I'm back. All right. Hello again. Next up is MSCI again. I'm Alex Kramm, Senior Research Analyst at UBS, covering exchanges and business services. As I said, MSCI is here with us. Andrew Wiechmann, I wanna say, second or third time at this conference. Thanks for being back. We actually just did this a few weeks ago in Scottsdale, our tech conference, as MSCI certainly gets a lot of attention from technology investors as well. So-
Thank you for having us.
Yes.
You seem to do a good job bringing nice weather. Very important this time of year.
Yes. I don't know if it would be the time to have a New York conference right now. So, anyways, I like to start these conversations pretty big picture. I mean, MSCI obviously has had some very impressive long-term growth targets out there: double-digit subscription growth, low-to-mid-teens EBITDA growth. We'll talk about businesses in detail for sure here in a little bit, but maybe from a broad perspective, you can just remind the audience here why the businesses are positioned for that, for that growth. In particular, again, there's been some choppiness in some of the businesses. So, help us get comfortable with the outlook.
Yeah, yeah. And as you alluded to, I think it is important to start with the big picture. Take a step back and think about who MSCI is, what is fueling the business, and how that translates through to growth opportunities for us and, as a result, where we're seeing those opportunities. But I like to think of MSCI as the intellectual infrastructure of the investment universe or the IP underlying investment strategies, the capital markets. That takes the form of things like benchmarks which define the opportunity set. Here's how you define the total universe of investable securities. Here's how you segment that opportunity set across sectors, sizes, styles, countries, factors, specific objectives. We are the standard and common language that is used by investors to navigate the markets. And then they allocate assets across those standards. They track the performance of those allocations.
They measure their risk. Then ultimately, they design strategies and portfolios to achieve their specific objectives. So when you think about the opportunity set for MSCI, it is deeply interwoven with the growth and investment universe. So you see growth in global savings. You see growth in investable assets. Within that, you see assets can increasingly being allocated across more security types, asset classes, geographies, navigating more risk considerations, geopolitical, AI-driven, specific market factor, objectives. All those create more needs for that infrastructure that I was alluding to earlier. So as you see global investable assets continuing to grow, you see the number of strategies increasing, the personalization of strategies, the systematic number of strategies like outcome-oriented or solutions type of strategies growing. You need to have MSCI's tools.
That necessitates the need for index frameworks and indexation, particularly around areas like custom indexing. You need to be able to have a consistent view across all asset classes. Multi-asset class analytics, factor models, particularly private asset insights, which has been historically very opaque with limited standards, those are all areas that are increasingly needed by investors to achieve these, the outcomes that they are looking to achieve. MSCI is uniquely suited to meet that demand. When you see what's driving our growth, index. You've seen an acceleration in index subscription. You've seen tremendous growth on the asset-based fee side. You've seen a pickup in custom index growth rate. You've seen a pickup in private asset or namely PCS growth rate. Those are all ultimately a byproduct of those macro trends that I was alluding to.
And so yeah, they're very exciting targets. We have conviction and confidence we can deliver on them. We have been delivering on them. If you look at our CAGRs, growth CAGRs since the IPO, we've had a 13% revenue CAGR since the IPO. We've had a 15% Adjusted EBITDA CAGR, 16% Adjusted EPS CAGR. So we've got the track record of compounding over time. You'll see the growth fluctuate up and down for a whole host of macro market, idiosyncratic factors. But we are a long-term compounder. We've also got the momentum right now. So if you look at the growth in the fourth quarter for us, we had 11% revenue growth, 13% run rate growth, as an organization, 13% Adjusted EBITDA growth, 14% operating income growth. So we are in a position of building momentum and strong strength moving forward here.
Thanks for taking me up on my next question, 'cause I did wanna talk about the near term. The fourth quarter was definitely showing a lot of signs of strength. Can you unpack a little bit more? What were the biggest drivers of that strength? But then more importantly, how do we think about sustainability as we clearly are now thinking about 2026?
Yeah. So I alluded to this a little bit, when I was talking about some of the areas where you are seeing acceleration and outsized growth. But we have seen good momentum the last couple quarters. We saw a very strong Q4. That was driven, in part, based on the innovations that we have been making, that increased cycle of new product releases, new capability releases. And so you've seen that be an added fuel to the growth algorithm of the company. But you've also seen nice growth across client segments. And so you've seen us continue to deliver elevated growth in client segments like hedge funds, trading firms, what we call the trading ecosystem or fast money community, as well as broker-dealers. You've also seen higher growth with asset owners, wealth managers, insurance firms.
These are all areas that are smaller contributors to the overall revenue of the company. But we're increasingly, through our go-to-market actions, through the investments we've been making in those product innovations that are geared towards some of these client-specific use cases, starting to unlock those opportunities in size. And then on top of that, you actually saw a pretty strong fourth quarter with asset managers as well, which was encouraging. So to be sober, I think there's, there's an environmental aspect to that. We've probably on the margins seen slightly more confidence among our client base, slightly healthier buying behavior. But again, that is fueled by a lot of the enhancements that we're making. So we see these organizations looking to license more content, looking to license more capabilities, looking to use us to help them become more efficient. And so we're definitely encouraged by the momentum.
And as I alluded to, in addition to, you know, the continued elevated growth across client segments with some pickup in asset managers, the areas where you've seen the acceleration of growth on the product side are within index and within private assets and PCS specifically.
Great. I do need to ask about the other side of the coin, which is, retention. Also nice improvement. I think sustainability was the only segment that was a little bit softer. But, as you think about the retention rates, do you feel comfortable where we are right now as we go through 2026, or are there even opportunities to maybe step up a little bit more?
Yeah. So we're always focused on improving retention with clients. I think you've heard us mention before, our retention rate tends to be notably higher with clients that are using three, four, five different products from three, four, five different product segments of ours. And so the more we continue to upsell, provide more content, more services to these organizations, the stickier they will be. On top of that, we are making continued advancements in existing products they get. So a lot of the innovations are not just fueling upsells, but they are fueling the existing products, which support price increase, but they also support retention. So they allow our clients to operate more efficiently, get more value from the service that we are providing. And then we have a laser focus on our go-to-market but also account management.
This is a big initiative that Henry's, Henry's pushing from the top, but really serving our clients more strategically. And I think it's something we've done with the largest clients, particularly large asset managers, for some time. And we've, we've seen the benefits of that. But we're increasingly doing it across different client segments. So our enhanced go-to-market efforts across a lot of these other client segments I talked about is going to enhance our retention rates in those areas as we can do more for them, deliver more value for them. But it's also something that ultimately is gonna create more opportunity for us. And so, listen, we've been encouraged by the retention. As you said, we saw a pickup year-over-year in the fourth quarter. You know, we're encouraged by the momentum we see there.
I think if we continue to deliver on the innovations, product enhancements, and those go-to-market and account management areas, we should continue to see an attractive outlook for retention.
All right. Last one across the business. I need to talk or ask rather about pricing. I think you or maybe actually Henry did talk, sound a little bit more constructive on pricing in the, as you called it, better environment, recently on the earnings call. So anything specifically you're seeing there, anything you can quantify? I know people are always very focused on this.
Yeah.
But it's an area that you kind of have a good starting point with every year.
We do. And listen, we feel like we're in a good place, from a price increase standpoint. As I've mentioned before, the key inputs for us into price increases are client health. You know, we are generally looking at overall costs as well, client usage of our tools, but also the value and importantly, the value that we are delivering to clients. So linking it to what I said on the retention question, what I alluded to earlier, you know, we are delivering more and more value to our clients. We continue to enhance the services they get. They're able to operate more efficiently. They get more data points. They're able to unlock additional value, be more effective in their day-to-day jobs. All that supports price increase. And so the contribution to new sales from price increase has been relatively steady in recent periods.
There were puts and takes across the business. But we feel we are in a good position to continue to sustain unlocking value through price increases over time, given those enhancements that we're making to the service we deliver to clients and our content sets overall.
Okay. Jumping into the business then a little bit more, maybe starting on the index side, which is clearly the biggest, the biggest part of your business today. There was a long period where the business actually grew double digits, and then it got a little bit more choppy. Still very good. But-
Yeah.
People seem to be very focused on that double digit. So since there is a big focus, and I think you have, in your previous targets, you don't have segment targets anymore. But when you had segment targets, I think that was definitely a business that we were looking for double digits. So how do we get back there?
Yeah. Listen, it's got double-digit growth potential for sure. If you look at where the growth is now, I think 9.4% subscription run rate growth in the fourth quarter, up from 9% the prior quarter, up from 8.4% a year ago. And so we've got good momentum there. If you dial, you know, dial the clock back further, we saw a meaningful contribution from our sustainability module, our ESG module. I think I mentioned this at your last conference, where we were getting a big benefit from this tremendous growth with our ESG module. We have seen that growth slow down. And that's been probably one of the primary factors that's driven the overall index subscription growth rate down. That is a smaller contribution now. And where we are seeing tremendous demand, I think there is a long runway to continue to fuel that.
And so we are seeing, I alluded to this earlier, you know, talking from the firm-wide view. But we're seeing tremendous and steady growth with areas like the trading ecosystem or the fast money community, where the utility of our index content in creating things like baskets, structured products, over-the-counter derivatives continues to grow. Things like index arbitrage strategies where the opportunities for, you know, trading firms, hedge funds to continue to make money, around that growing ecosystem of products, continues to grow. We're seeing wealth organizations increasingly use our index content to develop model portfolios, and be more sophisticated about how they track their clients' portfolios' performance. We're seeing the FIA market, the fixed index annuity market, become a meaningful opportunity set for us. All of that's on top of asset owners that are using our index content more broadly as they internalize their investing processes.
And then asset managers, who are generally around the edge, is becoming more systematic in how they develop strategies. And so they are seeing increasing utility and value from licensing more and more content from us. And so we saw a strong fourth quarter. I alluded to this with active managers, looking to license more content from us. We see a long trajectory of demand and opportunity on that side. But we also see tremendous opportunity to fuel growth across all of these areas. And then linking it back to one of those big trends I alluded to at the beginning, systematic investing, outcome-oriented investing, custom indexing, we saw accelerate in the most recent quarter as well. And we continue to be very bullish about the opportunity set around custom indexing. And so there's a lot of legs to this momentum.
We continue to see tremendous opportunities. You know, we think this definitely can be a double-digit growth area for an extended period. And then layer on top of that, the incredible momentum that we've seen within the passive market, namely ETFs, where we've seen record flows at unprecedented levels. It's incredibly exciting how big the index opportunity set is for us.
Okay. Staying on index, but then maybe going a little bit more into the cyclical side. You mentioned a little bit at the beginning already. And you know, we actually talked about this right before we got started. We've done, I think, last year a lot of work on what international flows picking up could mean, well, first for the asset management community, but then what that means for a company that serves the asset management community, namely you guys. So Henry on the call actually did echo our sentiment a little bit. I was very happy to hear that.
Yeah.
Seems like you are starting to see a little bit of a positive benefit there.
Yeah.
Maybe, you can be a little bit more specific how it's manifesting itself. But then also, as we obviously think about this maybe just getting started, where else could you see potential upside? Again.
Yeah.
On the cyclical side, on the subscription side mainly.
Yeah. So I'll touch on the subscription side. But it is related to and you can't lose sight of what's happening on the asset-based fee side. And so we had record inflows in the ETFs linked to our indexes in the fourth quarter. We had $200 billion+ of inflows into ETFs linked to our indexes throughout 2025. And then year to date, so if you just look through January and early February, $50 billion+ of inflows already this year into ETFs linked to our indexes. So the pace has even picked up so far this year. You know, that's obviously going heavily into international exposures. So we see it into EAFE, World, emerging markets, in variants on those, including, you know, single-country types of exposures.
And so I think that is reflective of a broader sentiment, not only capital flows going internationally, but a broader sentiment of investors needing to be aware of, smarter about, thoughtful, and intentional about how they allocate across geographies. And so you've got the environmental aspect of it, which is, as you alluded to, to the extent you have asset managers and even more broadly, financial markets participants increasingly focused on international markets. So it might be they're launching new strategies, building new teams, wanting to understand the dynamics and nuances of those markets better. Those are catalysts for demand. As Henry said, it's, it's without a doubt a helpful thing, to us. At the very least, our clients are getting more value out of the massive content that they are already licensing from us. And we can push price increases, as a result of that.
But it also, at times, leads to the demand to license more content across those organizations. And it's not just on the market cap indexes. This also feeds into factors, so our factor indexes, but also our risk models more generally. You have a world where geopolitics can move markets significantly. The need to understand specific market dynamics, exposures, risk factors is growing. And that is where MSCI is uniquely positioned. So it's not only the focus on increased allocations internationally, but it's trying to understand those dynamics of what's driving those capital flows in those markets is something that should benefit MSCI.
Excellent. All right. Wanna quickly shift gears to the analytics business.
Yeah.
Which has definitely been an area of strength over the last couple of years. 4Q was a little bit softer on the sales side. And I'm, I don't know if I'm being nitpicky, but it was. So look, do you think the business is in a good spot here? It's been in this 7% growth rate. But I think you always have ambitions to, to maybe get that, get that higher. So what, what are you focused on? Are there opportunities to, to get it higher? And then again, anything notable maybe on, on the 4Q why it was maybe a little bit softer?
Yeah. No, nothing notable on 4Q. As you know, it can be lumpy quarter to quarter based on timing of big deals, for us. But, listen, it's, it's been an area of strong momentum for us the last couple of years. It's always an area where we see huge opportunities. The exciting thing about analytics is we can serve so many different client segments, users, use cases with the unique IP and, and capabilities that we produce. And so we see tremendous opportunities out there. What has been fueling some of that acceleration and growth from a product type lens, I think you're all aware our, our factor models have been ripping. You know, we've seen solid double-digit growth with equity analytics for several quarters now.
A lot of that is benefiting from the growth in multi-strat hedge funds, where that factor content is integral to how they manage their portfolios and, and manage risk. And we've benefited with the growth there. But we all are also seeing traction with more traditional investors. This is early days, so I don't wanna overstate it. But it's super exciting where you start to see front office use cases of those risk models at many traditional asset managers. We've historically served the risk function at those organizations. But as you see the portfolio managers, the investment office starting to wanna understand what I was talking about in your prior question, what's driving the market? What's driving my portfolio? What are some of those underlying risk factors that I'm, I'm taking in my strategy? That creates opportunities for us to move into the front office, on the risk model side.
So that's incredibly exciting. On the multi-asset class side, you did see a pickup in growth in multi-asset class analytics, in the fourth quarter. And that was in with the asset owners directly. You know, there's a whole host of factors at play there. But one thing that I would call out is our private asset capability. That is where we are very differentiated. So if you're a CIO or a CRO at a big pension fund, sovereign wealth fund, you're increasingly allocating to the private markets. You wanna have a deeper understanding on your private credit risk and exposure. You wanna understand the value that you're getting from the fees that, you're paying to these managers. We are uniquely positioned to help in that total portfolio view, but with a particular focus on the private asset side.
So things like our private credit risk model, our real estate risk model, our private equity risk model, all things that I think are big differentiators for us. Some of the insights that we can provide there and integrating with our Private Capital Solutions capabilities is helping to fuel opportunities on the asset owner side. Then we've also gotten traction on the wealth side. Still relatively small for us in analytics. But as you see wealth organizations become more systematic, not to overuse that word, but how they think about risk in their clients' portfolios, they build model portfolios. That is what our tools are designed for. It's, you know, I wanna take, based on this client's planning objectives, risk tolerance, and our house views, here's generally the portfolio we wanna construct.
You can use our risk models, our optimizers, our multi-asset class analytics to do that. And so we've gotten traction in mainly around that model portfolio process, for big wealth managers. So yeah, there are legs, legs of growth there. We do serve a lot of clients, a lot of segments. And so you'll continue to see some lumpiness period to period. But we continue to be bullish about the opportunity set based on the direction of travel of the industry.
Excellent. Okay. Then, stepping through the businesses here, sustainability and climate business continues to decelerate, not to, you know, move on to a little bit of a more softer note. But, look, we all remember the fantastic growth in 2021, 2022. It's certainly far away from that. Some people are worried that this business could actually be ex-growth or negative growth. So maybe just talk about that a little bit. And then in particular, as we think about 2026, there's still a lot of dynamics in a lot of different places. Any, anything of note in that business that we should be aware of?
Yeah. I would say nothing new to highlight. We've talked about a lot of these dynamics in the past. You definitely see pockets, particularly in the Americas, where demand for sustainability solutions and insights is more muted. Clients are more cautious about, you know, additional purchases, expanding what they're doing, even communicating how they are doing it, which has created a softer dynamic. But we still do see pockets of opportunity as well. So we are seeing areas like our physical risk insights, our geospatial, AI-enabled insights as a high-growth area. Even corporate sustainability insights has been a high-growth area for us and a new focus, particularly outside the U.S. And so there are a whole host of areas where we do see strong growth. And then even against that backdrop and those pockets of muted demand, we are picking up market share.
And so as organizations look to consolidate providers, they're looking to do more with single organizations. As the provider of probably the broadest standards, as well as the provider of the broadest solution set across asset classes, across climate and sustainability, we're uniquely positioned to, to win business there. And so this will be a big market opportunity over time. This is going to be a key input into the investment process. We're uniquely positioned to support it. The thinking is evolving. There are additional views around resiliency, energy transition. These are all areas where we are helping. And there is demand for our tools. But we're in a transition phase. And I think that's gonna mean in the short term, we're gonna continue to see the same dynamics that we've seen in recent quarters, in the near term here.
But we believe over the long term, we are well positioned to be the leader in what will be a big space. And so we continue to be excited about it.
Okay. Very good. All right. Rounding it out then with your other private asset segment, there's two businesses in there, the real estate side and then also the private market side. I think a lot of themes here, structurally, I think probably well positioned for growth as those and markets get bigger. Cyclically, I think on the real estate side, there's a little bit more challenge. Maybe you can touch on that. But then even on the private market side, on the PCS side, I think you made a comment, not that long ago that maybe it's been performing a little bit below expectations. So where are we right now? How do you think about 2026? And then, of course, what gets you excited in terms of the medium term? Is this still both very early businesses?
It, it definitely, definitely. I mean, it is an area we're incredibly excited about, massive, massive long-term opportunity, to your point, very early in that journey. Maybe just a touch on real assets first. And then I'll come to PCS, although the trends feeling both of them are consistent. As you said, we've had some tough cyclical headwinds on the real asset side for the last several years, where you've seen notable decreases in commercial real estate transaction activity. We do have big parts of our business that are tied to that transaction activity, serving developers, brokers, lenders, where you have seen decreased activity. You have seen some green shoots. I mentioned this on the earnings call. But there's certain areas where you've seen a pickup in capital coming back into the space, namely around office space, retail.
You know, in recent periods, we've also seen it around rental properties. Obviously, there's areas like data centers, infrastructure. So, you know, green shoots there are positive early indicators for us. And we've seen, as a result, while small, we've seen some pickup in business activity, things like our Index Intel offering, which is a solution set that allows you to understand what markets are moving what way and what is driving that performance. We've seen tremendous success there. And so hopefully, hopefully, some green shoots that should continue. On the PCS side, to your point, we, you know, to be frank, when we announced the acquisition of Burgiss, I said, you know, we think this is a 20%+ growth business. The growth has fallen down into the teens. You know, it did tick up in the most recent quarter.
So it's up to 15% growth. The thing that's encouraging about that is the growth is coming from those areas that we've been focused on and we've been enhancing. And so we've been on this journey for the last couple of years, to enhance the product offering, enhance the go-to-market, and really deliver some of these tools that we know the private markets need. So tools like benchmarks, classification standards, liquidity insights, credit risk. These are all things that we now have. We have a more robust go-to-market effort not only in the U.S. but also internationally. And so we've seen tremendous success in both EMEA and APAC, although they're still small for us, very early days.
But going back to my comments at the beginning, this is an area where we know investors, particularly given some of the dynamics you're seeing in, like, growth equity with software-focused funds, particularly some of the dynamics that you're seeing within private credit where investors are really thirsty to understand what their exposures are. And that's just a baseline, understand what's driving the risk and performance of their portfolios, and then be smarter about how they allocate their assets. And in a world where there are more markets that allow them to sell their positions, buy their positions, hedge their positions, get access to more liquid open-ended funds, there's gonna be more and more need for the solutions that we provide. And so it's early days, as you said.
But we think we're getting to a position where we've got the tools, we've got a more refined go-to-market effort, and should be able to continue to build momentum there. And so we continue to be excited about the opportunities up.
Okay. Excellent. Thank you for that. Going back maybe to company-wide topics, AI is going to be a big topic at this, at this conference for sure. It's on everybody's mind. You've been sounding pretty optimistic here recently. So maybe, maybe you can talk about both opportunities on the revenue side and also on the, on the margin side. In, you know, in, in particular, when you think about the revenue side, which maybe it's not as much in focus these days, but, like, maybe be a little bit more specific, what you're actually working on, go-to-market strategy, anything that you can highlight that, that maybe, maybe already produces some results in the near term. And then, of course, I gotta go to the risk side 'cause, as I mentioned, that's where investors seem to be focused on.
You just look at these markets again over the last couple of weeks. You seem to be getting caught up in that as well. So, maybe, maybe talk about both of those sides.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So AI is, I mean, you've heard it, as you alluded to, on our recent calls and from Henry in particular. It's exciting. It is super exciting for us across a number of dimensions. I think I've mentioned to you in the past it is very CFO-friendly. I think that's probably not surprising to most folks. But the impact is very tangible. And so cost to produce, I'm seeing notable improvements on, particularly in areas that it's difficult for us to source clean, standardized data, like in the private markets, where we've seen improvements in the cost per data point increase by 30%+. And that not only leads to efficiencies for us, but it allows us to rapidly expand the coverage that we have.
So I think you've heard us mention we did not have a proper private credit transparency service offering, you know, a year and change ago. And AI enabled us to very rapidly build out the capability to offer transparency across private credit portfolios. You've obviously seen us do a lot of things around risk and liquidity there. So it's a huge enabler. It's leading to productivity benefits and efficiencies across most of what we do, obviously, things like pace of development and engineering. You know, we're seeing notable improvements in productivity. But the exciting, the real that's great for me. I get geeky and excited, just from a P&L management standpoint. But the exciting thing is what it is doing for clients. And so I alluded to this earlier. But we are rapidly delivering more and more value to our clients.
And so things like our AI insights offering, which is basically making it much easier for clients to interact, interrogate, query their portfolios, serve up insights to them around the inherent risk, things that they need to be focused on. You know, it's a big leap forward where clients no longer need as big teams to handle the integration with our platforms. They no longer need big risk teams to parse the massive amounts of data and scenarios. And so we're making, are making our clients much more efficient. And so that's been a growth area for us.
You know, I alluded to expanding on the, the private credit front but also in other areas where it's tough to get data, areas like our asset location geospatial data set, which is a key input into assessing the physical risk of a portfolio, together with some of our standard models, is allowing us to deliver a tools, really an AI-driven tool set that would not exist without, without AI. Even on the custom index side, it is allowing us to develop custom indexes, new custom indexes, but also custom indexes faster than we were in the past, with a whole host of added, added capabilities around it. And so tools that we are delivering today are directly almost everything we do is AI-enabled and AI-supported.
But tools that would not exist without AI. I think we mentioned on the most recent call in 2025, we had about $10 million of sales from these true AI-enabled tools. And we're just getting started on that front. But the thing that is most exciting is it is unlocking the vision that we as an organization have had since I joined the company, which is really bringing a total portfolio solution to our clients. And so we are on the cusp of releasing some capabilities that we've talked about for a long time. And we are uniquely able to produce because we have access to the client portfolios.
Clients with $50 trillion of assets are using our enterprise risk and performance tools, the $18 trillion trading ecosystem of benchmarked assets around our indexes, our industry standard frameworks, as I was talking about earlier, and risk measures, bringing that all together to allow a client to say to MSCI, "Hey, I wanna develop a portfolio or a basket with this strategy.
You know, I wanna be long semiconductors, limit my China exposure, overweight the momentum factor, achieve this climate objective." We can bring together the total universe of what their portfolio looks like, so the context of what their portfolio looks like, the context of where the capital markets ecosystem is around those indexes, in the standard frameworks that they are using, to think about their portfolios and exposures together with world-class index capabilities to build this custom basket or custom index, to very efficiently achieve their objectives on their portfolios. That has applications across not only the allocators and asset owners but wealth managers, traditional asset managers who are launching more of these systematic-type strategies and obviously within the fast-money ecosystem of trading, trading firms, hedge funds, broker-dealers.
And so we are connecting that massive ecosystem that exists around our unique content sets, our standards, with unique tools across that total portfolio, as I alluded to earlier, including private assets where no one else has the same capability. And it's super exciting. Being able to unlock that network and ecosystem is the holy grail for us. And it feels like AI is unlocking a big opportunity for us. And so I know you asked about risk. But for us, the focus is move as quickly as possible. So we are, we're all in. We're moving quickly. But it's to unlock the massive opportunity set in front of us.
Okay. Very good. Moving quickly, as you just mentioned, a couple of questions left. Maybe on the, on the expense side, since we are on CFO-type questions, you just gave expense guidance. Maybe just, anything to add there, maybe the building blocks, any, market-related, items you wanna highlight, what, what brings it to the lower or the higher end? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Thank you for asking. We didn't give that color on the earnings call. So I would say the AUM assumption that underlies our guidance, including our expense guidance that we provided, is that AUM levels are relatively flat for the first half of the year, and then gradually increase in the back half of the year, which is, you know, consistent with how we've done it in the past. And so depending on how markets move but also as a result of a whole host of other factors, we will continue to calibrate the pace of spend across the business. And so in addition to looking at the market levels, we're looking at business performance, investment performance, emerging opportunity sets. And so all those factors feed into our ongoing proactive financial management across the business.
We will continue to, as we've done in the past, calibrate that pace of spend based on not only how markets are moving but the overall business performance that we're seeing. We are committed to delivering on driving long-term outsized sustainable growth but also delivering period-to-period attractive profitability. We think we've got a lot of levers and tools at our disposal to continue to deliver this very attractive profitability growth, in addition to that long-term, long-term top-line growth.
Okay. Lastly, very quickly on, on capital allocation. On the M&A side, you've been fairly selective. But let us know if there are any capabilities you're still looking at closely, anything you need to add. And then, look, you're pretty opportunistic on buybacks. You've been stepping it up recently. Markets have been choppy. The sector and your stock has been under attack. Normally, you would lean in now. So maybe, maybe give us an update there and, and anything else we should think about for 2026 as it relates to, to capital allocation and buybacks.
Yeah. I mean, listen, we're big long-term believers in the stock, the opportunity set I talked about earlier. And so we take an opportunistic approach to share repurchases. And yeah, we are continually monitoring the market. And it's a function really of available cash, market volatility and stock volatility, and some level of conviction or value overlay on what we're doing. And so, you can intuit from that, our approach to repurchases. On the acquisition front, listen, we generally believe that we have very attractive organic growth prospects. We're not looking to dramatically diversify the business, add a new product line. We are continually looking at opportunities. But we are very selective to make sure that they are very financially compelling and strategically compelling.
Usually, it's to accelerate those capabilities, to use your term, those capabilities, that we think are gonna fuel the long-term growth of the business. They're just bolt-on enhancements if we do pursue them. We're gonna be very selective. The areas that we would look would be private assets, unique content sets, capabilities around custom indexing, those growth areas that you've heard us talk about and you've seen us do, these tactical bolt-ons in the past, we'll continue to look in those areas.
Okay. Fantastic. Sorry we didn't leave any time for Q&A. But I think we got plenty here. So why don't you help me thank Andy for making it all the way down to Florida and give us an update.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you all.