All right, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us here after lunch. My name is Manav Patnaik, I'm Barclays' Business and Information Services analyst, and we're pleased to kick off the afternoon session here with Doug Peterson, who's the CEO of S&P Global. So Doug, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having us. Great conference.
Thank you. Appreciate that. So first, Doug, maybe just a broad question. You know, we're about two plus years since the close of the IHS Markit deal, almost three since you first announced it. So maybe just, you know, we've gone through a lot of cost synergies. You've you know had that much time to look through it. So maybe your assessment today on what your portfolio looks like and your level of happiness with that.
Yeah, so going back three or four years ago when we first conceived of the merger with IHS Markit, we had identified some long-term trends, secular trends, that we thought at that time were gonna be driving the growth of the financial markets in the future, data analytics in particular, things like sustainability. We didn't call it private markets at the time, but it's the same thing as private markets. We thought that at core, data and analytics would also go into the benchmark business, it might change the rating space, and that we needed a partner who would allow us to get a lot more scale. We figured we couldn't do it through organic growth, and we couldn't do it through bolt-on acquisitions, and we wanted something much bigger and bolder that we could move faster with, and thus, the merger with IHS Markit.
We started after the merger, before it was closed, to talk about our organization structure, our management, how we're gonna our approach towards integration, our approach towards the, the culture, and I think we've, we've done really well. We've, we've exceeded our approach to synergies earlier than we thought. We had an original target of $480 million. We achieved $620 million. In our revenue synergies, our target is $350 million two and a half years from now, and we're already at $180 million of realized synergies. A lot of that is through cross-sell, and the, the power of the brand of S&P Global has been even stronger than we originally thought. A couple of surprises. There were a lot of upside surprises, the quality of the customer relationships on both sides, the quality of the technology, the ability to move with speed was an upside surprise.
Downside surprise, there were a couple businesses in IHS Markit that were more market-driven than I had probably originally thought. I kind of knew it, but then there's a business within Market Intelligence, which was, had, the Enterprise Solutions business that was impacted by a very low, very slow M&A market, et cetera. But net-net, very successful, strong team, strong brand, really good execution, and as a portfolio, the second part of your question, we now have a, a portfolio, and you think about it, we've got the ratings franchise, we've got the Market Intelligence, we've got an incredibly powerful Commodity Insights franchise, the mobility business, and then finally, the index business. We're seeing a lot of synergies across the portfolio. That's some of the upside, especially in things like energy transition and sustainability.
We're finding ways to move as fast as possible, and one of the interesting areas right now where we're getting a lot of synergies in terms of learning, is artificial intelligence.
Okay. So well, since you ended with that, maybe let's jump to that right away. Just, you know, we've asked a couple of companies before you as well, but your general view on GenAI, and how you think S&P can benefit, you know, either on the cost side or top line as well.
We think we can benefit in both ways, but we're not ready to call it yet, what will be that top-line growth or what will be the margin improvement we've got. As you know, we bought Kensho six years ago, which was an artificial intelligence team based in Cambridge, in Boston, Massachusetts, that we brought in-house, and over the last six years, we've used the traditional AI to build out a whole set of products and services that are really around data: d ata linking, data management. And the reason I mention that is the secret to GenAI is to have data that's clean, it's easy to use, you can tokenize it, you can feed it into models.
Very simply put, what we've done is we've put in place a vision for artificial intelligence, for GenAI, which is that it's going to supplement what all of us do, but not replace us, that we're going to put in place a set of governance. We have a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, who's also the CEO of Kensho, and we've put in place a whole learning approach across the entire company. Then we now have something we call S&P Spark Assist. It's a co-pilot that we built internally that allows us to have a firewall around all of the data, so we're protecting all of our data and our intellectual property by bringing the models inside of our firewall, so we can bring in models from anybody, OpenAI, from Microsoft, from AWS, from Anthropic, and we can bring them in.
Into our firewall, into S&P Spark Assist, and then all of our analysts, our developers, they can use the tools, download data sets inside of them, and we're seeing an incredible amount of creativity. If something is big enough that we think it's going to make a big difference to either productivity or to a product, we move it into something we call an accelerator, and we've had some successes of getting things out of the accelerator. Nothing that is fully in the market yet. ChatIQ is one we talk about. It's a conversational search on top of CapIQ Pro that we now have in the market as test gates as a pilot, but we're very excited about it, but no numbers yet.
Got it. And so maybe just a few follow-ups on that. So first, in terms of the models, I know you said you could bring in anything within Spark Assist, but I believe you guys have your own large language model. So can you talk about the split of usage, if that's the right phrase? Like, how much do you use your own versus all these others?
Yeah. We have a model called FinLM. It's a financial model. It's, it's a m aybe I'll call it an SLM, a small language model. It's not a large language model. But what we found is that large language models are built off of the word language. They're not financial models. One of the things that large language models do very poorly is financial calculations. If you want to look at things like CAGRs and, and comparison over times, or stock prices or multiples or, or, corporate actions, it can't do the calculations. It can find the language, but then it has a hard time. So we're building, we're building tools that allow you to use the large language model to extract the information, and then layer on top something like a FinLM that can turn it into usable information.
We're also building tools that allow you to do visualization, extraction, et cetera, to build it into workflow.
Okay. And is Spark Assist, just so I'm clear, is it like a sandbox, which any of your divisions can jump in and.
Any person.
How do you?
can use it.
I guess, how do you control the cost of, you know, using those models? Because everyone talks about how.
Yeah
I t's very expensive.
Well, it is expensive, but we are controlling it. We have something we call the S&P Global Kensho Benchmark tool. We're now benchmarking all models against 600 standardized questions. You can look at it on our website, and we rank models for the quality of the answer, the precision of the answer, and then we have an overall score as well. We can then use different models for different use cases. But we're controlling the cost, as an example, by being open architecture. We're working with everybody. Anybody that's building large language models, we're working with them. We also have the firewall approach, so we bring the models in. Right now, we're running our own, call it our sandbox, or if you want to call it this Assist tool, we call it S&P Spark Assist.
We're running it at a cost lower than $1 a month per user, as opposed to what it would cost to have an exclusive relationship arrangement with somebody else. The tools don't necessarily automatically link into workflow, but we feel like at that cost, it's really a great value for us to have, and it allows us to have. Now, right now, we have 1,800 power users of Spark Assist that are also have built a library of queries. You know, one of the things you learn about AI is that the question you ask determines what the answer is, and so we now have a lot of people who become experts that write very long queries.
It's not just, "Write me a poem in Shakespeare style." They're very long queries that will ask for information to be extracted about, let's say, corporate actions or about M&A, and then it not only does that, it asks you to give the answer in this format, in a tabular format, with et cetera, et cetera. So we're now getting a lot of expertise in how you use GenAI, and it, so it's a long way to go, but we're really excited about what we're achieving.
Got it. And I understand you have nothing to share now, but just rough timelines, what should we think about when you should see some stuff? Just because, you know, in your business, you can't be 95% right.
Right.
You have to be 99.99. Just help us, you know, appreciate that difference and the timeline in which we should be realistically expecting stuff.
Yeah, by the Q4 into the Q1 of next year, you should get, please expect us to give you something that's much more complete. Give us the rest of the year to target applications, understand what the use cases are, test the veracity and the quality of the output on the models. But we cannot be, as you said, we cannot be wrong. It can't be 95. It has to be, you know, six nines. We do have one of our systems right now, we are like the old S&L, which we built into CapIQ Pro, where people that find a mistake, we pay them $50.
We're starting to do that with one of our pilots, so if an answer is wrong, we want people to give us the right answer because it actually trains our models.
Yeah.
And so we've got a loop now to pay people to find.
Yeah
.W rong things with some of our, our AI models, 'cause it's just a, it's a very inexpensive way to train the models.
Yeah. But be careful with that one, 'cause I heard S&L used to send out W-2s to people.
Yes, they did.
B ecause they found so many errors, so.
There were some people.
Yeah
W ho were good at that.
So let's go back to, you know, just the deal. It was a transformational deal, but the one segment that obviously benefited a lot from this deal and that you've been transforming over the years is Market Intelligence. You know, you went, it was just CapIQ, then you bought S&L, now Market Scan, you've got Visible Alpha. So just maybe a big-picture question is just help us appreciate your vision for Market Intelligence. And you know, is there a competitor you're specifically going after, or how should we think about what that solution set ultimately will be?
Yeah. So first of all, we think of it as a broad set of solutions that are going to meet the needs of multiple users, where we're broader than just thinking about a trading floor or a sell side or buy side. We have tools that will be diversified. They're gonna be tools for buy side, sell side, and within the sell side, insurance, banking, investment banking, et cetera. So we have a very broad set there. On the corporate side, we have large corporate access to treasurers, heads of strategy, CFOs, planning offices, heads of marketing, et cetera. So we have a large customer base there. We also have governments, regulators, academics.
So one of the beauties is that we don't depend just on any single base, and if there's a if we have a weak sales performance or somebody who cancels a contract, it's not gonna have a big impact on us because of our diversification. When it comes to the tools, we have different segments. We've got one segment, obviously, is the risk services, which is the distribution of ratings, intellectual property. That service is also being enhanced, including a lot of other risk and credit information models, et cetera. We have another business, which is the desktop. The desktop has benefited tremendously from the last few years of the upgrades that we've made to the quality of the data, the datasets. We benefited tremendously from bringing in the IHS Markit datasets into the desktop.
Last June, we had a major upgrade, which included a upgrade also of graphics, of the design of the interface. This is where Visible Alpha is gonna sit. So this is a traditional, think of a desktop. The users are risk managers, investment bankers, bankers, strategic planning heads. The media actually is a big user of this. We have a lot of media clients that use it to do their research. In data and advisory, we have things like PMI, and we've got the information about supply chain, so it's another type of dataset we have. And then finally, we've got the Enterprise Solutions, which is where we have installed software products. This is where we're benefiting something like iLEVEL or Wall Street Office from business activity related to IPOs, to financial markets, and then private markets.
So it's across the group. It's a broad set of capabilities. We also think of it as our data engine for the company, as well as our technology engine. There's a lot going on here. We have a large set of data experts there, and it ends up being that we also benefit. As an example, we launched last year in the Commodity Insights business something that we call Platts Connect, and Platts Connect was the convergence of the Platts Dimensions Pro and Connect from IHS Markit. But we actually built it off of the framework of CapIQ Pro.
Okay.
This is where we get these kind of technology benefits across the company.
Got it. And, you know, in terms of the revenue synergies you talked about, I mean, I think market intelligence and then Commodity Insights were the two big areas.
Yeah.
So in market intelligence, to stick there, like, where are these synergies coming from? You know, $180 million I know is the number for.
Yeah
T he company, but getting a lot from market intelligence. So what are some of the examples of.
Yeah, examples of that, interestingly, we probably got off to a much faster start and have done much better than we thought in terms of cross-sell. A typical cross-sell is where the financial services business at IHS Markit was pretty much focused on financial services. But they had products there, whether it was investor relations products, reference pricing, dividend analytics, et cetera, that it turns out that they're really valuable also for commercial banks, for treasurers, for corporates, and the brand opens the door. So we were able to do a lot of cross-sell into new segments that were already clients of Market Intelligence at S&P Global. And so there's been a lot of cross-sell, so cross-sell across the board. That's, that's actually w e got a lot faster on that.
And then, the new products are starting to come out, and I'll give you an example of one, which is not only an IHS Markit Market Intelligence, but it's also includes the information from ENR, which was in IHS Markit. So this is something called Power Evaluator. Power Evaluator is a tool that's in Market Intelligence, and it's used by power companies to evaluate their entire market, their competitive analytics, what's happening with alternative energies, what are the price of energy. It's a planning tool for power companies and anybody that's distributing power, and we were able to build it with data from Market Intelligence, from Financial Services, and from the ENR business. So we got this Power Evaluator business. It's off to a start.
As soon as we launched it, we had clients because it's, it's one of those huge needs. The energy transition is moving fast, especially in the power industry. And so that's an example of that kind of a product. We have a lot of other products, especially pricing products. We've been able to enhance products like iLEVEL with some of the information that comes from, from Market Intelligence. So we have 15 different products in, in Market Intelligence that have been launched. And in the Commodity Insights business, there's also been a whole set of products, especially marrying prices with research, and so there's a lot of new products there. And, and one final example I'll give you is CERAWeek. CERAWeek, as you know, is, i t's the premier energy conference that takes place in Houston every year.
We've now grown it the last couple of years at about 20% per year. This year's up was not quite 20%, more double-digit, but not quite as high. But now the entire S&P Global, the entire company is benefiting it from it. We've got clients there from every single division, and we've got clients that went way beyond energy and especially way beyond traditional oil and gas. So that's another area that that type of business as well, it's benefited.
Got it. And then, you know, within MI, I think a quarter of your business is desktop.
Yes.
You know, the question's more around the market environment there. You know, we had FactSet before you, and, you know, MSCI we'll have tomorrow, but a nd you guys reported it, too. But can you? In your view, the market environment of the customers, like, you know, where do you think we are? Like, you know, would you call it cyclical, structural? Just your thoughts there.
Yeah, we've seen. We've been actually talking about for the last four or five quarters. I can't remember if it goes back longer than that, that we've been seeing some headwinds in the desktop business from banks, from investment banks. Not necessarily commercial banks, from investment banks. We haven't seen it so much from the buy side, and we haven't seen it at all from the corporates. In fact, corporates has been a growing area for us. So we think that when there have been some surprises, growth hasn't been as fast as we could have expected. We've already built those surprises into our forecast.
When we saw earlier this quarter or from last quarter, we saw that there was some discussions in the markets about some large banks in Europe that had stopped using the product. We had that in our numbers as well, but we didn't have to talk about it because it's already in our guidance.
Okay.
We'd already planned for it. We've been talking about it for a while. We've seen a lot of investment bank seats. Do we see a decline there across the board from many of the different banks? But because we have enterprise contracts, we've been thinking about this for the long run. We've already been experiencing this slowdown for a while. We didn't need to change any of our guidance.
Yep
Related to that 'cause it was already built into our forecast.
Are you seeing any kind of pain from the asset manager side or the buy side? I don't know if that's a big mix of your clients.
It is, it's an important part of our mix, but we're actually seeing, we're not seeing a lot of pressure there. We are seeing consolidation take place, but we're actually seeing new products that we're bringing to them.
Okay.
So we, we see more. It hasn't been one of our strengths. We've always had a lot of desktops inside of the asset management, but we think we're bringing more products, more pricing. We think the fixed income indices that we can bring in through our index business supports that, and then we're including improving some of our tools. So for us, we see that more of, as an upside.
Got it. And then how about our hedge fund friends? I know your exposure is about to go up now that you've closed the Visible Alpha deal. So just, you know, what's the environment there look like? And I guess, what's the strategy with Visible Alpha? Is it gonna be fully integrated into CapIQ or?
Yeah, we haven't seen anything, we haven't seen anything yet that I would say is a major trend related to the hedge fund. In fact, the hedge funds are moving faster. They're getting, seem to be getting larger all the time. A lot more capital allocated there. When it comes to Visible Alpha, this is a deal that we're, we think we're the only organization that could have done it. It was a complicated deal, 12 banks were the owners. All 12 banks, we have excellent relationships with, and we negotiated with them to be able to benefit from the 180 analysts and organizations that provide estimates into Visible Alpha. So we can keep Visible Alpha going, as a tool on its own, and then put it inside of CapIQ Pro. It's already, you can already link to it through CapIQ Pro on day one.
On 1 May 2024 , we're able to set that up immediately. But in terms of being integrated, it's not integrated yet, but you.
Right
You can link to it, you can use it from CapIQ Pro, and you can use it as is. We see that this is the type of differentiated data that's very beneficial to add to S&P Global. We think that there probably are a lot of other similar companies that at some point will be on the market, and the question is, will they get bought by a strategic, or by a private equity fund, or roll up or something? But this is one of the ones that we knew it incredibly well, we knew the quality of the data, we knew who the users are, and we think there's a real stickiness of that user base with CapIQ Pro, and there should be a real synergy—positive synergy there as well.
Got it. You know, earlier you mentioned enterprise solutions, which I think is a quarter of that business as well.
Yeah
W as the one area where it was much more tied to the market than you appreciated.
Yeah.
I think when you announced Visible Alpha, you also said Fincentric was something you were looking to divest. Maybe just remind us if you've sized Fincentric, but also, like, how much of that Enterprise Solutions then is something that you potentially want to take another look at?
Well, the Enterprise Solutions business is one of the ones I mentioned that it had had the last couple of years were there were headwinds from no IPOs, no M&A. I don't know if any of you track the M&A charts. I look at them frequently, but every quarter I get a complete review of the prior quarter, and it's been pretty bad the last few years. It just keeps dropping and dropping and dropping. And that business had depended on. Now, the last quarter, we did see some green shoots of M&A. We saw some IPOs. New York has benefited from the IPOs more so than other markets around the world. And we saw that in the growth.
We had 8% growth in that segment this last quarter, which was a lot better than we'd seen in the last few quarters, and we did see some of the volume-driven businesses were quite strong. To answer your question about where we would look for potentially peeling things off, it's probably better if I say everywhere, not just the Enterprise Solutions business. Fincentric happens to be in the Enterprise Solutions business. That business, it's a great business, but its business model, who its clients are, really doesn't have a lot of synergies. They're not a cross-sell, we don't benefit a lot from the kind of services they provide, and it's the kind of business that we think has a better owner than us.
So those are the kind of criteria we'll look at, so it's not just there. In Commodity Insights, there's a couple of very, very small things. They're so small, we don't even mention them.
Okay
That we, we shut down. There's a tiny business in the mobility business we sold last year. Again, so small, we've never really talked about it. But I want you and the people in this room and the people on the call, please hold us accountable to continue to have the discipline to look at our portfolio, to make sure that we're, we're the best owners of everything we have. And that, and that's what our promise back is to continue to do that. So hold us accountable, and we will do that, and we'll continue to see where we have things that really don't fit or don't have the right margin profile or growth profile. And this is a great time to do it, because after two years of closing the merger, we now know the businesses really well.
We see some of the big trends that are taking place in the market, and this is a great time for us to do that kind of portfolio analytics.
Got it. Maybe one last question, MI, the margins.
Yeah
Is that, you know, it's a competitive business, there's a lot going on there. Is that just more leverage to the top line, or is there initiatives that you think you can take that higher?
I think we think we can take it higher. We think we can get to the 2025, 2026 goals that we set for our Investor Day goals. In fact, for all five divisions, we're on good track for both the top-line growth and as well as the margin guidance that we gave. The question's always going to be, how much more do we have to invest? And we think that we hope, maybe this is hope is the wrong word to say in a meeting like this, that the productivity that we get from artificial intelligence that we can reinvest some of that in growth and also have some of that go to the margin.
And we're not quite there yet to be able to give you how we're going to quantify that and how we're going to do it, but this is a business that we think we can grow through pruning the portfolio and freeing up.
Yeah
S ome margin that way, some regular organic investment. And as you know, we always build in about $120 million-$150 million of organic investment every year. We measure it, we track it, we put those new businesses into our vitality index, and a lot of that has been in market intelligence the last few years.
Got it. Let's shift gears to a segment where margins are not an issue, your ratings business.
Yeah.
Maybe just first, can we just set the stage on the, you know, your analysis of the strong activity we saw in the Q1? And I know you've guided that to be more pull forward, and so the H2 will be weak, but just your thought process around that.
Yeah, if you don't mind, I'm going to go back to 2022. In 2022, the interest rates went up by over 500 basis points in the United States and the U.K., and in the E.U. During that period when interest rates were going up that high, that fast, and if you look at a chart, you'll be shocked at how fast. This looked like a stepladder. They just flew up, and at that time, what did the fixed income investors do? They took their money out, and they stopped making any more new fixed income investments. So basically, fixed income investment died in 2022. It fell off the cliff. It was partially replaced by private credit investors, who ended up making a lot of private credit loans. So now go forward two years.
We began this year with the expectations that interest rates by central banks were gonna be reduced during the year. At the beginning of the year, it was this euphoria of it's gonna be six times or eight times. We thought three times at the time, not six or seven or five. But with that environment, you also saw spreads drop. Spreads were at a historic lows. They were almost at the lowest they've ever been in the history of spreads, both for high yield and for investment grade, and with the expectation of rates going down. So fixed income investors flooded back to the market, a lot of capital available. So you had a combination of high yield repricing. You had loans that had been in private markets that came out to the public markets.
You had the large financial institutions that are looking at a lot of changes going on in the regulatory environment, and they were looking for liquidity buffers, for TLAC, which is some sort of a capital that they can have in an equity. It's like a type of capital, a bail-in capital. And so you saw the financial institutions, you saw high yield repricing, you saw that there was a very large expectation for this year to see issuance. But then we believe, though, that a lot of the issuance in the Q1 was pulled forward from the Q2, Q3, and Q4, especially the Q3 and Q4.
That's one of the reasons we increased our guidance by $0.10 and not more than that, because we do think some of that pull forward came from this year, maybe a little bit from 2025. But on the other hand, when we look at 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028, we look out the next three to five years, there's a very healthy pipeline of potential issuance with what's sitting on balance sheets that will need to be refinanced. And our expectation is, it's been our practice over time, once debt is debt, it stays as debt.
Yeah.
At some point, it gets refinanced. Interest rates and external environment right now is still probably not as positive as it was at the beginning of the year. Nobody's expecting rates are gonna go up. Our economist now has revised his expectation of three rate drops this year in the U.S. to one in December. So that kinda changes the environment a little bit, but those are the factors we looked at.
Yeah
W hen we were setting our guidance for the rest of the year.
Got it. So maybe just two follow-ups from there, one around private credit, we'll get.
Yeah
W hich we'll get to next. But the second, or the first question is, you know, you talked about a lot of pent-up demand coming in, a lot of pull forward, but then also a lot of maturity over the next three to four years. So do you believe in the thesis that outside of just a normal cadence of compounding ratings growth, there is an extra level of pent-up issuance that is out there that you'll benefit from?
Well, there is the, t here is so one thing we think we'll benefit from over the longer term is the amount of issuance that's on the amount of debt on balance sheets will get refinanced. It's there. We every other quarter, so the Q2, the Q4, we publish that, and our ratings group publishes that every quarter. So you can see what's on balance sheets, and you can see that it's a very large and it's been getting bigger. We also can go back and look. What they do is they look at balance sheets, but you can also go back and look at what the issuance was 10 years ago and seven years ago, and then also eight years ago, and five years ago.
You know, you can go out and see, and there was a lot of issuance that now needs to get refinanced once it's, once it's out there and outstanding. But the number one driver of growth of issuance is economic activity. What, what we, when you look at over time, debt, corporate debt on balance sheets continues to grow. This is just, it's, it's typically grows about 4% or 5% a year, and then the timing of when it gets refinanced or when it goes to market is much more determined by rates and by spreads. But the trend is over time, you can continue to see a trend, but we do have volatility in the business. You have market volatility, but the trend is, is driven around growth, M&A.
There's a lot of factors, but economic growth is really probably the most important factor that you can see that's driving issuance. And then you've got rates, spreads are more around timing, and then you've got the longer-term view of what's on balance sheets that's gonna be maturing.
Okay, and then maybe just on the private credit point, I think you just alluded to it as well, but I think Moody's had thrown out some notable stat, which I can't remember, but there was a lot of private credit kind of issues in the public market.
Yeah
I n the Q1. So, do you think about private credit as competition anymore? Synergistic? How do you think of that opportunity?
Well, you might recall that two years ago, I said it was delayed revenue. I always felt that the private credit players were going to need services to evaluate prices, evaluate credit risk, look at their portfolio analytics, that some of that would get securitized into CLO, some of it would get syndicated, and all of that started to play out. And so we see it as a part of an ecosystem of credit and debt. It's one of the big players, and we think that those, all of the players want to have the kind of analytics we can provide from market intelligence and from ratings.
Got it. Okay, if we shift, let's touch on Commodity Insights. That business has done, you know, tremendously well, maybe better than some of us expected, and maybe it comes down to the point you said before, where every company's an energy company.
Yeah.
Can you just talk about what the combined business today, like, what's going well there that's driving this good growth?
Yeah, this is a business that's underappreciated in S&P Global, and it's a combination of what has been the leading price assessment business, which is the Platts business, along with what has been the leading research and analytics business, which was IHS Markit. And if you go way back, when you and I spoke about this years ago, it was really difficult to build a research business organically. We tried, we did a couple of very small acquisitions, but we always felt that the pricing business would benefit from the research hand-in-hand. And so with IHS Markit, they really do have a premier set of research capabilities, conferences like CERAWeek. And when you put that together with the pricing business and with very dynamic people that know their markets so well, they can anticipate what's the direction of the markets.
What we're getting right, right now, in addition to the cross-sell and the new products, and, and the quality of the people, and this, this culture that we've built in the business, we're, we're doing a really good job of anticipating what's happening in the energy markets. There is a trend I briefly mentioned up front, but this sustainability and energy transition trend is here to stay. It's every company is an energy company. Every single day, you're gonna pick up the FT or the Wall Street Journal, and you're gonna read an article about something to do with energy. It might not call it energy, but it is. There's been articles in the last few days about all the data centers that you need for the, for artificial intelligence and all of the technology we're using, and those data centers are voracious users of energy.
Amazon and Microsoft are trying to figure out, "Where can I build a data center in a way that's gonna be energy-friendly?" And some of the size of these data centers, in theory, could run a small city with the amount of energy they're using. And guess what that means? That means that there's huge demand for information from Commodity Insights, for carbon intensity, energy source, energy transmission, what's the environmental impact? We can use that same data for ESG analytics, ESG ratings. We can use the same data in the ratings business to help the IMF and the World Bank, and the United Nations and others figure out how they're gonna help emerging markets finance their energy transition and their infrastructure investment.
So there's this, this incredibly rich data that we can use in the business and across the business, and it's, it's really exciting.
Got it. I just want to touch on all the segments for you. We don't have that much time, so I'm gonna move on just to... We can come back as well. So on the index side, I guess my main question is, you know, you added the fixed income.
Yeah
P ortfolio from Markit in there. How, how is that going? And then on top of that, I don't know if there's anything else in particular, initiative-wise, you'd want to call out on the index?
Yeah, so the first one I'd call out is the fixed income indices. When we brought them in, it's fixed income, it's credit, it's specialized credit. We know that when you build an index, you don't get a pop immediately. You don't, you don't see the revenue right away, and I'm really excited. This quarter, we started seeing the revenue come in, and it's particularly coming from the insurance segment for multi-asset class products, and we're starting to see the volume build, and it's being used as a benchmark product, which is either a multi-asset class or the credit or fixed income that we have, so a lot of growth there.
One thing I would highlight, in addition to having very strong AUM fees this quarter, I look at this ETD franchise we have, which has been very innovative over the years, and it didn't have the highest growth rate this last quarter, but when you look at it in the long run, it is a really strong franchise, and we're incredibly pleased we have it. We've recently launched VIX products in other markets. There's a VIX product now in Brazil and Australia. But the real power and the real powerhouse is in Chicago, with CBOE and CME, that working together with them, we've been very innovative about new products: single day single day whatchamacallit maturity products, mini products that are more retail-oriented.
The amount of futures and forwards and options that have been built with the S&P 500 or S&P indices has been incredibly strong, and so that area is one that, despite the volatility, it's a really strong franchise.
Got it. Maybe we can quickly shift gears to Mobility, the last segment we haven't touched on. You know, we were obviously familiar with the asset 'cause we covered IHS Markit, but it has surprised a lot of, you know, the new investors, if you call it, in terms of how well.
Mm-hmm
It's grown. How do you think about the outlook for Mobility?
Well, the Mobility business is another one that's fairly unique. There's not another publicly traded company that has a business like this inside of it, this deep data and analytics. The way that the data's extracted, it's very similar to the rest of S&P Global. It's publicly available data that you extract from DMVs and the consumers themselves provide the data from dealers. And so the business has been growing very quickly, and partially, we had some huge wins because of COVID. COVID meant that the relationship between the OEMs, the manufacturers, and the dealers completely changed. It also... And why I say that's important, because the dealers went to, like, y ou remember the book Moneyball?
All of a sudden, they realized there's all this data and analytics that they could use to run their business better and know who's gonna buy what car. And so we were able to take advantage of that and have this ecosystem of manufacturers, supply chain, dealers, financial people that provide financing to the industry, and have a really unique set of products at a time when the industry is going through massive transformation. So it is, it's one of those industries where I think we've been able to bring a lot of discipline to how to run the business and to think about investing. We acquired a company called MarketScan that has prices. It has, it has unique pricing information to enhance that portfolio.
In the context of an industry that's going through massive transformation, electric vehicles, autonomous, the supply chain is changing, we have the solutions that are needed for that business, and a great timing for us.
Got it. And in terms of the overall synergy targets, I think Mobility tended to be on its own, right?
It's one of the smaller one. Ratings and Mobility were small parts, not nearly as large on the synergy targets.
Got it.
For revenues.
Okay, fair enough. And then maybe just last question for you, since we're almost out of time here. You know, obviously, you're conducting a CFO search now, so just curious if you would like to give us an update on, you know, a timeline we should expect on when maybe you'd decide?
Yeah, that's a , I 'm gonna say it's probably the toughest question you've asked today. Because if I give you a timeline that's too short, if we don't get it.
Fair enough.
T hen you're not gonna be happy. So I can tell you that it's an incredibly attractive company. We have excellent candidates, and I can't think of a better time to be part of S&P Global, especially with the things we just talked about now, the transformation taking on. And two years after a merger, with the success we've had, and little, you know, little blips here and there, but with the way we're positioned, I can't think of a better time to be the CFO of S&P Global. So we're, we're pleased with what we're seeing in the market, but I, I can't give you a timeline, 'cause.
Fair enough
I'll miss it no matter what I tell you it is.
Okay. Well, maybe I'll end with asking you an easier question then. You seem to be having a lot of fun at the company. You know, you have a good leadership team, et cetera. So just, you know, what are, what are you most focused on, you know, on a day-to-day basis?
Yeah, I'm spending a lot of time on energy transition, on AI, and then seeing clients. So as you know, I love seeing clients because I learn so much when I see them, and this year so far, I've spent a lot of time on those three activities. Artificial intelligence is something I will never become an expert in. But I was a data analyst, a data guru, or what do you wanna call it, when I was very young in my life, and so it kind of has opened up my interest back to my roots as a very young analyst in the oil industry and the banking industry, and just seeing what kind of transformation's gonna take place there.
It's the kind of thing that an organization like ours needs to have the tone from the top that it's okay to do it, and the acceptance, as well as to take risk. You know, we have to take a lot of risk, and so it's a lot easier for people in the company to take risk if they know that I'm behind it and I support it. So that's one area, and then I'm spending a lot of time on energy transition and what that means for our business, but also for the markets. There's a lot of interest from organizations I mentioned, like the IMF and the World Bank, and the large institutions, to see how are we gonna finance the energy transition.
And then I love to see clients, and I always learn things from seeing clients, and so that's how I'm spending most of my time these days.
Got it. Fair enough. All right, we'll end it there then. Thank you, Doug.
Great
F or being here.
Thanks, Manav.
Thanks, everybody, as well.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you.