All right, everyone, we're gonna get started. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. We are so pleased and honored to have here with us Doug Peterson, President and CEO of S&P Global. As you all know, S&P Global is a provider of credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics, and, and workflow solutions, in the global capital, commodity, and automotive markets. The company completed the merger of IHS Markit, a little over two years ago, and Doug has been CEO of the company since 2013. Doug, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
Thank you, Faiza. It's great to be here.
Excellent. So look, I wanted to start with, you know, you just completed the IHS merger. It's been two years. Just curious, from a leadership perspective, right, you run a very large organization with a lot of different pieces. You know, would love to hear your reflections on how do you ensure that the organization is still being run in an agile way, you know, decisions are made, made fast, and you're not, sort of, you know, running like a conglomerate. That's what some people might think.
Right. Well, first of all, when we conceived of the merger with IHS Markit, it was based off of our expectations for where the markets were gonna evolve and how they're gonna develop, and why, for S&P Global, it was better to do a merger with a large organization like IHS Markit, as opposed to doing a lot of small tuck-ins or trying to build things from scratch. We had a vision that there would be opportunities in private markets. At the time, we thought maybe a little bit more like private credit. We could see that starting to emerge. IHS Markit had incredible information and services products when it came to reference pricing and credit analytics. I'd add to that what it meant for credit and fixed income indices.
So there was this vision about what was gonna happen in the credit markets and the, and the index markets. Another one had to do with sustainability. We believed that sustainability, energy transition was gonna be a really important area. And as part of that was also the commodity businesses. We had the Platts business, they had the ENR business, and we believed that putting those together is gonna give a scale of a benchmark business with a research and analytical business. So thinking about the original proposition or the industrial logic of putting the two companies together, it's actually been playing out now over the last 2.5 years. Between the time we announced the deal and it closed, it took a long time, and so instead of complaining, we used that to plan.
During that time, we decided what our strategy was gonna be, our vision, our values, the organization structure, and our management system, which has allowed us now, since then, to have in place a management system that allows us to be nimble, to move fast, to have accountability, to think of the company not as too large, but how do we keep it small? And how do we make sure that we can make quick decisions and people can move forward? A couple of examples would be in the Market Intelligence business, where we made a decision to acquire Visible Alpha. I'm sure almost everybody here is a user of Visible Alpha. So that was something that we, we were able to do quickly.
We were able to do it in a way that we could move fast with the team to be able to have the right business people involved, as well as keep the board informed along the way. Then another example of something like Fincentric, where we've decided it's not a great fit for the business, so let's find a way to reposition it, and ultimately, we're going to divest. So this is the way we think about the company. It's got a management system in place. We're about how we think about management, opportunities, how people are in charge, what they're responsible for, and it all comes back to that vision, the purpose, and the values that we discussed two and a half years ago.
Great. Great. And then just in retrospect, you know, what has gone better than your expectations, and have there been sort of any, you know, downside surprises? I know you've done a great job with the cost synergies. Most of those have been achieved. You're starting on the path for revenue synergies. But just talk about some of the, you know, positive or negative surprises along the way.
Yeah, so along the way, positive surprises were all around the quality of the people, the way we've come together with such a strong culture. Those have been really positive surprises. People are worried, will there be a culture clash? It ended up, there was not. We had this. Both companies had a complete belief in our people and our customers. These are the core values that we think about the most. How do we. We kinda call the company that it's people first, customer centric, and that was very similar for both cultures, and it allowed us to move very quickly. We both believe in the quality of the brand, the importance of S&P Global as a really strong financial brand, something that opens doors. So what are some of the things that were the positive surprises beyond that?
The quality of the products, the services, being able to cross-sell. I think that when you look at our revenue synergies, the cross-sell has gone faster than I would have thought. But there's amazing opportunities to take IHS products, for instance, in the Market Intelligence business, and bring those into corporate clients or to different types of financial services companies that maybe not IHS Markit had not been calling on before. So the cross-sell has gone really well. The product development has gone well. Some examples in the index business, where we've taken fixed income and credit indices and built some multi-asset class indices through the insurance chain. In the Commodity Insights business, we've seen incredible synergies.
Something like the CERAWeek Conference, it's now grown two years in a row at over 10%, and it is the premier global energy conference. You take that and you add to what was that conference with the old Platts business, all of a sudden you have this really powerful commodities and energy business. So when I look across the board, all of the revenue synergies are on track. Maybe they're coming a little bit different than I thought. Cross-sell is much stronger than I thought it was gonna be. On the cost synergies, we were able to put in place a really robust plan. In fact, at the very beginning, we were meeting every single week. It wasn't the sort of thing where we said: Let's meet every quarter and see how it's going. We were meeting weekly to have accountability.
I was not happy if everything was green. That meant there's something wrong. When you're doing projects like that, you need to know what's off track or what's not working quickly. But we got the accountability, we got everything set up, so I was very pleasantly surprised by all of that. The only very minor area where I would say maybe that I was surprised the other way was that we had more businesses than I thought that had some market headwinds... and market headwinds is part of it. But we've been able to adjust those quickly and really build those businesses in a way that we can understand what the market headwinds are and move quickly. But overall, I've been really impressed, I've been really pleased, and we've made progress that's faster than I would have originally expected.
Okay, great. Makes sense. Maybe we can pivot to, you know, just your position as you see, you know, a pretty big picture from a macro perspective. Just curious on how your views have changed maybe over the last, you know, few months or so, and how does that impact your business? It seems to have a pretty direct impact on your ratings business, but talk about how you see the macro environment.
Yeah. At the beginning of the year, globally, there was a lot of discussions about how faster interest rate's gonna come down, and let's use the Fed as the example. At the beginning of the year, a lot of large financial institutions were expecting that interest rates were gonna come down five, six, or somebody even said 8x this year. We said three. Our original forecast, which we built our original guidance on, was based off of three interest rate cuts starting in June.
We've since adapted that for what we see are the current circumstances to one interest rate decrease in the fourth quarter, more likely towards the end of the year. We're calling what we see now a longer, prolonged soft landing. We don't see interest rates going up. We don't see a recession coming. We actually see pretty robust growth in the U.S., which is one of the reasons rates aren't gonna come down as fast as we expected.
We think Europe rates will come down a little bit faster, maybe in England as well. The BoE might signal that rates are gonna come down a little bit faster than the U.S. But we see a robust growth environment, although there's still risk in the environment. You've got political risk around the globe. You've got a couple of wars going on. This uncertainty around interest rates creates some issues. Now, you mentioned specifically the ratings business.
The ratings business had a very strong first quarter, as there was a lot of capital that came back into the fixed income capital availability. This capital availability meant that the rates for issuance were lower, the spreads were quite lower, and there was a lot of issuance across the entire spectrum of fixed income. Every single market had a lot of issuance, including also bank loans.
So we see that sometimes issuance can be determined by rates and spreads, but in the long run, over time, the most important factor which drives issuance is economic growth. If you think about underlying issuance in the ratings business, it's gonna be driven by, do I have confidence in my business that I can invest and continue to grow my business? Am I confident to do M&A? That's what drives issuance. Rate, rates and spreads drive timing, but issuance is really driven by confidence and growth.
Okay. So on the ratings business, right, like, there's been a lot of volatility, I would say, really since COVID. But curious, where do you think we are from a normalized perspective? Like, is the issuance, are we in a normal environment at this point? You've talked about pull forward in 1Q, but at the end of the day, do you think 2024 is normal, or is there still, you know, a lot of pent-up demand as we look ahead over the next few years?
Well, as you mentioned, I became the CEO in 2013. I joined the company in 2011, and I'm not sure if there's ever been a normal quarter. Every quarter, there's different ins and outs of ratings. But it's very steady when you look across the trend. Clearly, you're right to point out that COVID had a couple of bigger shocks to the financial markets, as well as to the ratings volumes.
And then, in particular, after COVID started changing, there was a huge impact from inflation across the globe, and a lot less issuance when inflation really started kicking in and rates started going up. We do think we're heading back to a more normalized level of issuance. We're getting back to what was more like 2018, 2019 trends. And there's a very large backlog of refinancing, which is gonna be coming into kicking in in 2025, 2026, 2027, and 2028.
And so when you see that, you can see that there's a large backlog of refinancing that's gonna kick in over the next few years. When we talk about pull forward and when, what's the timing, sometimes that's driven by confidence, by rates, et cetera. We did see pull forward in the first quarter from what we'd expected sometimes later this year. We didn't see a lot of pull forward from later years, but over time, almost all issuance ultimately kind of is pulled forward away.
People don't wait until the last minute to refinance their debt. They're always pulling forward. They pull forward a year, a quarter, three quarters. So I'm not sure about the timing on that, but we saw a very strong first quarter, and we're expecting, in the second half of the year, a lower levels of issuance, given all of the circumstances that I've been describing.
Yeah. Yeah, and you do have difficult comps as well.
Difficult comps as well in the second half of the year.
Yeah, there was a lot of activity. You know, so if I look at your medium-term guide, right, which you had put out maybe a year and a half ago, of 6%-9% for the rate business, and I know at the time there wasn't a base necessarily. I guess my real question is, is that sort of the right? Like, do you think 2024 is gonna be a base that you can grow off of, you know, on that 6%-9% sort of medium-term rate from here?
As we've said in our earnings call, as well as more recently, we're still confident in the numbers that we put out. That was December 2022, we did Investor Day. The ranges that we gave for all the divisions are still on track.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then, you know, there's been a lot of activity around private credit, right? A lot of conversations. Just what's your view? I know you've talked about that potentially as a delayed revenue stream. Just any updated thoughts around how much that could be a contributing factor to, you know, just ratings, revenue, ratings growth? How do you think about that?
Yeah, private credit is an area that has been around for a long time, but we didn't really start talking about it until more recently. And I think it came into the public awareness in 2022 when the fixed income investors withdrew their capital from the markets. They were looking at an environment where interest rates were starting to go up really quickly and very high. And if you're a bond investor, the last thing you want to do is own bonds when rates are going up. And so they pulled their capital out, and the private credit pools replaced the traditional investors in large cap fixed income, and they went into these private credit pools.
Private credit's been around for a long time, especially for SME and mid-cap credit, and so they moved up into a higher tier, and there was a lot of capital available for that. When I think about the business for ratings, as you've heard me say before, it was delayed revenue because I don't know of any investor that has a pool of any kind of asset that doesn't eventually want to trade it, reposition it, look at concentrations. As we started working with the private credit organizations, they were talking about needing to either syndicate or securitize or to find new ways to manage the risk, and we felt that all of that was going to be opportunities for our ratings business. But beyond that, in our Market Intelligence business, we've got really strong reference pricing.
We have a product called iLevel, which is providing GPs and LPs information about the portfolios. So we think that there is the opportunity for private credit and private markets generally goes across the entire portfolio. So it's not just a ratings opportunity, it's also a big opportunity for Market Intelligence as well.
Okay, great. Okay, maybe we can talk a little bit about GenAI, right? You've been investing behind that. Curious, you know, what your vision is as we look ahead, sort of more short term and then more longer term, sort of where do you think we'll be, you know, three to five years from now? Is there anything that you've seen in terms of the testing that gets you, you know, personally most excited about the GenAI opportunity?
Well, first of all, if you go back 5 or 7 years ago, we made a venture capital investment in a company called Kensho, which at the time was owned by a combination of banks and some venture capitalists from Silicon Valley. And they were building models using traditional machine learning for financial institutions. We made an investment and then became a client, and then along the way, decided that we had a vision for artificial intelligence, that it was going to replace a lot of routine, basic work. It was going to be an automation tool. It was going to be allowing a company like ours, as a data company, to automate a lot of work that today was being done by humans in a way that sometimes is quite, quite basic work.
So we decided to buy Kensho and bring it in and leave it completely separate as our artificial intelligence wing of S&P Global, with its own brand, with its own work style, hiring its own people. And now, 5 years, 5.5 years later, generative AI has now become the new big artificial intelligence opportunity, as opposed to machine learning. So Kensho has been able to pivot, and the CEO of Kensho is now the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer of S&P Global. So let's now go back to your question about the vision. There's two aspects to the vision. One is this replacement of analytical work that's going to allow all of us to think more, to act differently, to use inputs in ways we can get a lot more information before we make decisions. We think that humans will still make the decisions.
We also think that AI is going to become embedded in everything, and it's going to become a must-have tool. So your question about 3-5 years from now, we think that AI tools are going to become table stakes, that anybody who's using any kind of information service is going to want to have a query tool that allows them to look at what-if scenarios. Whether it's your travel agent, you're getting ready to plan a trip somewhere, or you're in a very sophisticated hedge fund looking at analytical aspects of how you're going to manage your portfolio. We think that that's going to become a table stakes tool, and that we need to be on the leading edge of being able to start experimenting and building around that. We put in place a governance structure.
For us, it's really important that we protect our data. Our data is our gold, and our data across every single aspect. You mentioned earlier that it's pricing, it's benchmarks, it's analytics, it's news, it's research, et cetera. That is data, and that's our goal, and we're going to protect it. And so we're building tools so we can bring models inside the company, and we can test and build using our data inside of our own firewalls, so we're not going to be losing control of our data.
We can continue to control our IP. That's something along the way. But our vision in the medium to long term is that it will improve our productivity, it will improve, improve our product opportunities. We'll probably get some new products out of it, but it will become table stakes, especially when it comes to getting query and understanding what's inside big data sets.
Do you think it's something, just given that everyone seems to be investing behind GenAI type of products, and you mentioned the word table stakes, like, does that suggest, l ike, is there an incremental revenue opportunity from, you know, standalone GenAI products? Or do you, do you worry that it's something where just the cost of, you know, new product innovation is going higher, and you may or may not get a return on it? H ow do you think about making sure that you're competitively differentiating?
I'm not too worried about getting a return on it, but I'm more worried about expectations set so high that we don't get this huge hypergrowth out of it. But when I think about the benefits from AI, we've seen them tremendously from Kensho over the last 5 or 6 years. We've seen productivity opportunities. We've built products. I don't know if any of you ever use transcript services while you're listening to an earnings call, but you can see our Scribe, which is transcribing earnings calls. You actually can see the transcription faster than the voice comes over the webcast.
And so that's the kind of a tool that we built that was looking at hundreds of 30,000 hours of transcripts, and then Kensho built on top of that a transcription tool that is now used by a lot of organizations. It's used to transcribe earnings calls, and then on top of that, that becomes a completely new kind of data set. That transcription, it's not just words now. That text becomes data, which can be analyzed in large language models. So I'm very optimistic that it will impact in growth. Growth will be faster, customers will be more loyal, we'll see better retention, we'll see better, higher quality products. I just can't promise you yet how it's gonna show up in our revenue stream.
Okay. And then, how quickly do you think you can get the productivity benefits, right, internally? Like, is there a margin target? I know you haven't publicly said anything, but how quickly do you think we can get there, where there can actually be productivity?
Yeah, yeah, we don't have any margin targets yet. We're still sticking to our guidance that we gave in December 2022. This is the sort of thing that we're talking about a lot within our executive committee. In fact, at our executive committee now, every single meeting we have, we talk about generative AI. It's a standing agenda item. We're not just gonna hope that things happen. We have to manage it and manage and control our future. We're starting to see a lot of benefits for developers, in particular with GenAI, but it is improving the speed to be able to write some code, but at the same time, they're finding new ways to use their time, and they're reinvesting that productivity in other ways. So we haven't seen anything yet that's built into our guidance.
Okay. Okay, makes sense. Okay, maybe we can pivot to, you know, just the various segments. We did talk about ratings already.
Yeah.
But, you know, MI, look, I think there've been some, you know, cyclical issues, and you mentioned those, that have impacted the business a little bit. You have talked about an acceleration in the back half. You know, give us just an overview of what areas of MI are doing better versus what areas of MI have been, you know, perhaps negatively impacted, and what exactly do you think will drive the acceleration?
Well, first of all, MI, Market Intelligence, is a really critical heart. It's like a beating heart within S&P Global. It's where we have all of our data. It's where we have our innovation. It's where we have technology. It's where we've built platforms like the CapIQ Pro Platform, which that foundation is used in other parts of S&P Global, in Commodity Insights and Ratings. It provides us with this technology engine that can help power the entire company. So there's a benefit from Market Intelligence that serves the entire company with these data services, technology services, innovation, et cetera. As a business, we see a very steady risk services business. This is one that continues to grow. It's the way we distribute our intellectual property from our ratings business. That business itself has some additional risk models.
The risk is heightening. People are more interested in risk. We see a lot of growth there. It's a pretty steady grower over time. Last year, we upgraded and updated our CapIQ Pro Desktop in June. There was a major release, which also integrated a lot of data from IHS Markit. That was a major uplift, major facelift, you wanna call that, as well, and that's gone incredibly well. And in fact, that's also the area where we're gonna be including Visible Alpha, which will have its own life as Visible Alpha, as well as become data sets which are available through the desktop. Our data solutions business has also done quite well, and this is a benefit of having the IHS Markit, S&P Global come together, the Market Intelligence business.
Those are in high demand, especially there's more volatility and more risk, more people planning, strategic planning, et cetera. And then our enterprise solutions business is also off to a really strong start this year. So when I look across the board, we have had some headwinds from the financial services market, in particular, some big mergers, some cost-cutting, et cetera.
We've talked about that over the last couple of years, but all of our guidance already has that built into it, and it's, and there's a lot of really exciting growth going on. Finally, within Market Intelligence. This is where we're gonna have the most upside from synergies from the merger. Market Intelligence is off to an excellent start. We've basically completed all of the expense synergies. We're off to a very strong start for cross-sell, and then the new products are starting to kick in, especially this year.
So give us an example of some of the new products where you're really, you know, gaining a lot of traction. I think I heard before, like, there were 17 new products that were introduced. So talk, bring to life some of those products.
Yes. So, the types of products that are bringing the excitement is where you can take, as an example, we have something called Marketplace. Those of you in the room might not be big Marketplace users, except to search for data. Marketplace is where we have tiles of data sets that are available for use, especially for developers and programmers, or model-to-model direct data feeds. We've been able to use this platform of Marketplace to build new products, new data sets. As an example, we came out with something called Blueprints. Blueprints starts using multiple data sets. It allows you to query what are your needs, and we're watching the users.
We've got a whole new set of multiple data sets that come together to meet the needs of market participants, of data users, et cetera. We've got other areas we're using reference pricing, which, as you know, is such a strong business, the original market, so to speak, and taking the reference pricing and building it into CapIQ Pro. CapIQ Pro has always been known much more as an equity tool, as well as where you can get information about stock prices, about corporate actions, about corporate balance sheets, M&A transactions, et cetera. We now have the ability to build in the fixed income information, fixed income, that comes from the original market business into the CapIQ Pro, so it's a whole another new set of products. So it's really exciting to see the products come out, and to be able to now get the true synergies coming to market.
Yeah. Great. Just to talk about CapIQ Pro a little bit, right? There's some large competitors in that desktop space. How would you characterize your, you know, share position in CapIQ? But now, given that you did the upgrade, what are some of the things that you're hearing from your customers? You know, what types of customers are you gaining traction with? And maybe just touch on pricing there, 'cause, you know, some competitors have talked about, you know, just elongated sales cycles, some price, I don't know if pressure is the right word, but at least some deceleration.
Yeah, let me start there. There's been a little bit of, as you mentioned, some slower sales cycle. We've talked about that. That's been built into what we've discussed. But we always position pricing as the value we add and the value we create. That's why something like the upgrade last year in June, with the data sets, the look and feel, the quality of the build of the downloads, the graphics, et cetera, is so important, because we always want to be improving the value and the competitiveness of what we deliver. When you look at the competitive landscape, one of the areas where we feel like we have a big advantage is that we can service every type of user.
We're not just on thinking about what is the use of an investment bank analyst or a risk manager in a financial institution. We also have a really strong user base in corporates. We have treasurers, we have corporate finance, people, we have the development people, we have the head of strategy and planning. So we have a very strong foothold in corporates, in buy side and sell side, in governments and in regulators, because the kind of data we have, the data sets, the proprietary data, is so strong that it's used by so many different constituencies. So when you ask about market share, well, there's a lot of market shares here and there in different types of use cases, but we feel like we have one of our biggest advantages is that we're much more diversified than a lot of the other players.
Okay. And, and then just sticking with MI, maybe last one on MI, right? W e talked about the Visible Alpha transaction. How impactful is that for the company, you think? I know you haven't sized it, but give us a sense of how impactful it might be in, in terms of, you know, improving the growth profile. And then you've also talked about Fincentric as, as one that you're thinking about divesting. And is there anything else in MI that you're looking at from a portfolio perspective?
Well, we haven't given any additional numbers yet about the impact, except that Fincentric and Visible Alpha are quite similar in size, so it has, it's not changing our growth profile or our guidance for the year. But the importance of Visible Alpha is that it's a tool that probably everybody in this room uses, and everybody listening to this call uses, because it is the best source of information about estimates. It's over 180 organizations that provide detailed models, which can be used for estimates and many other uses as well.
The technology is quite good. And so think about that as the type of additive, very small tuck-in that we can do that continues to upgrade and really add value into what we provide at S&P Global Market Intelligence. If there's something that isn't necessarily fitting very well, or it's not adding value, and in particular, if it's something that's managed very separately, that's the kind of a candidate profile that we might look at for a divestiture.
Okay. Okay, let's talk about commodities. You know, so you've mentioned that energy transition and sustainability is something that you're personally spending a lot of time on. So would love to hear, you know, what are your learnings? What are your conversations like with the various stakeholders? And, you know, can you sustain the strong growth that you've seen in the business? And, you know, what are the biggest opportunities there?
Well, first of all, the merger of the two businesses created, as I mentioned earlier, a combination of price benchmarks, research, news, analytics, conferences, something that covers the entire gamut of commodities. Originally, people think of us as energy, oil and gas, but we're much, much more, much broader than just oil and gas. It's also metals, mining, agriculture, et cetera. And within the energy space, it's not just oil and gas, it's all types of energy sources as well as renewables. So we have all of the different types sources of information covering the entire gamut of energy. And right now, a lot of the biggest growth comes from energy transition. It's things like the metals, which are gonna be used for renewables. It's the carbon attribution.
It's carbon ability to understand what's the amount of carbon that is used in this oil or barrel of oil once it gets to a refinery. People are really interested in that, what's called the carbon intensity. So there's a lot of opportunities for us to continue to grow with the energy transition and spend time on that. Now, the reason I'm interested in energy transition isn't just because of how important it is for the Commodity Insights business. It's actually important for all of our businesses.
It's one of the fastest growing areas within all of the businesses, within ratings and Market Intelligence, is also other things we put within the Sustainable1 purview, which means that there's people that are using information about the energy transition, about carbon attribution in the financial institutions and corporations to make decisions about their own energy transition. So we can provide them that data. It's not all just coming from Commodity Insights. So I think we have a really strong portfolio of sustainability and energy transition information across the entire organization, and a lot of the most important, especially unique information, comes from Commodity Insights.
Yeah. Okay. Okay, and then just, you know, on the index side, like, growth has been pretty strong. You've talked about, you know, the company's unique abilities around having, you know, equity, fixed income, and, you know, commodities data. How are you leveraging this? And, you know, how would you characterize that index opportunity from here?
Yeah, the index opportunity, we knew many, many years ago that there would be a shift towards fixed income and credit, that that asset class was gonna change its characteristics of liquidity and trading, and there would be some opportunities to have more index, index products around that area. So that was one of the most important aspects of the IHS merger, was getting iBoxx and, and iTraxx, et cetera, and the credit and the fixed income indices as part of S&P Global.
Some of our earliest wins after the merger were things like the fixed income products merged together with equity products as multi-asset class solutions for the insurance industry. As people think about the retirement and the new wealth that's being created in new generations that have a different kind of a horizon, we found that there's a lot of opportunities there. And we've also found opportunities taking something like VIX and applying VIX to credit VIX, not just equity VIX, but credit VIX.
So we were able to move very quickly with new products and new services in the index business. But overall, I'm excited about the business because we start with an incredibly strong position with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones as two of our most important indices. We also have a really strong relationship with the exchanges in Chicago that have a foundational hedging and forward and futures operations that use our intellectual property.
And then we have a data business which is growing and has a lot of opportunities, data and custom indices. So when I look across the entire panorama of the index business, it's one that I'm very optimistic about our growth. And going back to your question you didn't ask yet about the 2022 guidance that we gave, we're also on track for that as well.
Yeah. And, you know, some of your competitors have, you know, talked about issues with, you know, whether it's cancellations or just, you know, fee pressure with asset managers, things like that. Has that impacted your business? It seems like it may not have impacted your business as much. Perhaps talk about some of those.
Yeah, the fee, we don't think the pressure on fees is ever gonna go away, right? It's something that's there. It's just a constant of any business that you have where you're gonna be working with large organizations. They're always gonna be looking themselves how to be more productive and more efficient. So we believe that the most important aspect of being able to counter fee pressure is to provide high-quality, responsive service, ahead of technology, make sure that we can co-market. Our brand is so strong. The S&P Global brand overall is one of the strongest financial brands there is, and the S&P 500 is one of the strongest brands within the asset management industry. And so there's ways that we can work with people when it comes to fees, where we'll co-market with you.
We'll provide ways that we're gonna improve or update different types of technology delivery, things like that. So we know that the fee issue is one that's important, but the counter is that we're always gonna be improving our services, being more responsive, being more innovative, and that's one of the biggest counters to that, is in maybe there's fee pressure, but you grow the market share, or you get a whole new set of volume, it counteracts some of the fee pressure.
Okay. Okay, and then just on, you know, on the mobility business, there's obviously been some speculation in the media. Obviously, you can't comment on that, but just curious, sort of how do you think about, you know, the mobility business? Is it an attractive business from your perspective? How well does it fit with S&P Global? Sort of what are some of the opportunities and challenges there?
Yeah, the mobility business is an incredibly attractive business. There's no other business that's really that combination of capabilities in the market right now, especially one that's owned by a publicly traded company. A lot of the other mobility-type businesses are owned privately. They're not in the public market. So we do provide a benchmark for that mobility sector because it's part of S&P Global. But we have a combination of services that provide information about the supply chain, about the future of the automotive industry, long-term forecasting, short-term forecasting. If you go to an OEM or a supplier, they depend on our information to make decisions about what they're gonna buy and what they're gonna build, and how they're forecasting what's happening going forward. And think about the industry itself. This is another industry that's going through a massive transformation.
You're seeing this shift towards electric vehicles as well as autonomous mobility, and we're on the forefront of that. We're on the cutting edge of providing the data and analytics and research that people need to make decisions around that. So that in that sense, it's a great fit for S&P Global. A fundamental data business that uses insights for people to make informed decisions about investments, short-term and long-term. It's a perfect fit for S&P Global. On top of that, it's a business that's benefiting from the recent investments we've been making. We've been making investments in technology, in marketing, in sales, in how we're going to think about some of the businesses. We recently did an acquisition, a company called Market Scan. Within the mobility business . Let's go to the individual level. We had information about what somebody would buy, and when they would buy it, and what they would buy, but not what they would pay.
And so we had the information for dealers and for the OEMs about the markets, about what people, everything about a car except for how much they pay. So Market Scan filled in that hole, and all of a sudden, we have a complete picture of the consumer markets about how people are gonna behave. And so this is a way that we've been able to strengthen the business, make it much stronger. It's a really unique business, and one that's very exciting within S&P Global.
Great. Great. And then, look, I know you're in the midst of looking for a permanent CFO. I imagine there's no shortage of candidates who want to be CFO of S&P Global. But I'm curious from your perspective, you know, what type of a person are you looking for who would complement the team? What are some of the challenges that you wanna address? Sort of any perspective on that.
Yeah. So first of all, we're excited about the candidates we're seeing and the, and the strength of the proposition. But clearly, we want table stakes is, is somebody who there's no question about they're great at finance, so that's just table stakes. We're also looking, c an you imagine what it's like to join a company that just did a big, successful merger a couple of years ago? This is an opportunity for the next round of strategy, the next big thinking. So this is somebody whose table stakes is finance, it's about growth, it's about strategy, and then it's about being a great leader. So those are the things that we're looking for.
Yeah. Yeah. And then just curious on, you know, obviously, you've just finished a big transformative deal in terms of finished and integrating that big deal. For the most part, what is your outlook for potential M&A, like, should we be expecting, you know, maybe more tuck-ins? What type of things are you, are you focused on, or anything larger?
Yeah, well, first of all, i f there's things going on in the market, we like to be informed. That doesn't mean that we bid on everything or look at everything. It's just important that, given our size and given what we do, we need to be close to what's happening in the markets. But something like, I mentioned, Visible Alpha, that was almost like a no-brainer for us. And if you go back to the themes that you've heard me discuss: energy transition, private markets, the broader sustainability themes, fixed income indices.
We didn't talk about the growth in Asia and emerging markets, but these are the sorts of themes that, that we would be looking at. We're not in the market for transformative mergers, so let me take that off the table. That's not something that we're looking for right now. We still have some of our own deal to complete. But generally speaking, our excitement would be to fill in little gaps here and there that would allow us to be even more competitive.
Great. Well, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Thank you very much. It was great to be here. Thank you.