then in Latin America. I've worked also in Eastern Europe and in Asia a little bit, so a bit of a international background.
I'm originally from France, but moved to the U.S. about 10 years ago, and I was most recently a CFO at Dayforce, a HCM and payroll vendor, who's also gone through, like SAP, some transformation from a more legacy on-premise solution stack into a SaaS full SaaS solution provider. So quite excited and familiar with large tech companies going through transformation, multinational and very, very excited to be here at Moody's and working with the management team. And also take this opportunity to hear from our investors today about how they're looking at our business, what disclosures they like, and what we could do differently. That's also very important for me.
Got it. And then, perhaps, I mean, you know, given your tech background and your software background, you know, why Moody's?
Yeah, it's a question I got a lot. So I was an issuer myself at Dayforce. I came to the building pretty frequently, but was always very impressed by the depth and breadth of the analysis and the discussion I've had with the ratings analysts there. And I must say, after six months in, the people I've met hasn't called into question that choice. It's a very exciting place to be. Very smart people, very focused on research and data and decisions based on data, which, as a finance professional, really resonates with me. So a lot of excitement around getting to know the ratings business a little bit more beyond what I could see as an issuer.
And on the analytics side, I think we have built over a hundred years and a set of incredible data assets that we're very well poised to leverage with tools like GenAI and other software solutions that we're building. And that's also a very exciting place for me to be using my technology background. So the combination of those two things, I think, makes it a very unique place. The management team, I've been very impressed by Rob and his leadership team, the board. So all in all, I'm very, very happy to be here, and I've joined.
Got it. Before we talk about some of the business trends and dynamics, maybe just from, again, your seat, your perspective-
Mm-hmm.
If you go by division, maybe from what you've... I know it's been only under six months, but just some sneak peek into your plans and what you, you know, plan to bring to the table. Maybe on ratings, it feels like it's already a, you know, nicely humming engine.
Mm-hmm.
Like, you know, what can we expect there from your end?
Yeah, I think my, you know, priorities are very much aligned with the priorities of the firm is to continue to capitalize on our brand that we've established over a hundred years, being the trusted advisor to the capital markets, so continuing to build on that franchise and especially in the rating space, you've all seen the tremendous start of the year in issuance. We've been able to capture that surge in issuance with the investments we've made in our ratings, the workflow and standardization of those.
Continue to build efficiencies, leveraging new tools and technology to continue to make our analysts' life easier, so that they can focus on continuing to provide thought leadership and strong research, as well as the credit ratings that have been the bread and butter of Moody's for the past hundred years. Very eager to continue and support that. Then on MA, there's a lot of exciting things that we could do, leveraging again that data estate. Continuing to invest in the right places to leverage that data estate, and we can talk a little bit about more of the investments we're making.
So a very thoughtful approach to capital allocation, continuing what has been done at Moody's for the past few years, and really investing for fueling the growth of that business, but also returning capital to our shareholders, and again, committed to continue to do that.
Got it. And just on MA, you know, I think the impression most of us have is, given your background, I think, you know, maybe not a vast majority, but the majority of time will be focused on MA. Is that a fair assumption?
I think that it's probably both. I would say the beauty, what really attracted me to Moody's is the combination of the two, you know, the ratings franchise, the brand, and the reputation we've established that allows us to capitalize on that and continue to grow and leverage the data estate to continue to serve our customers and help them manage risks that go beyond credit risk. You think about the different types of risks that they are exposed to in terms of knowing who they're doing business with, knowing what the cyber attack might have as an effect on their financial statements. So how do you translate all those different risks into financial risks? I think, again, as a finance professional, that really resonates with me, and I think there's a natural-...
combination of those two elements that makes it very exciting. So I wouldn't say I'd spent more time on one or the other. Those, to me, are one part of a single purpose, which is helping our customers to manage their risks and make sense of all the data and information they're getting as they're making decisions about their businesses.
Okay, fair enough, and then since you brought it up, maybe let's just touch on it now. You mentioned capital allocation.
Mm-hmm.
You know, your philosophy, you know, compared to what Moody's has been doing, or anything different you'd bring to the table?
Yeah, I think we've first and foremost, we'll focus on continuing to invest to the growth of our business. You've seen, again, the issuance environment in the ratings. We've been able to capture that surge in issuance and continue to increase our margins, simply because we've made some investments in our rating workflow, and we've become more efficient at addressing that surge so that we don't have to add, you know, as many bodies as we may have had to had in the past. So that continues to be a big area of focus for us, to invest in our rating workflow and continue to work with our regulators to address new markets, like sustainable finance, like private credit, and so that's an area of investment.
On MA, you've seen us invest in bolt-on companies to acquire, like, either tech talent in data scientists, you know, engineers, modelers, with the acquisition of RMS. So we'll continue to do that and invest to expand the breadth of our offering in MA. And then, of course, continuing to return capital to our shareholders. You've seen us increase our guidance for share repurchase earlier in July, and we're aiming to return 90% of our capital to shareholders this year.
Got it. And just one follow-up on the M&A side, you know, your appetite or maybe just your personal views towards larger deals.
So we've really been focused on more bolt-on acquisitions in the recent past. You've just seen us last week announcing Praedicat, which is a pretty exciting acquisition in the insurance space that will broaden our offering there and allow us to cross-sell to the casualty market, and so that we can talk a little bit about that as well. So that's an example of things we're really focused on is extending the capabilities of our MA offerings. We've also made some investments in the domestic market in ratings, with completing our acquisition of GCR, the leading agency in Africa, which is present in 25 countries. And then if you think about, I think, six out of the 10 economies, fast-growing economies, are in Africa.
That's another area where we're excited to invest. That's where you'll continue to see us, and as far as, you know, always looking for opportunities to continue to expand our offering and big deals, we'll see what comes in the market.
Okay, fair enough.
Comment on that.
All right, let's move to some of the business trends then.
Mm-hmm.
You know, you mentioned you guys have the capability to capture the surge in issuance.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
There has been a nice surge in issuance this year.
Mm-hmm.
You know, S&P puts out some of the numbers in July. It was a crazy number in August. September seemed good.
Mm-hmm.
So just your thoughts on the current environment and how you would characterize that and whether that was also contemplated in your guidance?
Yeah, so you called it out, a very strong, you know, first half and second quarter. We raised. We were above $1 billion in MIS revenue, which I think is the second-largest quarter on record. So very pleased with our performance there. We've seen the interesting statistical thing for me, we've seen the transaction revenue for the first half of 56% growth, growing higher than the issuance of 43%. So back to the point about being able to capture that surge and really grow even beyond that. So that's obviously very exciting. We've seen strong performance across our asset class. We've raised our guidance for most of those asset classes as well.
We've. In terms of what we're seeing, and I'm not gonna obviously raise our rate or, you know, provide additional guidance here, but we've always said, even in the beginning of the year, that we would expect the second half to be more muted. That continues to be true. We expect the months of November and December to be more muted simply because, you know, our issuers have been advised by their banking partners to go to the market earlier this year, so we've seen some pull forward from 2024, in-year maturity. And as we've said, and so that's why we've raised our. We've, you know, taken a softer approach for the second half.
Having said that, we've also done in July, you know, taking into account the strong performance that we've seen in the beginning of the year, we've actually rolled that into the full year guidance, and we've upped primarily our Q3. So, that's the reason why we raised our guidance in MIS. I think it's overall a great environment. We've talked about what you've seen in the last week post-Labor Day, and so we're pretty excited about what we see.
Got it, and just on the Q4, I think, you know, your peers have taken the same approach to be conservative.
Mm-hmm.
I'm guessing some of that is election volatility that they're advising against, but barring that, there's no macro reason to believe issuance will suddenly slow.
It's typically, you see the first half issuance historically has been typically higher than the second half, so that's just a natural, you know, follow-on to that. And as you said, we wanna be more cautious and acknowledge some of the uncertainties around the U.S. elections.
Got it. And then before we get into the more medium-term view, you mentioned, you know, 43% issuance, but 56% kind of revenue growth or whatever.
Mm-hmm.
So what is that 13-point delta? Is it a combination of pricing and other things, or how should we think of that?
Yeah, so we're focused on transaction revenue, which is something we, you know, driven by the activity. We have also a recurring revenue, which is more on the frequent issuer pricing and the price increases that we're doing. I think it's an interesting. So let me give you a bit of color on the different.
Yeah
... elements that play around the mix. Obviously, we've seen in corporate finance, a very strong growth, in the first half that was driven primarily by leveraged loans. And those are typically more repricing and refinancing activities, so less favorable to the revenue mix. However, in investment grade, those can be also sometimes priced with a premium if they're really complex, but mostly those would typically be more repricing and refinancing types of activity. On investment grade, this quarter, we've seen a pretty strong M&A activity, to deals related to M&A, so that's obviously favorable to the mix for us. And then spec grade loans is typically where we're able to charge a premium, so that's more favorable to our mix. So that's kind of the best way to think about it.
If you want to summarize it, Manav, I think, what's more favorable to, to our revenue mix is obviously spec grade issuance, M&A related transactions. Our rating assessment services, which precedes M&A transaction, that's also a pretty high premium that we can charge for that. And then less favorable is more like the refinancing and repricing activity, which we've seen in the corporate sector.
Got it. You mentioned M&A, starting to see some signs of that already in the second quarter. I think majority of the year has been refi.
Yeah.
So just on the M&A front, like, are you? I know you guys have the rating evaluation.
Yeah
... services that gives you a little bit of a leading indicator. Are you seeing any signs there?
Yeah, before I go there-
Yeah
... I wanna call out also the, in the Financial Institution Group, which I should have mentioned in the revenue mix, we also have the infrequent issuers, that also is a usually it's more favorable to our mix. That's why you saw the performance in our Financial Institution Group, in the first half. We've seen a record amount of infrequent issuer in that space coming to market in the first half, so that's obviously helped the activity, especially in the insurance space. So I just wanted to call that out. Now, in terms of new money on M&A, we've seen signs of a M&A activity. I've talked about what happened in investment grade, in the second quarter.
That stays below historical levels, so we have yet to see a rebound there, and that's obviously an upside for us down the road. We have private equity funds that are firms that are really sitting on have a lot of dry powder, so when that's going to be deployed, we'll see a pickup in that in terms of insurance as well. The corporates have a lot of cash that they have to put to good use as well, so obviously that's another potential tailwind for M&A activity. And we have yet to see the IPO market in the U.S. really pick up, so that's also another element that could affect, you know, activity going forward.
Got it. You know, you mentioned pricing initiatives earlier, and, you know, I think the more complex the deal, the higher the price. That makes sense.
Yeah.
I think you referenced frequent issuers before. So just curious, was there anything new in terms of the pricing and frequent issuer, just your broader pricing strategy?
We have a and that's something I was very interested in coming in, and I participate in those. We have ratings pricing committees. So where the commercial team and very separated from the ratings group actually reviews our offering and the pricing of such, and we take a very thoughtful and long-term approach to those. We haven't changed our approach there. We still have, you know, roughly 3%-4% increase based on the market and the GDP and the actual CPI.
Got it.
Mm-hmm.
You know, in terms of the, to my earlier point on barring election volatility, there can always be more pull forward, right? So maybe just some thoughts on the maturity wall looking ahead. They look pretty robust, so you know.
Yeah, we'll publish our maturity world study, I think, Shivani, sometime in October. So we'll can talk more about that obviously at that time. In terms of pull forward, I think we've seen obviously in year, there's two types of pull forward that we typically see. One is the pull forward related to the in-year, calendar year maturity. We've seen definitely some of that, as I said earlier, with issuers being, you know, advised by their partners to go early in the market. So we've definitely seen some of that. That's what drove the first half performance. We've also seen some pull forward from 2025 maturity, and I would say that's from spec grade issuers, and that's not uncommon. That's pretty common to see.
You don't wanna wait until a maturity to go to market, to risk a risk-off period in the market. So we've looked at historical trends, and we haven't seen any that's out of the norm. Those pull forward from specific maturities are within historical levels. There's just simply a lot more debt to be refinanced, so the stock of debt has actually increased. And so that's what, you know, is driving some of the outlook for 2025. We haven't published anything yet, but we will publish-
Yeah
... our maturity wall. And the other thing I would say is, if you think about leveraged loans, I think for 2020 and 2021, there's about $1.015 trillion that was issued. 70% of that matures in 2027, so those won't come to market until the rates come down because they were issued at such tight spreads. On the other hand, there's about another $1 trillion that was issued in 2022 and 2023, and those might be candidate for pull forward because they were issued at a higher rate. So those are kind of give you some color about how we're thinking about it.
Okay, fair enough. Is there anything to call out in terms of the recent search from a geographic perspective? You know, I think the assumption is U.S. and Europe is most of the activity, but you mentioned, you know, GCR, you have Latin America. Any of these emerging areas?
Those are... Like, on the domestic market, I think those are more like areas of investment and future opportunities to continue to grow our business. They're part of the, you know, MIS growth algorithm. There's nothing out of... Again, that I wanna call out here. It's just areas that we're really focused on to give investors access to domestic markets and provide the same level of transparency there that we've been providing in the U.S.
Okay, and then just maybe lastly on ratings, a margins question. It's very healthy margins.
Mm-hmm.
You've mentioned a few times efficiencies, the opportunity with GenAI to do more. So it sounds like there's probably no ceiling on the margins here as long as activity is strong. Just your thoughts on how we should calibrate a model for the margins?
Yeah, we've published our medium-term guidance for MIS margins that I'll stand by that. I think it's a very interesting operating leverage, especially for me, coming from places where that might not have been the case in the past. We're making some investments, as I said, in our ratings workflow. I wanna say on GenAI, though, to clarify for the crowd, that we're not using GenAI in our ratings yet. We obviously have dialogue and discussions with our regulators, but that's not something we embed in the way in our methodology today, just to be very clear about that. But we're investing in modernizing our ratings workflow and digitalizing our platforms and so on.
So I think it allows us to face, you know, different ebbs and flows in issuance, and that's the ultimate goal, is to get to those margin levels with maybe less of a favorable issuance environment. We can talk more about that later in next year when we talk about our medium-term targets. But that's really where we're focused on. It's a great business. And the other thing I would say on margin is, we've raised our guide for the full year, taking into account the performance for the first half. The only thing we've changed on the expense side is obviously our incentive comp and then some of the true-ups and the legal accrual for the off-channel communication topic.
Got it. Okay, maybe we can move on to Moody's Analytics.
Mm-hmm.
So maybe I'll start with just a very high-level question. I mean, you know, those of us who've been following Moody's for a year, I think we have an idea of what Moody's Analytics is, right? But often when I think a new person looks, it's a lot of different things.
Yeah.
So how would you, you know, new to the seat, try and explain high level what Moody's Analytics is?
Yeah, I think back to the point I made earlier about helping customers manage the variety of risks that they're exposed to. I think Moody's has been doing this for over 100 years with credit risk, and now leveraging those capabilities and that brand and that franchise, we're now able to do that beyond just credit risk, and I think that's kind of the way I would start. We have a depth and breadth of data that comes from our ratings group, but also we work with over 130 vendors to enrich our data and provide, you know, data on unrated names and other private companies. So leveraging that data, we curate that data based on the use case and the needs and the risk you're trying to address.
So take a cyber risk and how that would affect my financial profile, or we have an investment in BitSight, that's a leading provider of credit risk, or climate risk with the modeling around that the acquisition we've made with RMS. We're able to explain or articulate how a catastrophic event might affect either your suppliers' facilities, and as such, your supply chain, or your portfolio, if there's a hurricane in a specific area where you have some properties. Those are kind of. We are able to address all those different use cases with the data sets that we have and some of the modeling and research capabilities that we've built over the years.
And then the last layer of it is, if you need to, if you want to, you have decision solution tools that allow you to leverage that data, that feed some of those models, to be able to make decisions on how you're going to approach a particular risk. Is that a risk that I'm going to take? Where is that risk coming from? What's the magnitude of that risk? How do I dimension it? Then, under which condition am I willing to accept to take that risk, and what's going to be the financial consequence for me to take that risk, being in the insurance space, in the banking space, or even in corporate with KYC and doing business with a certain person?
and then the last thing is, how do you report on those risks, not only internally, to be able to sustain the decision you've made about approaching a particular risk, but also to your regulator or whatever compliance requirements you have, to be able to document and report on how you've managed those risks? And I think... So there's a variety of use cases where those principles apply, but that's probably the way I, at least I like to think about it and what I found very interesting, again, as a CFO.
Okay, we'll break that down a little bit more.
Yeah.
But first, you know, I think you kind of alluded to it. GenAI seems to be a little bit more of an MA focus at the moment.
Mm-hmm.
So can you just help us appreciate what, what the GenAI initiatives there are?
Yeah, and just on the MA focus point, I think we're not using, again, GenAI in our ratings workflow, but we're also obviously talking a lot with our regulators in the ratings space about the use of GenAI and how that affects, you know, the ratings. So I just want to call that out. It was interesting for me to see coming in, not only externally, we could talk about our Moody's GenAI offering, but just start internally. We have rolled out, you know, Copilot and a lot of different tools internally, and everybody is using it. That was a big finding for me coming from a tech world where I was more accustomed to seeing that. I wasn't expecting necessarily Moody's employees to be so up to speed and using those tools.
We have hackathon that we run, where we have very strong ideas about internal efficiencies as well. So that's a pretty exciting place to be in that regard. Now, in terms of our GenAI opportunities for our customers in our MA offering, if you think about what feeds GenAI and large language models today, it's really about the data that you have. And so we're doing a lot of investments to make and render that, those data sets that I talked about in different areas, interoperable, so that they can be applied and leveraged with GenAI capabilities to address any use case that you may want to. So let me give you a couple examples of...
You've heard about Research Assistant in MA, and that's part of our research in our research and insights group, where we've developed some GenAI capabilities to make, you know, the life of our research analysts easier. You can have also credit memos that are produced in a much more rapid fashion. So that elevates the discussion with our customers. We're talking now about significant savings across company-wide, as opposed to maybe selling a particular product at a given price point. So that's a very interesting value proposition there. We've also recently launched the Early Warning, and that's a pretty exciting. I've seen a demo of this the other day.
It tells you basically leveraging, again, a lot of different data elements internally, but also externally, news feeds, telling you a retailer is going to exit a particular location or geographical area. That immediately alerts you to see if you have any of those leases in any of your particular real estate portfolio, commercial real estate portfolio associated with that particular retailer as a tenant. And then it can tell you scenario modeling around vacancy rates and things like that, and probability of losses. So that's another example of use case that we recently launched with GenAI, and that's again very exciting.
Got it. Maybe just a few quick ones before we go broader as well. Last quarter, I think you had widened the range on the Moody's Analytics business.
Mm-hmm.
I think from my recollection, there were two main factors. One was market environment, and then there was some nuances with the MSCI partnership. So let's just take the market environment first. Can you just remind us what you saw and perhaps any update on, you know, things that stabilize?
So for the ARR guidance that you're referring to, we've MA has been, you know, consistently around 10%, 10.4% in Q2, growth in ARR. We've widened our guidance range for the full year, a little bit. I would say, though, that the midpoint of our guide is still in that high single digit number, so just to set expectation there. We've called out a couple of things that are happening at the same time, and that we think will affect a bit the way we're looking at it for the balance of the year. The first, you talked about the partnership with MSCI, where we And we can talk about more about this.
But on the market question, we obviously have a significant footprint with banks and financial institutions and asset managers, and we've continued to see a little bit of cost pressure. And I'm sure you guys are probably facing this as well in your own firms, around decision-making, around investments. And so we continue to see a bit of cost pressure from that category of customer segment. Having said that, the performance in the first half of twenty twenty-four was stronger than the first half of twenty twenty-three, so we start to see this picking up. We also have our Research Assistant product that we expect will drive further growth in the back half of the year and subsequently.
The other element we've called out to kind of explain and articulate the widening of the range is some of the large contracts with a few government entities. And obviously, in an election year, depending on budget decisions, those renewals can swing from one year to the other. So just we wanted to acknowledge those elements.
Yeah. And just one quick follow-up on the cost pressures you talked about.
Mm-hmm.
From your standpoint, does that seem to be more of a cyclical factor, or is there something else going on out there?
I think it's more like if you think about, and I'm sure Barclays is in the same boat, like large financial institutions and asset managers who have traditionally been our customer base, they all have a long journey of digitalization to go through, so I think there's an overall, you know, tailwind to growth in the future. I think we're just seeing a bit of an air pocket with some of the consolidation that we've seen in last year, but if I'm looking at some of the conversations we're having with our large customers in banks and financial institutions, there's a lot of appetite and excitement around making the work more efficient, leveraging, again, the humongous datasets that you guys probably are dealing with every day.
How do you make sense of those datasets to free up capacity for you guys to be working on something more meaningful sometimes? I think overall, there's a large opportunity there. We continue to see that customer segment as a core to what we do. So there's... I wouldn't say there's a-
Yeah.
It doesn't call that into question, for sure.
Fair enough. Let's just touch on the MSCI partnership then. Maybe two parts. First, just if you could remind us the impact in the quarter-
Mm-hmm
... from the partnership, and then, maybe just a broad, you know, from the headlines, it seems like a potentially very attractive partnership-
Mm-hmm
... longer term. I think you guys put it out in a holiday week, so it didn't get much attention, but just some thoughts on your end from there.
Yeah. So let's maybe step back. MSCI is obviously the leading provider of ESG content and scoring, and we just wanted to offer to our customers the best dataset. So we're incorporating those datasets now into our product in MA. So that's what this partnership is about. We're also, on the other side, we are working with them to expand their coverage with private companies that are using Orbis.
Sure.
They also have a very significant footprint with the asset manager segment. And so we're excited about the opportunity to leverage, to provide access to our Orbis database, to those types of customers in their... And embed that in their, in the way MSCI market their product. On the financial aspect, for the quarter, we've called out, obviously some people action that we've made for people who are working on building that ESG content. And we've also have an asset non-cash write-down that we've talked about for the second half of the year, that's embedded in our guide.
Got it.
It's non-cash and operating charge.
Yeah. You know, we had asked Andy at MSCI, the CFO there, the same question yesterday, and he was very excited about it, too.
Mm-hmm.
So, aside from the Orbis database access, I guess, that they're getting from a distribution capability, you know, what are you bringing to the table there for them, too?
So I think, again, we have Orbis. We have over 525 private and public company names in there, so that obviously allows them to expand their coverage and provide additional scoring to companies that they may not have rated in the provided scores in the past, and that obviously has a lot of interest for their existing customer base. So that's one example. There's a lot of other things, if you think about KYC, potentially, that they can leverage from Orbis and having, you know, an understanding of the hierarchical and corporate structures of those companies. So there's a lot of different use cases, we're obviously in the infancy of building that with MSCI, but there's a pretty good excitement on both sides.
Got it. Maybe we can move onto the Predicat M&A-
Mm-hmm.
You, you referred to, and maybe you'll just, I guess we can start there.
Yeah.
But how does that fit in with the RMS acquisition? And then I just had a follow-up on RMS.
Yeah, it's actually expanding the depth and breadth of our insurance offering. You've seen insurance ARR growth pretty nicely going up this quarter. So that's definitely an area where we're excited. We are now tapping into the casualty market, which is, I think, probably an equivalent size of the property market, so that's obviously a very exciting acquisition for us. There was a rapid growth in litigation financing have increased. The rising cat losses for insurers have also increased. So bringing those capabilities is actually enhancing the breadth of our portfolio in insurance. And we have now the ability to cross-sell our solutions to the casualty insurers as well, which we may have not had the ability to do so easily in the past.
So this is overall a very nice complement to our insurance offering.
So, where do you think with RMS is the property model, and then Predicat is the-
RMS has a lot of different models, catastrophic models that are around property and, you know, losses associated with catastrophic events. As you know, again, as insurers are facing different levels of risks and different losses associated from a variety of risks, I think that's a very complementary offering, and we're pretty excited about it.
Got it. The high growth in insurance that you referred to, you know, falls into that decision solutions.
Correct.
Item.
Yes.
There's banking and KYC as well, and I believe KYC is also growing really nicely.
Yeah.
So can you just maybe tell us why that's the case?
Yeah, if you think about KYC, it's almost... It started with know your customer, but it's almost getting into know your everything now, right? You wanna know who you're doing business with in terms of companies. Are they subject to any sanctions, or do they have, as part of their corporate hierarchy, any link to Russia or other types of entities? And I think that's a very important aspect of our KYC offering. I will give you an anecdote. When I was at Dayforce, we used to obviously manage payroll funds for our customers, and we would put those funds in a trust.
We opened a national trust bank to be the trustee of those customer funds, so it opened up a lot of regulations around KYC, and know your customer, know your counterparty. And we were doing a lot of that research and figuring out every time we're signing a customer manually, and how, you know, are we allowed to have to do business with that customer? Because the funds that are coming to pay the employees of that customer are gonna be held in a trust that is regulated by the OCC. And I remember going with my team and having a lot of headcount dedicated to doing that manually. Had I known at the time that we had a very good offering to do it, I would probably have come to Moody's earlier.
So that's just an example of how those are very cumbersome manual tasks that can be easily solved through the use of our technology, leveraging the data that we have in Orbis, but also using our 130 providers outside of the U.S. I think that's a good use cases for significant efficiencies. The other thing I would say is, we're expanding, and we're working on that. That's part of the investments we're making this year on the data interoperability, to be able to have those use cases around KYC to the corporate segment as well for supply chain. We know whether, you know, which vessels a specific company uses, where the facilities are located.
So that allows us to have a very strong insight into risk associated with third-party risk management, with supply chain, et cetera.
Got it. And just to round that segment off, just on banking, can you talk about that solution set and what's proprietary or unique?
Yeah, we have a very strong decision and modeling around solutions to help banking, you know, in the lending space. We recently acquired Able AI, a very small player, to complement our offering in lending with documentation, et cetera. So that's very exciting. So that's been really where we've seen a lot of historical growth. We have a strong Credit Lens solution for our banking partners, and again, that's a sector that will continue to grow.
Got it. I failed to ask the question on private credit in the ratings section.
Mm-hmm.
But I think it—I want to ask it more from a Moody's Analytics side of the view, because I think Rob and many others have said before that the data and analytic opportunity is much larger than what could be just a rating opportunity. So can you just talk about some of the, you know, that statement and what that means for Moody's Analytics?
Yeah. So for private credit, it's interesting with... In the rating space, first of all, we've set up a team earlier in two thousand twenty-three that well, that really is well connected to the private credit players, private equity funds, and so on. And so we've had a very successful conference early May, where we had an audience full of the large firms and the large players. We continue to have those dialogues. So we're really excited to really do what we've been doing for the public debt market over the hundred years and expand that to give more transparency to the private credit market.
And then on the ratings, on the analytics side, again, with Orbis and we've expanded the coverage on unrated names as well, so companies that we don't rate. And that gives, and again, a lot of data sets for different lenders, investors to understand more about who they're doing business with and who they can lend money to.
Got it. And then just to wrap that up on the rating side, I think most of the investors have gotten comfortable that it's not necessarily pure competition. So just your take there.
Yeah, that's interesting. I think if you had heard Rob maybe a few quarters ago, there was a bit more cautious in terms of how is that going to be a replacement of some other sources or funding? I think we're feel more comfortable now that it's an additional, it's incremental to what we've versus what we thought in the past. So we're pretty excited about the opportunity to work with those private equity players. We've seen also in the first quarter, specifically, some of that private debt coming back to the public market. So there's also that cycle that naturally sort of provides a bit of a tailwind as well.
Got it. And then maybe last question. You know, I think high single digit ARR growth in Moody's Analytics, you know, really strong issuance on the rating side. I think the stock, the multiple reflects like some high expectations. So the question is more, when rates start getting cut, how do you think that impacts both sides of the business?
Just on the ARR, we've grown by 10.4% in the second quarter.
Second quarter, yeah.
So it's an important, if you had Steve in the room, that would be something very important as well. I think we've said, and just to your question on rate cuts, not for the actual evaluation, but on the business in general-
Yeah.
We've said we were pretty agnostic to a rate cut decision this year. What really matters to us is economic growth and GDP growth. And so that's as long as we continue to see strong economic growth, I think we'll continue to see strong debt issuance and activity that fuels our businesses. So we're again not accounting for any significant. The rate cut decision is not going to affect materially our business. And listen, it's a great business to be in. Again, I think we've demonstrated that we can capture the environment that we're seeing and still delivering strong operating leverage.
That also gives us opportunity to invest and in the business in MA to fuel sustainable, durable subscription growth in our SaaS solution, and make the investments required in that data set, in our infrastructure, to be able to have a sustainable growth in MA in the future. And that's really what I think is reflected in the current sentiment around the stock, and that's certainly how I feel about the company and the reasons I joined.
Okay, perfect. Well, I think we'll end it there. Thank you so much, Noémie Heuland.
Thanks a lot. Pleasure to be here.
Appreciate it, and welcome aboard.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.