Okay, we'll get started here. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the final day of the SDC. Our first session here will be with S&P Global. I'm very pleased to once again welcome back Doug Peterson.
Thank you.
President and CEO of S&P Global. Welcome back, Doug, and thank you very much, as always, for-
Thank you, Christian. It's great to be here today. Thank you.
Fantastic. So I thought we'd just maybe start a big picture and talk about the macro backdrop. Your business touches so many different end markets, financials, energies, autos, et cetera. Can you just briefly talk through how you're viewing the macro backdrop and any implications for your business?
Well, well, let me start. First of all, thank you for having us here today, and it's great to see everyone. When we think about the macro backdrop, let's take one step back for a second and discuss how important it is that we're involved in that macro backdrop and that we see so many tailwinds coming out of it. Right now, clearly, there's a lot of volatility in the market. There's a couple of wars. There's a lot of questions about interest rates, but we're watching interest rates quite closely, and because of these big macro trends, they're impacting things like the sustainability environment, what's happening with the energy transition. We see private markets starting to have an influence in how markets are coming together. There's much more of a flattening of the markets.
Within the backdrop, we expect our house view is that interest rates in the U.S. will be decreased one time, 25 basis points in the Q4 . Our original outlook was for three times this year, starting in June. But growth is strong, which is actually quite good for our business. Overall, when you see growth, that's good for our business. But some of the volatility in the capital markets and the banking sector does create some headwinds for us here and there. But overall, with the longer-term trends, we're seeing a lot of tailwinds, and we feel quite optimistic about our business mix, what we've put together and how we've been executing.
Great. Can we dig into the ratings business? I know it's a smaller part of the business to be a much more diversified firm, but I'd just love to dig in a little bit here. Very robust start to the year in terms of issuance across most asset classes. But it does feel like we're seeing a bit of a slowdown in issuance trend over recent weeks. Maybe any thoughts on what you're hearing from issuers so far in the Q2 , and how you're thinking about your full year expectations?
Well, let me start there. With our full year expectations, we're still with the exact same guidance that we had at our earnings call, which is that we think bond issuance will be in a range of 6%-10%, and that our growth will be 7%-9%. We had a very strong Q1 , as all of you know, a 29% top-line growth in the ratings business. We've seen very robust issuance in April. May has had robust issuance in non-investment grade, as well as bank loans and some structured areas. Investment grade dropped a lot. That slowed down a lot during the quarter.
When we look to the full year, we expect that there has been pull forward into the Q1 and the Q2 from the second half of the year, maybe a little bit from 2025. But when we take a longer look, we see a very robust refinancing schedule that's gonna be coming up in 2025, 2026, 2027, 2028. We'll publish that in our Q2 earnings. We'll give you the full schedule of what we see on balance sheets that would be refinanced over the next three or four years. But let me make one more comment on this. We look at ratings in a way that there are key drivers of the business. I talked about one, which is the given pipeline. What we know is already coming up over the next few years.
Probably the most important driver is economic growth, GDP growth, and that's what drives issuance. People that want to build businesses, grow businesses, do M&A, that's when our business grows, and we grow along with economic growth. Then if you look at interest rates and spreads, that impacts much more timing than necessarily, the issuance itself, the trends, but we do think economic growth is the most important factor that we have to watch.
Just digging into the pull forward comments you made, so you sometimes like me, the back half will be slower than the first half. But how does that inform maybe the next couple of years? Not looking for, like, an exact guidance, but some of the pull forward from 2025 and 2026 coming to this year, and that means it's a little bit weaker or-
Maybe not necessarily, because the pipeline into 2025 and 2026 is still very strong, even with a little bit of pull forward. And we do expect that there will be growth. The way we're looking at this, I mentioned the 25 basis points this year before. We're still expecting a soft landing, not a recession, so we still expect the U.S. economy to grow. We see that Europe and both the U.K. and Europe are going to be lowering their interest rates as well this year, probably faster than the U.S., and they're also still on a growth track as well, not a recessionary track. We also see in Europe that capital markets are becoming much more important than the banking market. For many years, and the ECB had a program called the LTRO.
It was a short term and a long-term liquidity provision for banks, and they're using that to fund loans instead of going to capital markets with their clients. We see more and more capital markets activity in Europe as well. So we think that this approach to the next few years is it's a quite strong pipeline and as, as well as economic conditions, it should favor a longer-term view. And we're, and we're still sticking with the guidance that we gave in, in 2022 for our longer-term guidance.
I like your comments on Europe and, you know, debt market penetration there, so let's dig into that topic a little bit. Broadly speaking, what are you seeing in terms of global debt market penetration? Obviously, the US has always been much stronger than other regions, but I'd love you to walk through what you're seeing in the US, maybe a little bit more Europe and Asia.
Yeah. In the U.S., it—depending on which metrics you use, they're somewhere about 65%-70% of corporate financing is done in the capital markets. There's—the private markets, which have been growing the last few years, is part of that. I consider that part of that non-banking market, so to speak. And then in Europe, it's been flipped the other way around. It's only about 33%, 35% of the capital market is—of the corporate market is done through capital markets and bond markets. And Asia, with the exception of Japan, is even lower than that, and then Japan is similar to Europe, around 35% of the corporate financing is done in the capital markets.
So the more that starts moving towards bond markets, we benefit it from that, not just in the ratings business, but across all of our businesses, because the bond market also attracts information services for market intelligence. It's also going to help get more, more public, opportunities for our index business. So we see benefits across all of the, especially our capital markets businesses, the more you move from being a banking market to a capital market.
Okay. What about in non-corporate debt? Are you also seeing that transformation? So clearly in the corporate markets, we're seeing, well, capital markets, debt markets, penetrate further, but what about non-corporate debt, auto, credit card?
Yeah, so things like securitization. We see that securitization is a tool that's very important in the United States. It's increasingly so in Europe, and it's the tool that banks and corporates use to manage their balance sheet. Going back to one of your earlier questions about what we've seen in the first part of this year, especially in the Q1 , a little bit into April, there was an incredible amount of bank issuance. This is investment grade issuance. It's long-term capital for the banks. There's some rules have been coming in for the financial institutions to have what would be considered TLAC or some sort of loss-absorbing capital. And so the financial institutions did a lot of issuance to get that loss-absorbing capital.
But one of the other tools that they use to manage their balance sheet, in addition to raising capital and loss-absorbing capital, is securitizations. It frees up liquidity, it frees up capital, and so the banks have been quite active this year going into CLOs. And one of the other things, we've talked about the private markets the last couple of years, how important the private credit markets has become. They're also doing a lot of CLOs and a lot of issuance through securitization. So securitization is a critical part of our business. It's one of the most important capabilities we have.
Okay. Let me step back a little bit and try and get maybe a long-term view of how you're thinking about the business, the ratings business. Where do you think we are in the issuance cycle, if you like? Obviously, a boom in 2021, a little bit of a slowdown, 2022, 2023. Are we early in this, in recovery? How are you-
We're well on the way to the recovery. If I use 2019 as a benchmark, kind of a trend line, we had a huge uptick in 2020, 2021. There was this, the COVID period, where at one point at a conference like this, I made a comment that if you're a CFO and you haven't raised debt yet, you know, what are you doing? It was... The capital was so cheap, interest rates were incredibly low. You also had spreads were low. It was, it was all-time the cheapest capital we've ever seen. In addition, there was a lot of risk in the, in the economy, and people - nobody's getting criticized if you were a CFO and you had a lot of debt on your balance sheet, a lot of, you know, a lot of cash, a lot.
Maybe sometimes you get criticized for that, but not then. So we saw a huge peak, and then there was a big drop in 2022. We see that we're getting close back to that 2019 trend line, especially with the strong start to this year.
Great stuff. One of the questions I often get is if, if you look back over the last 15 years, it's been great time for the issuance markets, very low rates, et cetera. And I guess the implicit assumption in the guidance is that we should have similar growth going forward. How do you square just the fact that we have we should be, you know, high inflationary, high rate environment, and yet we expect the same or similar levels of growth going forward?
Yeah, if I go back pre-zero interest rate environment, we had the exact same environment we're going into. We've had a little bit of a blip the last couple of years with very high interest rates and high inflation, but as we settle back into inflation in the 2% range globally in the U.S., the UK, Japan is below that already. We settle down into interest rates, 10-year rates in the 2%-4% range, spreads will be part of the equation. But that's a normal operating environment. And if companies can price along that level, they can see economic growth. It doesn't phase us. What phases me is much more when you get into interest rates in the 5, 6, 7, 8% range, and you get higher inflation. That's much more destabilizing.
But as we see that we're going to get back down into a normalized level of interest rates, companies are already starting to issue into that environment. You know, people are saying, "Well, companies ever issue debt, expensive debt again?" Well, now, it's not so expensive anymore when you see strong growth and you see interest rates at a level that are starting to come down. So that environment doesn't actually concern me at all. I felt like the 10+ years of 0 interest rates was really the aberration.
Okay. Let's talk about a competitive landscape, which is not a question that comes up a lot because I think it's fairly obvious, a duopoly, in that business. But do you think there's any differentiation in the ratings business versus your main competitor?
Well, there's more than just one competitor. There are other players in the market. It's, there are some niche players, there's a couple of other larger players, there's regional players. And what's most important for us is we're global and we cover every asset class. When people think about S&P Global Ratings, they need to understand that we're rating everything that's in the markets everywhere in the world. So we're in Latin America, we're in Asia, we're rating the Middle East, we've got African ratings, we've got a team in Johannesburg. We recently did some acquisitions in Indonesia, in Thailand, and say, "Well, why are you doing these acquisitions?" Because people that are in the bond market, risk markets, want to know that if you're looking at an automotive company, a beer company, a...
bank and insurance company, that anywhere in the world, we're gonna be rating that type of corporation, those sorts of sovereigns, those municipal entities, and we're gonna be rating in local rating scales, international rating scales. It gives us the ability to have a benchmark that people can use anywhere in the world and know that it's done in the same way. So our differentiation is we cover all asset classes, and we're global. That is really critical to our business.
Okay. I guess one area of, I would say, ratings business, where there's, you know, the competition is more pronounced is structured products. And it's an area where at least just based on disclosed revenues, it looks like the competitor has a little bit bigger revenue base than S&P. Can you talk about the competitive dynamics in structured products, and capability set and sort of any opportunities to close gaps?
Yeah. The way that the structured finance market is driven is by outcomes, and we have criteria which is set by analysts who are looking at very long-term trends of what has been the credit trends. They build that criteria, we stick by it, and we can see over time the quality of the criteria, the quality of the outcomes of that criteria. We see an increase in demand from investors to have our ratings on new structured products because they know that the outcomes from our ratings have been very reliable. There also is a very competitive dynamic in the market beyond just the larger rating agency. This is the area where the smaller ones have made the most inroads, has been in the structured products.
Let's talk quickly about some opportunities. I think one of the more prevalent one is the private credit markets, which you guys have taken advantage of. We're hearing quite a few of the alternative investment managers here today talk over the last couple of days about expanding into different parts of fixed income. So can you just talk about the product roadmap in private credit and where you see the next leg of growth?
Yeah. Let me go back to 2022 and give a quick comment about private credit. In 2022, interest rates started going up very fast. Inflation was high. The Fed started increasing interest rates. If you look at the chart of those increases, it looks like a stepladder. It just went straight up and got to about 5.5% very quickly. And in that environment, what's happened with the fixed income investors? They all pulled their capital out. That not only did they pull out new capital, they also took a lot of bonds off the table because who wants to be buying bonds when rates are going up? The private credit players, especially the large ones that were very well established in mid-market credit, they filled that gap for large cap that needed to raise financing.
So in 2022, we saw really the boom of private credit. That's when. It's been around a long time, it wasn't anything new, but that's when everybody stood up and noticed this private credit world has a lot of clout. They can move with speed. They've got a lot of liquidity. It's become a large pool of asset. So we have a couple of opportunities here with the private credit. One is that the private credit players themselves, they need estimates on credit risk. They need portfolio reviews. As they syndicate or securitize their portfolio, they need ratings. So there's been a lot of benefits for the ratings business as we saw, in a way, kind of delayed revenue, I used to call it.
And that revenue pool has started coming out with the services we can provide to the private credit players from the ratings business. But in the market intelligence business, we have tools that are used by both the investors and the asset managers for reference pricing, for also different types of risk analytics, portfolio analysis. We've got a tool which allows you to have a ability to look across a portfolio, to have pricing for the GP and for the LP. It's called iLevel. So we find that the private credit area and private markets generally is a high growth area for us. It grew 15% last quarter, it grew 30% in the ratings business, and it grew 15% across the entire firm. So it's one of our priorities for investment.
Fantastic. Let me switch to about the market intelligence business. Just before that, just a quick note for the audience, if you want to ask a question, feel free to use the Pigeonhole system, and I'll get it to Doug if we have time. On market intelligence, I'd say the last couple of years have been bit of a down cycle for the industry as a whole. Actually, business has actually been not too bad. I'd be curious what you hear customers now, and kind of when do you expect the industry volume to look higher and your particular revenues to start to get towards your long-term targets?
Yeah. Our target for this year is 6%-7.5% growth rate in market intelligence. When we look at the business the last few years, there's clearly been a lot of consolidation in the banking market. There's been some cost cutting. So we've seen some of that, what we were calling some headwinds, as well as some slowing down of the sales cycle the last couple of years. All of that's been reflected in our guidance and what we've seen so far. But when I take a look at our market intelligence business, there's a couple aspects. First of all, the business itself is diversified. We have credit risk, we have enterprise solutions, we've got the desktop, we have a data and analytics business.
So we've got a diversified type of different businesses within market intelligence. And then the other is that we're diversified in types of clients. We're not dependent only on financial institutions. More than half of our business is financial institutions, but it's also buy side and sell side. We also have corporate clients, we have governments, we have regulators, we have academics, and we're seeing a lot of growth in the corporate sector. In fact, after the IHS Markit merger, one of the fastest growth vectors for our synergies was cross-sell into corporate clients of market intelligence. So we do feel like we've diversified product set, diversified client set, we've been investing for growth. And then the themes I talked about before, sustainability and private markets, supply chain analytics, these are things that benefit tremendously the market intelligence business.
And are you getting change in tone in terms of the customer base that, it would indicate, maybe stronger trends over the next?
I think that we're not necessarily where we've finished some of the slower sales cycles, some of the slower approach negotiations. We think that that's gonna continue. But on the other hand, we do think that we're seeing a lot of that consolidation and the banks coming up with final decisions about vendor packages, et cetera. That's gonna have to come to an end soon because there's not many banks left that we have to negotiate with.
Okay. Maybe longer term on that business, and again, the question I often get from investors is: How do you think about— I think your long-term targets are more like 7%-9%, which is a, you know, fairly robust top-line growth target. How do you think that can sustain over time, sell it into, call it slower growth end market, like natural services?
This is through choosing the areas, like I mentioned, the private markets business grew 15%, our sustainability business grew 15% last quarter. This is by ensuring that we're also drafting into the most important opportunities, the most important new areas for investment in market intelligence. We've got the capabilities to already add in new services and new products, as well as develop them ourselves. So this is gonna be one of the areas. Now, let me mention something that we recently closed. This is Visible Alpha. And Visible Alpha was a business that was owned by 12 banks. It was a business that probably many of you in this room use.
I know that you've been a user over time, and something that people really appreciate having this consensus of estimates of over up to 180 different institutions that are providing their data into this estimates business. The technology is high quality, so we bought this business to continue to manage on its own, as well as to add it to something that's almost like a must-have service as part of CapIQ. So your question about how are we gonna grow, we're gonna be looking forward to see what are the trends, what are the areas we're gonna move quickly into, and we have that innovation gene inside of the business. It's quite important for us to be driving growth through innovation.
Okay. We will talk about the IHS deal, it's a couple of years now, a pretty big deal at the time. Maybe just step back here. What do you think has gone better than you thought? What do you think has gone worse than you thought?
Well, let me start with the second part.
Okay.
I don't think there's anything that's necessarily gone really bad. There were a little bit of going into closing a deal into an environment where you had that really hyperinflation hit and interest rates popping. There were a couple of businesses that maybe were a little bit more market-oriented than subscription-oriented, so we had some bumps along the way from the top line growth for a couple of quarters because of the market conditions. So there's a little bit of that in there, but the positive surprises have been many, many, outweighed anything to do with the negative surprises. And the positive surprises, most importantly, is we came together as a team very quickly. We have a strong culture.
We have a strong management team that has come together with a management approach to lead the business, to grow the business. Because of that alignment, we moved really quickly with our synergy targets. We had an original synergy target of $480 million on the expense side. We took that up to $600 million, and we've now achieved $620 million, and we stopped counting. It doesn't make sense to keep counting much more above that because it's no longer really synergies anyway. It's now the way we're running the business. But we feel like the expense synergies, we achieved them faster than our target. We achieved our target and surpassed that. On the revenue synergies, I referred to already that the cross-sell was out of the box, far exceeded anything I expected.
The S&P Global brand was really strong, and then having clients, for instance, corporate clients, was really beneficial for the market intelligence business that came that's part of the IHS Markit business. Having that sales force, having that client base, gave us a lot of really fast cross-sell. We also had a lot of cross-sell in between the clients the other way. We also had a lot of cross-sell with our energy businesses, which would be the Commodity Insights businesses. That's probably where we had some of the fastest cross-sell. Another upside has been having fixed income credit indices as part of our index business.
We see a whole new set of products and services we're providing to the insurance industry, which are really beneficial with the kind of big trends that are happening with wealth management and with retirement. So across the board, all of our deal thesis, what we called the industrial logic at the time, is playing out, and we're seeing really strong execution. And as I go back to where I started, really importantly, a great management leadership team that's come together and is very well aligned.
Okay. You know, with, with IHS, obviously, the automotive business, Mobility, as you call it now, fabulous business, really nice top-line growth trends, but it's not one that's obvious to me in terms of, your mission of, power and global markets. So, from a portfolio optimization perspective, how do you think about the Mobility business?
Well, first of all, the Mobility business is a really attractive business. It's got top-line growth. It has must-have data for the automotive sector. The automotive sector is going through incredible transformation, and it's one of those industries that we can watch, and between now and the next 10 years, we'll see what will happen with autonomous vehicles, with electric vehicles, with hydrogen, with hybrids. And we have must-have data for the supply chain, for the OEMs, for dealers, et cetera. So it's a very strong business. It has important data model. There's a lot of synergies across the group for supply chain, for sustainability, as well as how we run the business. We're always doing reviews of our portfolio, and a couple times a year, we take a step back with the board and ask the question about what does fit?
As you see, I mentioned Visible Alpha for market intelligence. We also have a very small business called Fincentric that we originally did a strategic review of. Now we're looking at divesting. But over time, you should know that we're gonna continue with the discipline we always have for the entire portfolio to make sure that it fits, and that we're gonna get the most value from it, and that we're the best owner.
Let's talk a little about innovation and maybe AI. Why not? Vitality Index, kind of measure I actually quite like a lot, and which is percentage of revenues from new products. We're about 10% of S&P. Where are you seeing the greatest source of innovation, at S&P? Long term, what do you think that number should be?
Well, we have targeted that we want 10% of our revenue growth to come from new products and new service or enhanced products, things that have been really substantially improved or updated. And we think this is important because it continues with that culture of innovation. But innovation as ideas doesn't mean anything unless you're actually delivering it, and it has impact for clients. What we do then is we identify new investments, strategic investments that we wanna make. We start tracking those. We put them into the Vitality Index, and then we wanna see what kind of growth we're getting. The last few quarters, our Vitality Index has grown 15%-18%. Or sorry, the products within that 10% have been growing at 15%-18%. So we wanna see that kind of higher growth.
It helps push the entire portfolio to have faster growth by having those new products and services. Over the last year or so, we've had products and services in the Vitality Index that are growing at that fast rate from every division. Some of them have been in energy transition and Commodity Insights. We've seen some from the index business. We've had some new indices that have really been moving fast in the automotive business, Mobility. There's some products and services where we're seeing the dealer market that have been growing very fast. We also would have in there sort of some of the things I've talked about, sustainability, private markets, et cetera. So these are the products that we're using to drive our growth.
Go back to what, you, you were asking before about why is the IHS Markit deal gone so well? It's because we have accountability, and one of the ways we have accountability as management is ensuring that we're tracking and measuring our investments in new products and services. So when we give the capital to, somebody in the company to build a new product, if it doesn't work, we pull the plug. You know, we don't want things to go on forever. But by having this intense approach to looking at the investments, ensuring that they're profitable, we can get the Vitality Index, at the same time, have accountability when something's not going along quite as well.
I was gonna ask the question in terms of how do you drive a culture of innovation around the firm? Is Vitality Index is part of compensation, and how do you make sure this is it's part of the culture?
Yeah, so the Vitality Index is part of the scorecard of the divisions and the presidents, along with Net Promoter Score, which, as you know, is a customer metric. We have some other customer metrics we use, depending on the division. But we want to make sure that we have growth, which is being driven by these capital investments, which is in the scorecard. We also want to make sure that we have customers that we're responsive to, that they're satisfied with what we're doing. We have metrics that we use. So those two are really critical to driving our performance. It's the innovation, and it's also how do our customers see us, and are they actually buying our products or services? Are they satisfied with how we're serving them?
The AI, you guys recently launched—what was interesting, S&P AI Benchmarks, which I believe is a way to assess the ability of LLMs to answer financial questions. I'm curious how you think about that as an opportunity over time. Obviously, S&P is known for benchmarks. That's a key competence. Is that something you can expand to other sectors? How do you think that opportunity is?
The proposition of the S&P Global AI Benchmarks, that you can look up on our Kensho website, is to understand that there are literally hundreds of models popping up. You know, we hear a lot about OpenAI and Anthropic. Those are probably the two most prevalent right now, but there's a lot of large language models coming up, and we decided that there should be an opportunity for people in business sector, and especially financial sector, to have a benchmark that allows them to understand what's the quality of these, of these models that are in the market. So we have 600 standardized questions which are asked of a model, and then we grade them on how accurate are the answers, what's the quality of the numeracy of the answer, because most models today don't do a very good job with numbers.
We then come up with an aggregate score, and then we rank them. You can look at how we're ranking the models right now. Right now it's free. You know, we're not getting paid anything for that. But what's really important, the secondary opportunity of that is we have an open architecture per model. We're not linked in with one single company or one single model. We have an open architecture system. We've built an approach so that we can bring models into our firewalls, and then all of the work we're doing with large language models is done inside of our firewalls, protecting our data, protecting our intellectual property. And one of the ways we know which models to use and what's the best use case for them is by the work that's being done with Kensho.
So we see this as a, it's a positive loop, and we're sharing our what we're learning with the markets through the benchmark, but then we're actually using that same information for determining which models we're gonna be using for our own R&D and our own products.
Let's talk about your cloud partnership with AWS. It was about a year ago you announced that. Can you talk about any financial payoffs that you've gotten so far, or you anticipate in the next few years from that?
When we took a step back after the merger and looked at all of our vendors, and we were already at S&P Global and at IHS Markit, both of us were on a cloud transformation. We were quite advanced in both companies, and we all had multi-cloud strategies. As we look towards the next three to five years, we're a very large client. We have a large spend as a data company, as an analytics company, we wanna make sure that we have a strong partnership with the cloud providers. And as part of that, we ended up with the strategic partnership with AWS. It's a contract that's quite large. It's over $1 billion.
Because we were already starting to negotiate related synergies for the merger, we said, "Well, let's take this beyond and not just think about the merger synergies. Let's take this beyond as, as a longer-term strategic relationship." It's a very strong relationship. We have savings that are coming through. It's already built into our guidance. It came from, from the synergies, plus the ongoing savings that we'll have. It's a strong relationship, and AWS is a really good partner. At the same time, we haven't dropped everybody else. We have a multi-cloud strategy overall. We think it's important that we have relationships across the board. It's also good for us to understand what's happening with different service providers. You know, they're also all clients as well.
So we have good relationships across the board with the technology sector and the cloud sector, as well as the AI sector we just talked about. But it's important also for us to have a really solid base of a large service provider that can give us visibility.
Okay. Let me switch over to expenses and how you think about expense management for the company. How do you balance sort of near-term expense management versus longer-term investment? I think it's a particularly important question at the moment, given AI and potential transformational sort of power that I could have. So I'm curious how you think about that.
Yeah, there's a... I'm gonna throw it into three buckets. The first bucket is our annual budgeting that we've been doing for a long time. This goes back to when I first became CEO, as we talk about positive jaws. We start out in June and July with some framework, and then by the time we get to October, we're pretty much baked with the budget for the next year, and then into the next few years, we've got a good idea of where we're headed. And one of the requirements is that you come in as a president of a business with a higher top line growth than you have lower expenses. So it's. I don't want to see people come in with an expense growth rate that's higher than their revenue growth rate. That's just the way we manage the company.
So we start there. The second bucket has to do then with investments. If somebody would say, "Well, I have some specific opportunities that I want to invest in," we then have this program with strategic capital allocation, and we will have a certain amount. It's usually, and you know this because it's- we talk about it, about $125 million a year that we allocate. It's part of the expenses, but we allocate that to new innovation opportunities that get built into the budget. And we're able to keep positive jaws , even with that $125 million that we distribute to different businesses. And many of our innovation that we just talked about in the, in the innovation index, the, is, is really part of- is part of coming out of those investments.
So think about the first one is how we manage a budget, the second is allocating capital. The third is, as you know, we generate a substantial free cash flow, and we have a guideline that we're gonna return 85% of that to our shareholders through stock buybacks and through dividends. So that leaves 15%, which is up for acquisitions or other types of capital usage, and we try to find the best uses for that, $600 million, more or less, this year. Many years, we're returning more than 100% of our capital because we didn't have a good use for that. Other years, we returned maybe a little bit less than the 85%. It used to be 75%.
But the approach is, that's the third lever for growth capital, is we have that already available. It's something that's in our targets. We don't use it, but it's the third area for investment. It's how can we do acquisitions or tie-ins or things like that.
On the sort of like, incremental capital investment spend, are you seeing more pressure from your heads of businesses coming in and asking for bigger budget, again, given some of the transformation technologies that we have out here?
Oh, that's nothing new. That's all. Everybody always wants more capital than we have, which is one of the fun things about my job, is to try to make sure that we find the best opportunities for that investment. So there's always more ask than we have capital available.
Okay. A question on your management style. The company has grown tremendously under your leadership, 10-11 years as CEO. How has your leadership evolved over that time? And then when you think about picking new leaders for the firm, what, what are you, what are you looking for in those leaders?
So first of all, if you— It's interesting to ask about how things have evolved over 10-11 years as a CEO. There's things that have not changed at all. My belief in it's important to have a strategy and a vision. The quality of your team is critical. Having core values in the company. Our core values are integrity, integrity, partnership, and discovery. Those sorts of things haven't changed at all. I have belief in those. I've mentioned accountability before. So there's certain core aspects to how I lead and what I've admired in other leaders that I've tried to incorporate in the way that I lead the company. But one thing that's changed a little bit is how I spend my time.... As a very new CEO, I wasn't quite probably well prepared of what it meant to be a CEO.
I spent a lot of time in maybe the wrong places. I now spend most of my time with clients and people and shareholders. Those are the three areas I spend the most time with. It's important that I do that. I spend less time with bankers and consultants. At the beginning, I probably spent too much time with bankers and consultants, and-
Well, you were a banker first.
Yeah, I was a banker, so I knew all the bankers; they all were calling on me. But it's something that's important for me, how I spend my time, so that's been kind of a shift. To your question about talent and leadership in the organization, we have an approach to thinking about succession for all of our leadership positions. It's important from the board into the management team that we always think about succession, but the way we think about succession is through development. So we invest in our people through coaching, through leadership programs, through training programs, ensuring that people are getting to build a network across the company.
I really like it when we can bring a group of leaders together that spend time to get to know each other, but also we push them on how they're gonna learn and be better leaders and know their business better. So this, this approach to development is something that's critical to me. When I talk about people, I also think about growing leaders and growing people and allowing them to reach their full potential.
Okay. I just received a question from the audience. It's around sort of pricing in the ratings business. How do you think about the opportunity to, you know, maybe take more price in rating?
Well, first of all, when we think about pricing in the ratings business, it's always been based on somewhere around what's happening with inflation or general economic growth. That's always been the foundation of what we've done in the business. In addition, across all of our businesses, this is just ratings. We have a philosophy that pricing is allowed or driven by the quality of what we provide. If we provide the same old service every year, a tired service that's not being updated and upgraded, that doesn't have new features, new technology, new quality upgrades. If it doesn't have something where we're providing the best service and the most responsive service available, we can't price. So we've got to start with the philosophy that we're not going out to try to price.
We're going out to try to wow our clients and have them see our products as something that they must have. When you get to that, you get a virtuous cycle, and you're able to get the pricing. Pricing follows excellent service and really satisfied customers, so that's how we think about pricing.
Okay. The last one for me, the stock has obviously been tremendous over your over your tenure, but I'll say over recently, maybe lagged a little bit or at least been somewhat stagnant. Curious what you're hearing from investors and any plans to address them?
Yeah, so first of all, there is, there's potentially a little bit of wait and see after a deal this big. People sometimes see a company do a very large merger, and they say: "Well, let's wait and see. Do they actually deliver the synergies?" Which we have checked that box. Do we put in place great leadership? Check that box. Have we made some important bold moves? We started doing some of those. As you've seen, a couple very small acquisitions, a couple of small divestitures. So there's some questions that always come along with a large merger, and so I think that could be one of the areas we do hear from many people in this room when we meet with them. They're saying what's...
They're, they're pleased with what they're seeing, but they want to see a little bit more. So that's one of the areas. And then you started off your questions about a little bit about what's been the cycle in the financial services sector recently, a little bit, slower sales cycle, et cetera. So there might be some people that have taken a step back at that. But when I go back to what we're hearing from investors, there's a lot of enthusiasm, especially when you look at the long run.
When you look at the biggest trends that are taking place in the financial markets and the corporate sector, having to do with artificial intelligence, with private markets, with sustainability, with supply chain analytics, with globalization of markets, with the flattening of markets, every single one of those trends is something that we have huge benefits and we play into. We're well positioned for them, and that's the way I think about the company. You know, I'm not looking at next quarter and even the rest of this year. Obviously, we deliver. That's one of the hallmarks of our company, is that we do deliver. But what's more important to me is the way we position ourselves for the long run.
Fantastic. I think we'll end it there. Thank you very much, Doug.
Great. Thanks, Christian. Thanks for having me.