Good afternoon, and welcome to the MSCI Inc. annual meeting of stockholders. I would now like to turn the conference over to Henry Fernandez, Chairman and CEO. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon, and welcome to the 2018 annual shareholders meeting for MSCI Inc. My name is Henry Fernandez. I am the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MSCI. The polls are open, and you may now submit your vote online until we officially close the polls following the formal presentation of the proposals. Please remember that if you have already submitted a proxy, it is not necessary to submit your vote online unless you wish to change your vote. At our meeting today, I will present the proposals that you are voting on. If you have any questions about the proposals, you may submit them through the web portal. Following the presentation of all proposals, any questions about them will be addressed. We will hear the preliminary report of the Inspector of Elections and adjourn the formal annual meeting.
I will then proceed with a brief discussion of our financial results for 2017. Following this discussion, you will be given another opportunity to ask questions not related to the proposals. Our meeting rules require shareholders wishing to raise questions on topics other than the proposals to wait until that time. I'm also pleased to announce that all of the members of our board of directors are with us for the meeting this afternoon. Jonathan Grodnick, who is a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, our independent auditor, is also participating and is available to answer your questions. American Election Services, the Inspector of Elections for this meeting, is represented here today by Christopher Woods. Mr. Woods has executed his inspector's oath. The board fixed March 14, 2018, as the record date for determining the shareholders entitled to vote at this meeting.
An affidavit is with the Inspector of Elections, attesting to the fact that the notice of meeting, the proxy statement, and the 2018 annual report to shareholders were mailed to shareholders of record on or about March 29, 2018. We had 89,876,918 shares outstanding and entitled to vote on the record date, and approximately 89% of those shares are represented today by proxy or virtually, constituting a quorum. The annual shareholders meeting is therefore now formally called to order. I will begin by presenting the three items to be voted upon. As a reminder, we will acknowledge any comments or questions submitted by shareholders on the proposals themselves after all proposals have been presented. Item one is the election of directors. The current board has nominated 11 directors. Myself, Henry Fernandez, Rob Ashe. Rob was appointed to be our new Lead Director effective April 30, 2018.
Ben Dupont, Wayne A. Edmunds, Alice Handy, Kathy Kinney, Wendy Lane, Jack Perold , Linda Riefler, George Siguler , and Marcus Smith. Marcus is our newest director, just having joined the board last November. A warm welcome to Marcus at his first annual shareholder meeting. Also present today for his last annual shareholders meeting with MSCI is Skip Vallee, who served as a director since 2008 and previously served as lead director since 2010. Skip is retiring from the board at this meeting. Additionally, as we previously announced, Patrick Tierney, who had served on our board since 2010, retired from the board effective May 1st, 2018. On behalf of the MSCI team, I would like to thank both Skip and Pat for their relentless dedication and top-notch service to our company and our board. We will miss them as members of our board.
Item two is the advisory vote to approve the compensation of our named executive officers as described in our 2018 proxy statement. Even though this vote, which is often called a say on pay vote, is a non-binding vote, the Compensation and Governance Management Committee and the board will take the results of the vote into account when making future compensation decisions. Item three is the ratification of PricewaterhouseCoopers as MSCI's independent auditor for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2018. All of the proposals on the agenda are now before the meeting. If any shareholder has a question or would like to make a comment regarding any of the proposals, and if you have not done so already, please submit your question through the web portal.
Since there are no questions or additional proposals to come before the meeting relating to the business of the meeting as set forth in the agenda, this is your final opportunity to vote. Any shareholder who hasn't voted or wishes to change his or her vote may do so by following the instructions on the web portal. We will now pause to allow such votes. The voting is now ended, and the polls are now closed. The next agenda item is the preliminary report of the Inspector of Elections. Cecilia Aza, our Corporate Secretary, will summarize the report.
The preliminary report of the Inspector of Elections indicates that a minimum of approximately 97.19% of the votes of common stock represented at this meeting have voted for each of the director nominees, representing a majority of votes cast for or against. Approximately 98.82% of the votes of common stock represented at this meeting have voted on an advisory basis for the approval of the executive compensation of our named executive officers. Approximately 96.52% of the votes of common stock represented at this meeting have voted for the ratification of our Audit Committee selection of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the company's independent auditor for 2018. Any ballots cast before the polls closed but not reflected in a preliminary report will be included in the final vote tally. We will file a report with the SEC containing the final tally no later than four days following this meeting.
That summarizes the preliminary report of the Inspector of Elections. I will now turn it back over to Henry.
Thank you, Cecilia. This concludes the formal part of our meeting. There being no further business to come before the meeting, the 2018 Annual Meeting of Shareholders of MSCI is now adjourned. Now I will give a brief report on the company's 2017 financial results. First, I would like to briefly touch upon the important role that we play within the investment industry. As slide seven in the presentation shows, the content, software applications, and services that we provide to our clients are mission-critical to their core investment activities, such as allocating assets, constructing and optimizing portfolios, and understanding and managing investment risk and performance. Because we are a central part of our clients' core activities, we have gained unique insights into their investment needs and key objectives.
Furthermore, because of our success, our products have become established within the industry as widely adopted frameworks for defining and measuring investment risk and return. Because our offerings provide frameworks for analyzing aspects of the investment process, a broad range of participants within the investment industry provide us with their thoughts and insights. They provide viewpoints on how to more effectively measure a market or calculate risk and return, as well as their thinking around the latest investment trends and additional tools that may be required to capitalize on those trends. Our ability to synthesize this feedback from all parts of the investment industry increasingly positions us as a thought leader around emerging investment trends. This feedback allows us to create new content, applications and services, and to modify our existing ones to make them more effective.
This virtuous circle has allowed us to stay at the forefront of key industry trends like global investing, environmental, social, governance, and factor investing, and multi-asset class risk and performance management. Because of this feedback loop, clients increasingly want access to tools and knowledge across the firm, not just from a single product line, with the large majority of our clients now using products and services from more than one product line. During 2017, we achieved several key milestones and witnessed several notable events that reinforce the growing relevance and importance of MSCI in the investment process. As reported in December 2017, there were approximately $13.9 trillion of assets benchmarked to our indices globally.
Additionally, we receive an unprecedented level of industry attention and media coverage around index inclusion events, such as the announcement of the coming inclusion of China A shares, and the consultation on the potential inclusion of the Saudi Arabian market in our emerging market index, as well as around the growing importance of environmental, social, and governance investing, and the value of MSCI ESG content indexes. As Slide A demonstrates, we serve our clients by providing true innovative, mission-critical content that is necessary for investment institutions to design and implement current and future investment strategies. At the same time, our content is delivered through client applications, third-party applications, and our own proprietary applications to help managers operate more efficiently and effectively. In terms of providing clients with services, our goal is to provide tools and services that help clients use and recognize the full value of our content and applications.
Please turn to Slide nine, where we highlight some of the recent initiatives that we have been pursuing to fuel our integrated franchise. We are increasingly taking an integrated approach to engaging with our clients and are spending more time with C-level executives, where we are becoming an even more important partner by helping them understand emerging trends and how MSCI can help them take advantage of those trends. In addition to increasing levels of engagement in the sales process by MSCI senior executives, we are continuing to hone a consistent and holistic approach to delivering the full suite of MSCI products and capabilities. As a result of this senior-level approach to selling, together with the introduction of our Coverage Incentive Plan and other compensation programs, and our Senior Account Manager Program, we have achieved increased levels of growth from our largest client.
With 19% year-over-year run rate growth from clients with greater than $2 million in run rate, and a 14% improvement in sales productivity since 2015. We have also been heavily focused on providing innovative content and enhanced applications and services across the organization to better serve our clients. By having integrated coverage, research, data, and technology groups supporting all product lines, we are better suited to share our intellectual property and to leverage our differentiated know-how across different product lines to deliver even more innovative and high-quality content. Capturing executive-level feedback from our integrated approach to clients, we are leveraging our integrated research and data teams to deliver differentiated new indices, as well as differentiated multi-asset class risk and stress testing models.
Additionally, we are leveraging our integrated research data and technology teams to release new applications and services that empower our clients to use our content more efficiently and effectively. Additionally, analytics capabilities released in recent years, like benchmark aggregation, performance attribution, data management, and reconciliation, and enhancements to our regulatory services, including our liquidity analytics and services that help clients meet their new SEC Form N-PORT reporting obligations, which requires them to calculate and disclose certain risk and liquidity measures. They all help our clients address key operating challenges. Our integrated franchise continues to be a significant competitive advantage for us and an important driver of our attractive growth trajectory.
As you can see by the full year 2017 financial highlights on Slide 10, we are seeing the enormous potential of our franchise and the progress we have made on our go-to-market strategy, our continued content innovation, and the delivery of enhanced capabilities across applications and services delivered as one integrated company or what we call One MSCI. In 2017, we delivered record performance across key financial metrics. More importantly, those exceptional results reflect the strong progress that we have made as an organization in executing against our financial and strategic roadmap. We are very excited about our strong position and how we have started 2018. While we experienced a strong tailwind from market appreciation in our asset-based fee revenues during 2017, we also saw record cash inflows of $139 billion, nearly four times the amount experienced in 2016.
We further improved our market share among index providers producing indices for equity ETFs to 22%, capturing 28% of overall cash flows into equity ETFs during the year, and providing indices for more new equity ETFs than any other index provider. Furthermore, we saw an acceleration in some of our key leading indicators with subscription run rate growth of 11% in 2017 compared to 7% in 2016. Record recurring net new sales of 37% for the full year, reflecting the strong progress we have made on product development, commercial innovation, and client engagement. We remain committed to generating positive operating leverage for our shareholders through our relentless focus on enhancing productivity throughout the company. Slide 11 provides the full year summary financial performance. As you can see, we delivered very strong results for the full year, with revenue growth of 10.7% and adjusted EPS growth of 31.4%.
Free cash flow came in at $355 million for the year. As a reminder, 2016 free cash flow experienced several favorable non-recurring and timing-relating items related to tax refunds, prior period tax overpayments, as well as early payments from clients that drove an elevated free cash flow level in 2016. Adjusted for these items, the normalized 2016 free cash flow was $340 million. The growth that we show relative to the prior year normalized free cash flow reflects the strong financial performance for the year, partially offset by higher interest expense. Although collections were higher, they were somewhat slower than anticipated, attributable mostly to our tax realignment work as we adjust billing entities for some of our international clients. Overall, we're very happy with our execution and results in 2017.
We're excited about how we have started 2018 and our momentum heading into the remainder of the year. On Slide 12, we would like to share the exceptional sales and net new sales performance we saw as we closed 2017. We delivered record gross sales, recurring sales, and recurring net new sales in the fourth quarter and for the full year 2017. We executed well in the fourth quarter of 2017 and converted a significant amount of pipeline into signed deals, particularly within analytics. As you can see by these record sales, we're seeing the benefits of our enhanced go-to-market strategy, our continued innovation and product enhancement, and the increasing power of our integrated franchise. We're very pleased with the strong growth in 2017 sales, and the team is now focused on continuing to build and execute on this year's pipeline. Slide 13.
Lastly, we remain committed to returning capital to our shareholders. Since 2012, we have returned approximately $2.5 billion through share repurchases and dividends. In 2017, we increased our dividend by 36%. We continue to view repurchases of our shares as an important part of our return on capital strategy and will continue to repurchase shares opportunistically. Overall, in summary, 2017 was an exceptional year for our company and reflects our commitment to executing our strategy. We remain very excited about our growth opportunities for this year and beyond, and we very much look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. We will now proceed with our question and answer session. If you have a question, please enter it into the appropriate box on your screen. There are no further questions or any questions relevant to the business of the company.
Thank you very much for your interest in MSCI, and have a good day.