All right. Good day, everyone. Thank you all for being here with us today. I'm Faiza Alwy. I'm Deutsche Bank's Business Services Analyst in the U.S. We're very pleased to welcome Moody's to the conference. Moody's, as you know, is a global risk assessment firm that empowers organizations to make better decisions. From Moody's, we have with us Nick Reed, who is Chief Product Officer at Moody's Analytics. Nick, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
Good morning, Faiza. How you going? Morning, afternoon for us.
Good. Yes. you know, Nick, just to start to set the stage, could you give us an, you know, a brief overview of your role at Moody's, and then we'll talk more about, you know, Moody's role within the ESG ecosystem?
Sure. Chief Product Officer means lots of different things to different people. It's worth setting that background. In the context of Moody's Analytics, that includes innovation activity, product strategy, commercial strategy, customer experience and marketing. All of those kind of central functions sit in my world, although I will say actual product development activity sits in our business units 'cause they're much closer to the customer. My role, if you like, is about the kind of standardization and more singular customer experience that we're attempting to achieve across the different bits and pieces that we have that service kind of banks and insurance companies. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm also the Global Head of ESG.
I guess there's a little bit of interesting background there as well, I'm sure we'll get into it, but our strategy around ESG and climate particularly is much more focused today on trying to embed and inject our ESG and climate capabilities directly into our products rather than running it as a kind of separate business or as a separate set of products. So it kind of makes sense in the context of having a Chief Product Officer that we would use this as an opportunity to work out how do we make sure we inject data and analytics as it relates to ESG and the things that we already have.
Understood. Just to follow up, how long have you had this role and what did you do before at Moody's?
I am in Moody's terms, relatively new 'cause Moody's is a long-tenured company. I started in 2018. I can tell you I was a former customer. I worked at ANZ Bank in Australia, and was a customer of Moody's, kind of lending and decisioning products for about 10 years before that, and moved to take on the kind of definition of this role and the Chief Product Officer role at Moody's has really existed for the last two years.
Excellent. Now maybe we can talk about, you know, just Moody's role within the ESG system. talk about what you're doing there.
Yeah. I kind of alluded to it a little bit. Moody's absolute core value here is in data and analytics and providing information to decision-makers to better inform their decisions. Everyone on this call probably knows how to define what an ESG metric is and then how to use it in a decision-making process is a relatively difficult thing 'cause this is still a pretty nascent market. We think our role is to help define and find or buy or calculate or produce data and metrics that we think are relevant, sometimes to combine those data and metrics into scores and assessments of locations or of entities, and then to work out how to best inject those pieces of analytic, those pieces of data and those pieces of research into workflows that customers are already undertaking.
I'm saying this is a relatively new approach, I think, again, as part of the kind of growing and developing of this industry. We think our point of difference is our ability to be able to produce and build, really good quality trusting data assets.
Mm-hmm.
To apply them to a really broad universe. We're really interested in being able to help, lots of different kinds of companies. If you're in supply chain, for example, you're gonna be really interested in ESG and climate as well. Predominantly, banks and insurance companies make better underwriting decisions, better lending decisions that are informed by the implications of ESG and climate.
Absolutely.
It's probably worth noting that's a little different than some of our competitors who are, I guess, attempting to provide information that might drive investment decisions, where those investment decisions are about either the inclusion or non-inclusion of ESG underlying assets in a portfolio. We think our more natural approach is to help decision-makers where they are in those kind of lending and underwriting decisions, much more.
Understood. Maybe to put a finer point of this, can you discuss sort of the solutions that Moody's offers and, you know, maybe how this has evolved over the last three to five years and sort of the size and scale of each to the extent you can?
Sure. It's worth, I guess, going through a little bit of history here too. Moody's made a couple of acquisitions in this space. Trying to think how long ago it was, probably four years ago, we bought a French company called Vigeo Eiris, which is a 20-year ESG scoring and assessment company, really interested in kind of solicited scores to be able to get access to and deeply understand the data and metrics of set of companies to give us insight into how they're performing and what the implications are for ESG. Since that acquisition, what we've been doing is working out, again, kind of leaning into what we're really good at. How do we try and broaden and apply the data and knowledge that we've got from V.E. across a broader set of counterparties?
Remind people on the call that don't know, we own a big company database called Orbis that has almost 500 million entities in it. What we're attempting to do is either build data assets or model data assets and build models that allow us to be able to take that scoring from Vigeo Eiris and try and apply it across a much larger universe.
Mm-hmm.
That acquisition was really about that kind of core ESG scoring componentry. You know, I'll put a pin in that and come back to the scoring componentry because it's probably worth explaining a little bit about the methodology around that.
Mm-hmm.
A year later, we made an acquisition of a company based in California called Four Twenty Seven, which was much more focused on climate and much more focused on the physical implications of climate. Big database, global database, but with much more specific information in the U.S. about the implications of physical climate risk on individual pieces of property, which gives us a really good understanding of the implications of climate on companies' assets, physical assets.
Mm-hmm.
Of course, everyone knows we made the acquisition of RMS last year. Pretty significant database as it relates to climate predominantly, but other information that relates to catastrophe modeling. Our suite of solutions, if you like, is underpinned by the data and analytics that comes from those three companies. Our job has really been to work out how we inject that information into decision-making processes that we already have.
Mm-hmm.
When Moody's already has a lending solution that's been used by thousands of customers, what they're saying to us is, "I don't wanna buy a separate thing. I wanna work out what the adjustments are that are required in my lending decisions and lending processes, because I've now got insight into either the medium to long-term implications of things like ESG scores or the short, medium, and long-term implications of things like climate analytics and climate information." Our product suite, if you like, is, I guess, a little harder to define because we're not saying we have these two or three climate products.
Mm-hmm.
What we're saying is we have these 20 or 30 decision workflows and decision products, whether they're in supply chain management or KYC or lending or underwriting. We're making adjustments to our forecasting models. We're making adjustments to the way that we would make credit assessments as a result of the access to the ESG and climate information that we've got from those companies.
Mm-hmm.
Then there's a couple of really specific things. We have a product called Climate on Demand, for example, which is driven by that Four Twenty Seven data that I was talking about and RMS. It allows us to be able to get anyone to plug in a location, and we'll be able to produce a score that gives you insight into the physical climate risk at that location.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's really interesting like I said in, underwriting pricing decisions or in lending decisions. You can think of that as a kind of standalone module that allows you to be able to, to produce a score on demand for a physical location.
Great.
I talked about the scoring that we're talking about. It's worth digging into that a little.
Mm-hmm.
I'm assuming most people on the call know there are different scores in the industry produced by different participants that mean slightly different things.
Mm-hmm.
What I can tell you is our approach is, to, we refer to it as double materiality.
Mm-hmm.
Which is really trying to make an assessment that the world has on an entity and that the entity has on the world. I guess the kind of really simplistic way is the company doing well and is the company doing good. They're the two kind of measures. We produce a singular score that represents that kind of double materiality. Because we're Moody's, the financial elements of that, so the financial impact that is the company doing well, is really driven and informed by information that's produced during the ratings process.
Mm-hmm.
We also have credit ratings agency and for 100 years, we've been factoring in ESG and climate-related issues. We didn't call them ESG and climate for 100 years, but we'll make available anything that we think might impact the a company's credit worthiness from a financial perspective. It's just that we can put a label to some of those things now. Part of our approach is to try and standardize the financial elements so that there's some level of consistency between what's being produced by the ratings agency and what's being produced by Moody's Analytics.
Mm-hmm.
Our scores go beyond just financial impact because we're also hearing from customers that they're interested in this question of do good, which is a little bit about the medium to long-term impact of that company.
Mm-hmm.
It's not a question of making a judgment call about whether a company is well-governed. It's that a company being well-governed is a really good indicator of their medium to long-term viability and resiliency. That's what customers are talking to us about, and so that's what our score tries to represent. We try and either find public disclosures, we get access to datasets. We produce data ourselves from various bits and pieces that have been disclosed around the place to be able to get metrics that drive our ability to make that assessment, and then we try and apply that assessment over a kind of large swath of counterparties. That's what customers want from us. That's what we hear from the market. They like this idea of double materiality scores to give them insight into their decision-making processes.
Mm-hmm. Okay. That's all very helpful, and lots of things to follow up on there. Maybe you mentioned, you know, MIS and really the ratings business. Perhaps we could go a little bit deeper on, you know, how you being part of Moody's Analytics, sort of how are you collaborating with the ratings part of the business? Is that a specific opportunity for you?
Yeah. I mean, again, I assume everyone knows there are some things we can do and some things we can't do because that's a regulated business that has certain regulated processes. What I can tell you on topics like this, we actually have quite a level of flexibility to be able to share expertise and to be able to think about the kind of methodological approach that we're taking as a single entity rather than as two separate processes. We actually collaborate pretty well between, I'll call it the ESG methodology group in MIS and the ESG methodology group in my team. They're trying to solve a different problem, it's not like we're trying to make it one singular thing.
Like I said, we've heard from customers, and we really like the idea of saying where there are financial impact questions, that is the bread and butter of the ratings agency. What customers want is to say, "Well, we just want a consistent approach outside of the rated universe for that question." That's where the collaboration and connection exists, which is once we've defined how we're assessing financial impact.
Mm-hmm.
The ratings agency has a pretty public and well-documented process for being able to produce a Credit Impact Score for the rated universe, the underlying metrics and data is provided by us because we're the data provider to the organization. We try and share the outputs so that those outputs become inputs into our double materiality process. Then there are other things that Moody's Analytics is considering when we're producing our double materiality.
Mm-hmm.
I'm describing that like it's perfect.
Mm-hmm.
This is a nascent market. We're still growing and developing. We're still both developing our methodology. There's a really good kind of collegiate approach between the two groups, and I think you'll see more and more kind of consistency and joint messaging coming from Moody's about our approach to ESG, rather than on some other topics where we have to have absolute hardline differences between them.
Mm-hmm. Interesting. Maybe going back to, you know, the solutions that you outlined, you talked about the various, you know, various sort of almost products. How would you say Moody's is differentiated across sort of those various areas versus others in the marketplace?
Yeah. I think of our solution as being more comprehensive because we're interested in generally assisting decision-making that might be impacted by ESG.
Mm-hmm.
I think there are smaller players in the market that are interested in either collecting data or selling analytics for a really specific measure, like one individual component of ES or G or climate. Some of the bigger players, particularly earlier entrants in this market, have been really focused on servicing the investment community because they were the first to really adopt and start to factor in ESG information into their processes. Our differentiated position is we're not as interested, I guess, in this kind of industry chase for coverage.
Again, for people that have worked in the industry, there's this kind of idea that if you're making investment decisions, there's a requirement for the information that you're using to be really granular, really specific, and kind of highly analyzed because you're making really important decisions about what to include or not include in a portfolio. This chase for coverage has been expensive for most players in the market. I think you're noticing a little bit of a pullback on either the amount of factoring of ESG information kind of directly into those portfolios or depending on which country you're in, different choices are being made about how much to or how much not to leverage ESG information in investing.
I would say we differentiate ourselves because we're not as interested in driving information that's gonna allow you to understand alpha. We're interested in having a much broader approach that you can use to understand the impact of ESG on the decisions that you're making much more in a kind of generalized way, like I said in kind of lending processes or customer onboarding processes or supply chain choices or underwriting. Those choices require a much broader set of data rather than a smaller kind of narrow, but really absolute kind of answer that in the investment community are kind of interested in. Primarily, that's the kind of focus of our solutions. It's not to the exclusion of the investment community by the way, because they're really interested in benchmarks.
One of the things that we have, because we have a much broader base of scores, is a much better ability to give you access to an information about sovereign risk or about any kind of geographic risk or industry risk or segment risk, because we have a broader base around which to be able to produce benchmarks.
Yeah. Interesting. maybe as you think about, you know, your various client types, you know, what are sort of the top, you know, I don't know, three to five things that your clients are asking for? You know, how are you investing in those capabilities?
Yeah. This is a bit of a geographic answer as well, 'cause it kind of depends whether you're in Europe or in the U.S. because they're asking for different things.
Mm-hmm.
I can tell you in the U.S. there is a much more, kind of pointed focus on climate related information.
Mm-hmm.
Which is much more related to the physical risk of climate.
Mm-hmm.
Really kind of pointed questions, and we're focusing our efforts on being able to give specific answers to this kind of question of, if I have a factory on this piece of land in the middle of Texas, what are the implications for my 30-year mortgage over that piece of land? That's the kind of really specific stuff that's happening in the U.S.. It's starting to broaden outside of location. We're working on a version of Climate on Demand, which is Climate on Demand for entities. It's really saying, given we know in our databases where all of the assets are for those entities, then can we have some kind of way of understanding what the climate implications for the entity total.
That will take into account where they might have already made active choices about where their assets might be located on the basis of understanding what the climate risk and catastrophe risk might be at any one of those locations.
Mm-hmm.
Our investments, to drive kind of sales and access to data and analytics in the U.S. are much more related to physical risk of climate. I would say in Europe, there's really kind of two focuses. One is the next step after understanding physical risk of climate is understanding the transition risk of climate. Much more interest in, well, let's assume for the sake of the argument, this climate question is now known. What does the transition risk look like? What are the carbon offsets that are being bought? What's the transition risk and how do we measure and monitor that? Because it's going to be impactful over the next 30 years as well.
Mm-hmm.
Lots of questions in Europe about data and information that will service that particular use case.
Mm-hmm.
There's more regulation in Europe. Lots of the solutions that we're building is packaging up the information that we have to allow companies to be able to meet their regulatory reporting requirements. They're, again, more specific in Europe than they are in the U.S..
Yeah. Interesting. Maybe just, you know, because climate is such a, such a pressing issue as it relates to ESG, perhaps we can, you know, double-click on that one. You touched on this a little bit, but give us a bit more in terms of how you're really capitalizing on the climate opportunity and, you know, what are the key drivers as it relates to, relates to growth?
Yeah. It's funny, we have this kind of debate internally. Do we refer to it as ESGC, ESG and C? How do we make the difference? The answer is that there are some similarities and there are some differences.
Mm-hmm.
We actually think of climate and climate at Moody's as being a slightly separate thing from ESG.
Mm-hmm.
Clearly, there are climate implications for the E part of ESG, but there's actually a much bigger opportunity to understand the climate implications for more companies, for more decisions, and to be more specific in the answers that we can provide.
Mm-hmm.
We've actually had a much more significant investment in the topic of climate.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, none more so than, the RMS investment that we made last year. It wasn't, it wasn't predominantly climate because it allows us to be able to better service insurance companies, particularly in P&C. Lots of the underlying work that allows insurance companies to be able to price correctly involves understanding the implications of catastrophe. Most catastrophes are driven by extreme weather conditions, and extreme weather conditions are impacted by climate change.
Mm-hmm.
The combination of all of those things means there's a huge opportunity for us in this space.
Mm-hmm.
The RMS acquisition has been really interesting because it's given, I'll say, people inside Moody's Analytics, much better appreciation and understanding of the implications of insurance as it relates to protecting against decisions that are impacted by climate.
Mm-hmm.
Lots of the work in RMS has been saying, "How do we apply the data and knowledge and learning outside of the insurance space, and where is there relevant information that might be interesting to banks, for example?" Because banks have had some levers to pull when it comes to changing loan pricing, for example. But understanding the insurance consequences of commercial real estate or residential mortgages is a much more interesting prospect if we can provide that information during the lending process itself.
Mm-hmm.
Again, we're seeing kind of peaked interest from bank customers, predominantly, I would say, so far in the commercial real estate space.
Mm-hmm.
Which just inherently makes sense to me. You're talking about a segment that's about location, very specifically about location.
Mm-hmm.
Given climate is likely to have very specific implications at a location, we're seeing lots of really good work occurring between our commercial real estate teams, which access to and sell data and analytics about rent rolls and about really specific commercial real estate analytic information. Combining that together with our climate information, we can now give much better insight into property valuations, likely changes in movements in the type of people that are gonna be involved in commercial real estate transactions. This kind of question of climate, I think of as being an input into pretty significant P&C insurance underwriting decisions and commercial real estate decisions.
Mm-hmm.
We build up enough expertise and capacity to be able to kind of provide insight and drive expertise in the organization. The output of that climate work is really in those businesses. Like I said, rather than having a separate climate business where we're selling climate products, we're really just impacting and injecting all of that climate expertise and information into the workflows either that RMS already had or outside of RMS into the life insurance world or into the commercial real estate world.
Where are you in that process? Sort of how integrated is RMS at the moment? You know, you've identified the incremental use cases, you know, beyond just catastrophe modeling. Like, how big of an opportunity is it and how far along are you in it?
Yeah, we're progressing pretty well. I mean, we met all of the targets that we announced to the market last year from an RMS and a synergy perspective. I would say what we're seeing is them advancing towards us and us advancing towards them in equal measure. We think there's opportunity to be able to leverage lots of the RMS information outside of insurance. I think there's been a lot of insight in the RMS business about the value and access to significant amounts of data that they can now better service the customers that they were already servicing anyway.
Mm-hmm.
Here's an example. The climate business that I was talking about, that climate capability and expertise now resides inside RMS. RMS and Moody's are coming together, but part of that conversation was about how do we build those deep connections. It just made sense to us that given we already had modeling and quantitative expertise in RMS that was related to catastrophe modeling, we would combine it together with the climate capabilities that we already had, and it would allow us to more quickly double down on the kind of climate opportunity, particularly in the U.S. Really specifically, like I said, we've been working with our commercial real estate division more than anything else. That's been the most significant synergy between the two businesses to be able to unlock additional pieces of analytic that drive our commercial real estate solutions.
Still more to come, but I think the integration is actually going really well. You know what? You're never gonna read this in a report, but it felt really familiar when we started working with RMS, that their quantitative approach, their analytic approach to things, their focus on data is really similar to Moody's. So it felt like a really natural pairing. That's what we're noticing. Lots of really good kind of collaboration behind the scenes 'cause you've got really like-minded people that are, they're applying their kind of quantitative expertise to these types of problems.
Mm-hmm. Interesting. Maybe we'll pivot to, you know, supply chain or KYC, KYP type of solutions. You've seen, you know, there's been strong growth in that area generally. What type of, how much growth runway do you see there? What type of corporates are you currently working with? You know, again, where do you see the biggest opportunity in that particular area?
A significant growth opportunity, I guess, is probably the best way to describe KYC and KYP in general. I'll just differentiate a little because there are some ESG and climate elements that relate to KYC, so I'm happy to touch on them.
Yeah.
I'm assuming your question is about the kind of broader KYC and KYS opportunity. What we've found when we've talked to customers, and I will say the customer base of the KYC and KYS business is a little different than in banking and insurance. Because you're talking about corporates that are much more interested in the early insight that we can provide around customer onboarding decisions, transaction decisions that are related to sanctions and also increasingly supply chain issues. That's actually one of the ESG related elements that we'll talk about. I would say across the board, we're seeing significant interest in being able to get access to, firstly, the kind of binary information that we have.
That's, "Can I do business with this company?" Like, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and COVID, more than anything else, gave insight into the fact that there are uncertainties about who we're doing business with and whether we should do business with them. Our KYC solutions really provide, at least initially, those kind of absolute answers. Someone's been sanctioned. You wanna be able to know that so that you either don't onboard them or don't transact with them. That's a more complicated question to answer than you might imagine. Historically, we would have thought about that as, you know, just do a World-Check, confirm that they're not based in Iran and move on. That's not true anymore.
We're talking about deep analysis, which we have, to corporate hierarchies, to ownership structures, to the reference data about those ownership structures, and then being able to use To be able to drive decisions about whether you can or can't do business with the entity that you're trying to transact with on the basis of having a more holistic understanding of their corporate structure and the implications of their corporate structure. Like I said, that's not just a banking and insuring thing anymore. That's.
Mm-hmm.
That's a kind of across the board, by the way, also within the government sector, where there's, again, increasing interest in making sure that they're protecting against who they're doing business with. Everyone calls it KYC, but it's really just know your counterparty rather than know your customer.
Mm-hmm.
The use cases are also expanding. This is not just about a bank-regulated process that says you have to do a 100 point check before you can onboard a person or a company into your bank. This is about really knowing, deeply understanding the people that you're transacting with, the people that you want to enter into relationships with. Those relationships might be transactional in nature, you need to answer these kind of sanctions questions. They might also be driven and increasingly being driven by this question of supply chain support. Does the entity exist? Is it real? What does its support structure look like? Again, how complete a picture can we provide so that you can make really good, active decisions about onboarding someone into your supply chain.
Some of the ESG analytics that we produce are really relevant to those supply chain decisions, because if they're related to physical risk, for example, you can understand the impact that's likely to happen to your suppliers. I would say your supplier's suppliers is now becoming an increasingly interesting question that lots of companies are answering.
Mm-hmm.
We're running at a million miles an hour to tap into all of those opportunities 'cause it's a significant growth area for us, and we're noticing lots of these opportunities to be able to just inject and embed data and analytics that we already have and kind of bring it to bear, in a process where a customer of ours is making a decision about onboarding someone into their.
Mm-hmm
Into their world.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's exciting stuff.
Fascinating.
It's really exciting stuff.
Yeah. It is. It sure is. You know, we talked about sort of your ESG scoring methodology and how that might be different from others. As you know, there's been a lot of attention around sort of this disparity of ESG scores, ratings, whether there isn't a lot of consistency across providers. How do you expect this to evolve over time?
Yeah. There is some disparity in methodology, I would say. There isn't absolute agreement on one particular way of being able to produce scores, like I was outlining before. Our approach is really driven by what we're hearing from our customers and the fact that we have an ability to be able to produce and then predict scores across a large group of entities. This question of standardization is a really interesting one because at the moment, I would say I don't know that there's standardization of consumption, so it doesn't matter that there's not standardization of production of the actual metric itself. This information is being used differently by different organizations.
Mm-hmm.
It's not like we're saying, I don't know, credit ratings have existed for 100 years. There's a pretty well-trodden path to understand the use case for the consumption of a credit rating. That's not true for the consumption of an ESG score.
Mm-hmm.
This is an indicator. Some companies are baking it deeply into their processes. Some companies are using it as a piece of research to be able to inform their decision-making processes. Kind of as at today, in my mind, it's not as important that there isn't some absolute standard and there's some comparability across scores.
Mm-hmm.
I think as an industry, we've got a better job to do to explain what they actually mean because everyone kind of interchangeably uses ESG assessments or ESG scores or ESG ratings or whatever it might be, and they do actually mean different things depending on who you're consuming it from.
Mm-hmm.
Perhaps in a, there's a kind of educational component. I don't know that it's going to result in some standardized methodological approach.
Mm-hmm.
I would say in the same way there's not a standardized methodological approach in credit ratings either.
Mm-hmm.
There is an ability to have some comparability of the output.
Yeah.
Regulation might drive either insights into the framework that's being used and the fact that there's some kind of transparent way of understanding what the methodology is.
Mm-hmm.
Regulation also might impact the way the output is actually produced.
Mm-hmm
So that there's some level of standardization in the output itself, if there's an ability to.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty nascent market. Credit ratings took 100 years-
Yeah
To get to the point that we're at now. This is, this might take a little while to just shake itself out.
Yeah. You mentioned sort of the regulatory environment. I mean, what is your expectation in terms of how that might evolve? You know, Europe is certainly ahead in terms of regulatory action on, you know, disclosure. Do you think that would impact the U.S.? How might Moody's role evolve as, you know, some of the company-related or ESG data becomes more, you know, commoditized or just more readily available?
Yeah. You're right. There is more progress in Europe as it relates to regulation of the underlying entities. There's also the regulatory question about providers of data and information in this space as well. I would say, again, Both are opportunities for a company like Moody's because weirdly, we're actually pretty good at being regulated. We run a regulated entity today. Our ability to be able to apply the standards and the internal frameworks and the internal mechanisms to be able to produce information using a really particular framework and being able to transparently describe the control mechanisms that we have as an entity that would be providing data into these spaces, pretty good.
Mm-hmm.
We haven't seen anything really specific yet from European regulators, but I know that there's lots of talk about that. Again, we're kind of ready and prepared should that happen. We actually think we're pretty well-placed, as I said, as a relatively regulated entity today. The other part of your question is actually about regulation of the disclosure environment as much as anything else.
Mm-hmm.
That's much, more progressed in Europe. We don't think of that as being, detrimental to our ability to produce and sell data and analytics and insights. It's actually really advantageous to be able to get a broader set of, disclosed information.
Mm-hmm.
The money here isn't in repackaging and selling disclosures. We like the idea of more companies disclosing on a more structured framework because it just gives us access to more information. The fact that it gives everyone else more access to information isn't detrimental to us, because our power is in the additional data that we can apply it against and our ability to have a more broad brush way of producing modeled scores and producing new metrics and insight on, I would say, a better standardized set of data. Like I said, the consumption and repackaging of information that's been disclosed by a counterparty is not where the money here.
It's in adding the insights and analytics and quantitative processes over the top of the data that's disclosed, plus our own data, plus our ability to get access to and produce new data sets. That's where the real competitive advantage.
Mm-hmm.
Is to us. We kinda like the idea of increased disclosures because it allows us to fill in any little gaps that might exist where we don't have as much coverage in one particular geography or one particular segment. It's not really a game changer to our ability to.
Mm-hmm.
To continue to produce the scores. And it's not really detrimental to our approach if suddenly it becomes commoditized. Like I said, that's not the thing that we're interested in.
Yeah.
We're interested in the new metrics and the analytics and insight that we can produce as a result of access to that information, not the information itself.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe we can talk a little bit more holistically about Moody's Analytics, since that's where you sat. You know, how important is ESG to, you know, the long-term growth targets or the medium-term, I should say, targets that the company has put out for MA? Do you need to build sort of more content, data, technology to sort of get to those targets? Or is it simply a matter of, you know, distribution of data analytics that you already have to other players or other parties?
Yeah. I'm gonna give you probably the most boring answer that I can. Which is that it's not actually particularly impactful to our medium to long-term targets because of our strategy for ESG.
Mm-hmm.
We're not thinking about it as a kinda separate line item that's gonna drive a growth agenda. It happens to be a growing area. It's growing from a smaller base. It's interesting, and there's money to be made in this space. We think about it as being a necessary capability to be able to unlock either additional value in the customers that we already have or to continue to support the existing tools and distribution mechanisms that we already have in place with, particularly banking and ensuring customers and more so this kinda supply chain question, as being additive to those processes. More and more for anyone that works in that space, it's going to be necessary.
I don't think it's possible to sell a lending origination system and not be able to talk about the fact that you have some kind of ratings model that has ESG adjusted scores or ESG impacted scores or climate impacted scores. It feels like lots of the things that we're working on have that in brackets after them. Do you know what I mean?
Mm-hmm.
Again, that's a pretty natural advantage for us. Again, we think it's a growth opportunity, but it's probably not gonna appear as this kinda singular line item that you might imagine. It's gonna be enhancing to our ability to grow in all of the spaces that we already have pretty significant footprint in.
Mm-hmm.
That's the way our customers are talking about wanting to consume this information.
Mm-hmm.
Every now and then someone will come along and say, "I wanna buy a ESG data set," or, "I wanna buy access to a really specific thing." Mostly the answer is 'cause they don't know what they're gonna use it for yet.
Mm-hmm.
There's still a little bit of the industry that's interested in just consuming as much research and data as possible, and we've built all of our assets to make them available should you choose to buy them as big file feed or as an API. Mostly we think the growth opportunity in the future is unlocked inside the existing businesses that we already have, inside the existing products that we already have, and just making the necessary kind of additions from an ESG and climate perspective to be able to impact them.
Mm-hmm.
I guess to your question of investments, that's pretty insightful to the way in which we're investing. We've built out an ESG and climate capability. But it's not a separate business. It's not a separate area. It doesn't have a separate P&L in that sense.
Mm-hmm.
It's an area that's looking at how to make our information as available as and easy to access as it can be. Lots of our technology investments are less about building a big distribution platform for ESG and a little more about making sure that there's API connectors into our models, or there's an ability to be able to feed directly the data that might be relevant to an insurance underwriting decision directly into that decision. It's lots of that kind of internal connectivity stuff that we're working on, as well as the kind of processes and technology required to get better at capturing and collecting all of this data in the first place.
Mm-hmm.
Again, there's lots of new technologies that are coming out. Lots of our investments are about how can we leverage AI and machine learning, particularly, to be able to more quickly and more accurately extract from the Internet or from PDF documents or from public disclosures or wherever it might be, information that's impactful to our ability to produce ESG scores.
Mm-hmm.
As an example.
Mm-hmm
An ESG score is impacted by news activity or controversial activity that relates to a counterparty.
Mm-hmm.
That's kind of generally interesting in and of itself, but the most impactful part to the score is a company's response to the controversy as much as it is the controversy itself.
Mm-hmm.
That gives you really good insight into their level of governance, their level of control, and we have to have an ability to be able to understand both of those things really quickly.
Mm-hmm.
We're talking about kind of real-time quickly.
Yeah.
We're leveraging some of the technology that we acquired, actually from Acquire Media about, three years ago, which is a, an AI machine learning news filtering service, applying that to the topic of ESG and then trying to use that to drive a more real-time insights so that we can understand the impact to ESG scores more quickly.
Mm-hmm.
Because today there isn't the kind of turnaround that you might imagine. Controversy happens, ESG score gets updated in the afternoon. We're kind of thinking about a model where you'll have a better ability to make sure that the score is reflective of current state in a more real-time sense than it does today.
Yeah.
Mostly the scores that are available in the market from most people are updated when there's annual disclosures rather than necessarily.
Yeah
... updated as a result of really specific news or controversy incidents.
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, we've covered a lot of ground. We're out of time, unfortunately. Thank you, Nick. Really appreciate it. Thank you for spending time with us.
No problems at all. Have a good day, everyone.
All right. Take care. Thank you. Bye.
Bye.