Thank you very much for hosting, Wahid. It's great to be here.
To start things off, you know, within the information services space, we're asking most of our companies roughly the same question. AI and proprietary data has been a debate across the info services group, whether companies have a walled off proprietary data versus having an ecosystem of partner networks. Management has been pretty clear that S&P maintains strict control of its commercial relationships and does not allow LLM providers to train their foundation models on S&P data. As foundation models become increasingly commoditized, how do you ensure S&P's proprietary data remains a competitive moat? How are you defending against the rise of synthetic financial data?
Yeah. Wahid, this is a really important point, and we know it's top of mind for shareholders as well. When we look across the ecosystem at S&P Global, I think one of the things that brings us a great deal of comfort is just the understanding that so much of our business is really built on storied benchmarks that really don't exist outside of our walls, right? We've talked about this a little bit publicly. If you go back to our Investor Day, we put a slide up that kind of shows how much of our revenue is coming from various sources, and about two-thirds of that revenue is tied to our benchmarks business. That's ratings, indices, Platts commodities, prices in our energy division, and the distribution of that proprietary content. That's our owned intellectual property.
There's no other source in the world for that data. While we've said that's about two-thirds of the revenue, it's actually more than three quarters of our operating profit. That huge swath of value that we provide for the markets is unique to S&P Global. There's no other source for that in the world. When we look across the strategy that we have for businesses like market intelligence, one of the things we flagged at our Investor Day was that it's not enough to just assume that the world is going to continue operating the way that it always has, right?
There will be an evolution of the way customers interact with our data, the way customers interact with our products, and we want to make sure that the strategy we're executing allows for S&P Global to create meaningful value for customers no matter how this winds up playing out, right? We're embedding AI functionality in our products. You saw us do that with ChatIQ, Chart Explainer, Document Intelligence, all within the S&P Capital IQ Pro ecosystem. You've seen us do that with the launch of the automated data ingestion tool in iLEVEL. Really bringing AI functionality into our products is certainly a big part of the strategy. To your point as well, having that flexible delivery is also a really important part of the strategy, where we can partner with and collaborate with these LLM providers.
You've seen us launch Claude for Financial Services, with openai. we have collaborations with Microsoft Copilot, with Gemini Enterprise from Google, right? We're very platform-agnostic, but I think for us, there are two very, very important restrictions on those collaborations that would essentially be deal breakers for us, right? One, that you brought up is that we maintain strict control of the commercial conditions, right? Every customer that wants to access our data through these LLM providers has to have a contract with S&P Global on S&P Global paper. We control the pricing, the renewals, all of that, and so the disintermediation risk really isn't there. The other piece of it is that we have to maintain complete control of the data, so our data stays on our servers.
The MCP connector allows these ecosystems to send prompts and queries over into our ecosystem, but because of the Kensho grounding agent, our proprietary data retrieval agents, and our Kensho LLM-ready APIs, we actually have very, very strict control even over how many lines of data can cross over at any given time into an LLM ecosystem. So not just protecting our data, but making sure that things are structured in a way that our data creates more meaningful value for our customers, whether they're accessing that through our platforms or through our collaborations with the LLM providers. I think that puts us at a pretty significant advantage going forward, where we have that flexible delivery and that massive trove of truly proprietary-owned intellectual property.
Great. Just wanna touch a little bit more on some of the MCP connector comment that you made. Anthropic recently announced a suite of solutions, and S&P Global came up with a plugin. The collaboration with Anthropic has been something we've been aware of for some time now. Can you expand on how the collaboration with these frontier AI labs have changed the adoption of your data? What feedback has been from those who have been using it thus far?
Yeah. I'll start by saying it's very early in a lot of these. A lot of our customers have a great deal of interest in exploring this new functionality, these new platforms, but particularly in highly complex and regulated industries, there are a lot of hoops that people have to go through just from a compliance and an infrastructure cybersecurity standpoint just to get access to some of these tools. We do have quite a few customers that are actively using them right now, right? We mentioned this at a prior conference, but we've got about 80 customers right now leveraging the MCP connectors, and we're seeing strong usage there. I think we're getting very positive feedback from our customers. We're also getting very positive feedback from our collaborators, right?
The LLM providers of the world as well, where they see us as truly collaborative, where it's not enough to just say the data's available. It has to be readily available. The MCP connectors have to work, right? You have to have the data coming over in a way where it's trusted, it's truly grounded, it's, the sources are citable. These ecosystems function very, very well with S&P Global data because of all of the work that we've done through Kensho and through other avenues to get that data in a place where it's truly ingestible and functions well in these ecosystems. When we look at the energy business, where we've had the Copilot, Microsoft Copilot integration a little bit longer, we launched that in April of last year.
We've got 60 customers that are leveraging that, and we've seen revenue growth in those customers at twice the rate of the average energy customer, and we've seen retention rates 4 percentage points higher with those customers. We know that when we make this data or our proprietary content available to our customers through these ecosystems, they get more value out of it, right? We're seeing that in the usage. We're seeing that in the feedback we get from customers. It's probably too early to really say how this plays out in the long run, but I think the early indicators that we're getting from customers are very positive.
Awesome. Let's switch a little bit to the profitability component. Within the AI debate for info services companies, investors are focused on the potential for profitability improvements related to labor, process, and tech expenses. It's clear that AI is a powerful cost-containment engine for S&P right now, and management has cited specific opportunities within the Enterprise Data Office and software development over the next few years. Looking ahead, when do you think we hit the inflection point where net new AI product revenue overtakes cost savings as a driver for earnings growth?
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I would start by saying I'm not sure that it does, right? When you look at the opportunities for AI-driven productivity, when we have, you know, roughly two-thirds of our cost basis is, you know, people-related, and we have huge populations of people that we can, by leveraging AI functionality, make these people significantly more productive, help them get engaged in higher-order work, right, more fulfilling work. Not only does that improve just the quality of life for our people, but it improves the productivity and efficiency of the company. We did mention the Enterprise Data Office.
We actually expect to reduce expenses in the Enterprise Data Office by about 20% by the end of next year partially through the application of AI tools, but also through just general span and layer analysis and productivity work that we expect to do there, right? I do think that the opportunities span both sides of the P&L, right? As we leverage more AI functionality within our products, we think our competitive position improves, retention rates improve, pricing power improves. As we leverage more of our data through LLM providers like Claude for Financial Services or GPTs or others, those are opportunities for us to expand the addressable market, really allow our data to be consumable by customers that may not have been interested in some of the other products that we have, right?
We know there are segments of the market where a full-blown CapIQ license is gonna be overkill for those individuals. Leveraging some of our content through Claude for Financial Services or OpenAI solutions or Microsoft Copilot, right, that may be a very attractive entry point for some of those customers. We think this ultimately does expand our addressable market. The revenue opportunities are there for sure. The expense opportunities are too. I'm a little wary of, you know, some of the numbers that we've seen thrown around in the market too, just because we know internally there's a lot of judgment and flexibility around what you define as AI-related revenue. Right?
We have AI functionality in CapIQ. That doesn't necessarily mean that 100% of CapIQ revenue should be AI revenue. We have AI functionality in iLEVEL, right, in a lot of our tools and products across the ecosystem, right? The idea of assigning the AI label to revenue streams, I think is something that we're taking a very, very strict and prudent approach to. On the expense side, it's pretty clear, right? It's very easy to see when we deploy standardized AI-developed tools, where we're able to pull millions of dollars of expense out of our software development community just by standardizing on tools, right?
That's something we did in the back half of last year. It's a lot easier to acknowledge and very clearly allocate those cost savings to some of the AI functionality that we've embedded. In the long run, I think you're gonna see benefits on both sides of the P&L. Which side winds up being the bigger benefit, I think only time will tell.
Okay. There are debates on whether AI efficiency gains stick around or eventually get competed away. How confident is the team that AI-driven savings will drop to the bottom line for shareholders rather than being passed back to clients?
Yeah. I think the areas where we're looking are really on margin expansion and then opportunity for reinvestment in product development and growth. You can point to some of these very, very important brands and products that we operate. You look at the ratings business, you look at the index business, where we have incredible value that we create for our customers, but we also have very high margins in those businesses and very high incremental margins in those businesses. When we look at this, our view is improving the productivity and the efficiency of our people, improving the productivity and efficiency of our workflows, our product development, our internal processes. That doesn't change how much value we're creating for our customers. When we price our products and services, it's always based on how much value we're creating for the customer.
In an ecosystem where it's easier for us to deliver that value, it doesn't necessarily change the value we're delivering. You've seen that materialize in the margin expansion over the last several decades within our ratings business, within our index business as well, where we've become more productive, more efficient, but you've also continued to see pricing and margin expansion in those businesses continue to flourish as well.
Awesome. Now, 15 years, going back to Investor Day, there was an overarching theme of advancing essential intelligence with the focus on expanding into high-growth adjacencies. Looking at the portfolio pending the mobility spin-off, which specific verticals, whether it be private credit, energy transition, alternative data or anything else, do you see the most needle-moving to help sustain your 7%-9% medium-term organic growth?
Yeah, I think that's an important question too, Wahid. When we look across the portfolio of businesses that we have, right, and the four divisions that we're focused on, post-mobility, ratings, market intelligence, energy division and indices, the majority of our growth is most likely to come from these major franchises that we have that continue to grow, continue to have significant runway for growth for several years, right? The ratings business will continue to grow very well. The index business, we expect to grow, you know, 10%-12% on average over the next three to five years. These are huge global franchises with immense value, both to our customers, but also to the markets at large.
You look at something like the S&P 500 that has $13 trillion of AUM indexed to it and another $7 trillion of AUM benchmarked against it at the end of 2024, right? Like, that's just the S&P 500. When we look at the strategic initiatives that we have, there are incredibly attractive opportunities for growth. Just the sheer quantum of business that we're running through these major franchises means they will likely be the biggest driver of growth going forward. When we look at private markets, we think there are incredible opportunities in private markets. We think we have arguably the most holistic set of solutions for the private markets in the world.
You look at energy expansion, where we have a leading global franchise in really anything that touches the energy industry, including the world's premier energy conference that will take place in Texas in just a few weeks, CERAWeek, right? We have these incredible opportunities in things like supply chain and decentralized finance and very high growth, but nascent opportunities for us. We think all of those are incredibly attractive, and different ones will grow at different rates at different times. We think all of those, in the long run, should be accretive to our overall growth rate.
Okay. Just switching to a different segment here. In MI, you saw a medium-term outlook of 6%-8% OCC growth. We've seen some scrutiny on financial services head count and budgets. What is driving the durability of MI's subscription growth despite broader Wall Street cost considerations?
Yeah, I think a big part of this, and a lot of credit, frankly, goes to Sally Moore and her team in the Chief Client Office, as well as Saugata Saha and his team in Market Intelligence, for just the execution that we've seen over the last year and a half, where we've been able to elevate the conversation with a lot of our customers outside of just the procurement office and really have much more broad, holistic, strategic conversations with these customers. We hear over and over and over from these customers that they want to do more from us or more with us. They want to get more from us, and they want our help actually displacing some of these point solutions in the ecosystem because vendor consolidation at these customers is a very real thing, right?
We've seen that trend over the last couple of years. That trend likely continues for several more years. Our largest customers, because of the strategic focus on both the Chief Client Office and the revenue transformation that we've talked about in Market Intelligence, really aligning with long-term strategic goals at these customers makes it easier for us to go in and help them understand just what it is that we bring to the table across the entire portfolio of products that we offer. When our customers actually see what we could be doing with them, it's very clear that there's a huge opportunity. We are confident that the growth drivers that we pointed to at Investor Day absolutely exist.
That the growth rate that we talked about at Investor Day on average over the next three to five years, we admitted very clearly at Investor Day that that assumes some market share gains, right? We expect that to continue. A lot of that is because these customers see what we can do as we engage more deeply with them, not just with their commercial and strategic teams, but even with their technology people, right? You saw us launch Kensho Labs at our Investor Day last year, where we can actually leverage the incredible expertise that sits within Kensho and let these professionals work directly with customers to help co-develop solutions that leverage S&P Global's data and workflow tools and solutions in ways that solve some of the most sophisticated and challenging problems for these customers. They want more of that, right?
Because S&P Global just has such an incredible portfolio of products and such a broad suite of solutions that we can bring to the table, it's much easier for customers to consolidate into S&P Global and allow us to kind of further those market share gains over time.
Great. We talked about private markets a bit, and we talked about MI. Just wanna combine those two with your most recent acquisition of With Intelligence. It bolstered your position in private markets, an area that's notoriously opaque. It captures a growing share of global capital. How are you integrating With Intelligence datasets to the existing iLEVEL and S&P CapIQ Pro ecosystem to help to create a seamless workflow? Beyond just cross-selling data feeds, how does the combined portfolio position S&P to become the connective tissue between private market fundraising and capital deployment?
Yeah, I love the way you phrased that question. I think we would agree this is traditionally a very opaque market that is in need of transparency, and I love that language around connective tissue, right? I think that's the strategy for us. It's not just about taking data from With Intelligence and putting it into CapIQ and calling it done, right? These are incredibly valuable datasets that are largely contributory and proprietary datasets to With Intelligence, and by extension now to S&P Global. We can leverage those datasets and combine them with private company data that we have, you know, tens of millions of entities through Entity Insights, leveraging the tools that we have through Kensho to create very interesting combined datasets that can really lead to transparency in those private markets.
With Intelligence is actually a great case study for a couple of reasons. One, as you mentioned, because it furthers our strategic initiative around private markets, but it's not gonna benefit just market intelligence, right? Market intelligence is where that business sits and where the revenue gets recognized, but as we look for ways to combine data and we look for ways to leverage the other ecosystem of partnerships that we have, like Cambridge Associates and Mercer and other solutions and data that we have access to through tools like iLEVEL, we actually have opportunities to create some very differentiated benchmarks, right? That can benefit the index business too.
We're really looking at With Intelligence the way we would look at all of our data assets and the way we'd look at really every tool we have, which is how does it benefit the enterprise as a whole, rather than focusing on just how does it benefit the P&L for one specific division? How do we create true holistic customer value, right? I think With Intelligence is gonna be a huge part of that strategy for us in private markets. The other piece that I think is important with With Intelligence is it is an excellent case study in just how quickly we can move with data integration and data processing. We actually put a case study in our earnings deck in this most recent quarter. I think it was slide 10 of the earnings deck.
You can actually look at With Intelligence and see within 25 days, we had integrated 75% of the data from With Intelligence in the CapIQ Pro platform, right? That's incredibly fast. People don't realize how challenging that is if we didn't have tools like Kensho Link and Kensho Extract, right, and Kensho NERD and these incredible tools that allow us to manage this data in very sophisticated ways and rapidly deploy data in new ecosystems like Capital IQ Pro. With Intelligence is as I mentioned, it's a key part of the private market strategy, but it is also a great example of just what we can do with data because of the functionality and the tools that we have internally.
That's amazing to hear. Now, I'll touch a bit more on private markets later on, but I just wanna switch really quickly to ratings.
Yeah.
The medium-term expectation of 6%-9% organic growth being predicated on a mounting refinancing wall, growth in global debt, along with the need for transparency in non-traditional mark-to-markets, such as private markets and emerging assets. For 2026, organic growth is a bit light from 4%-7%. Now we saw a massive pull forward in debt during 2024 and 2025 as issuers tried to front-run expected rate cuts. What are your assumptions for global refinancing wall and based on volumes in 2026? How conservative are expectations given tougher comps?
Yeah. This is something that we obviously pay very close attention to. When we look out over the last couple of years, you're right, we did see very significant pull forward, particularly in 2024. 2025 was actually less, right? There was still pull forward. There's some pull forward every year, but the elevated levels that we saw in 2024 really didn't get replicated in 2025. 2025 kind of came back down to normal. Importantly, even with that pull forward in 2024, we saw meaningful growth in 2025 because the size of the maturity walls are so much bigger. We've talked about this a little bit, on the earnings call as well. The 2026 maturity wall is up something like 12% o ver where the 25 wall was last year.
Over the next three years, that cumulative maturity that's gonna be coming to market is 9% higher than it was at this point last year. We know there are huge opportunities here. It's very difficult to time that refinancing activity, so that's why you see us take a position like we did with our financial guidance for 2026. That 4%-7% revenue growth is really tied to low- to mid-single digit growth in bond issuance for us, which the assumptions underlying that are really important. We're really only looking at modest pull forward out of the 2027 maturity walls, very little, if any, out of the 2028 maturity wall, right? We're looking at modest growth in M&A activity.
We're looking at the hyperscaler CapEx environment, which is certainly top of mind for a lot of folks. We've got about $650 billion of announced CapEx from the hyperscalers for 2026. That's up significantly over what we saw from them in 2025. Our guidance assumes only modest growth in data center and CapEx related debt financing. If we do see a meaningful portion of that $650 billion coming to the market, and that's financed by debt, we've said that would drive a couple of percentage points of upside to our bond issuance forecast for 2026. We wanna make sure that we're taking a prudent approach to how we view the year when we're this early. As we've said before, our tendency is to refine that guidance as we progress through the year and we get more data available.
Great. Just switching to private credit ratings, how do you view the long-term economics and margins of covering private credit compared to traditional public credit? How will it impact the division's growth trajectory?
Yeah. I think in the very long term, you're gonna see us fairly ambivalent as to whether the debt is issued in the public markets or the private markets. I think our opportunity to rate that debt is very strong in both of those situations, particularly the type of debt that we ordinarily rate. We're not going to rate everything in the private markets. We don't necessarily want to rate everything in the private markets. What we do rate in the private markets, we leverage the exact same methodologies, the same risk factors, the same criteria, and the same economics, so the pricing's the same in the private markets.
I think that's a really important dynamic for us because as we see the public and private markets become more fluid with each other, where we see refinancing activity going from private to public or public to private over time, the fact that our methodologies are the same means that our rating can travel, right? If somebody issues debt in the private markets and wants to take advantage of a dislocation in spreads or take advantage of favorable market conditions and refinance that debt in the public markets, if we've rated that debt in the private markets, they can very comfortably do that because it's the same methodology that we're gonna use to rate that debt in the public markets. The perceived risk associated with that debt doesn't necessarily change, right?
I think that's a very, very important point for us, that when somebody sees a rating from S&P Global, right, our customers count on us because they know they can, right? They know that the methodologies are sound, the discipline that we have when we create these methodologies and how rigorous we are in analyzing any potential change to these methodologies. That's critical for the entire debt ecosystem. The fact that we don't employ different methodologies public to private is a big part of why issuers, fixed income investors, really the entire market ecosystem, views S&P Global so favorably as part of that global market.
Got it. Before we end our conversation, at our conference this year, we're asking companies that present to do a quick word association. Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when I say the following.
All right. Just so everybody knows, he did not give me these in advance.
The first one would be data moat.
Huge.
Okay. Issuance.
Strong.
Capital allocation.
Disciplined.
Disciplined. The last one, which I'm just thinking of right now since you're here, Martina.
Brilliant.
Okay. Awesome. I'll pause there, and I'll field some questions from the floor. I guess I asked some good questions unless I didn't address anything.
No. I think you've done a fantastic job.
I'll throw out a question. I didn't talk about the Indices division.
Sure.
It delivered double-digit growth over the past two years, led by growth in equity markets, and the medium-term guide exceeds the overall company guide. Beyond pure market appreciation, what is driving the core net inflows into products linked to your indices? How much runway is left in the secular shift from active to passive management? How does a broadening of performance in the U.S. equity markets impact S&P?
Yeah, great question. I think the index franchise that we've built is one of the most beautiful businesses I've ever seen in my career. I absolutely love that business, really because the interests of our business are tied so intrinsically to the interests of our customers, right? They're very tightly aligned. When they do well, we do well, right? When they struggle, we struggle along with them. The market appreciation certainly matters, but we've built global franchises in this index business that really have facilitated some of the most liquid ecosystems in the world. When you look at the S&P 500, for example, it's not just that it's an intuitive index. It's not just that you have the calculation engine on our side, and you've got incredible reliability, and the brand awareness is there, right?
The fact that it's the definition of the U.S. equities market, right? Investors know that they can get in, they can move out. They have that liquidity in that ecosystem, frankly, because of some of the partners that we have, right, and some of the incredible customers that have built phenomenal products on top of our intellectual property. It's really created this fantastic ecosystem in the U.S. equities piece of it. We have opportunities to expand beyond that, right? You've seen us talk about commodities indices. You've seen us talk about fixed income and cross-asset, right? We're in a very unique position at S&P Global, where S&P Dow Jones Indices is really the only organization in the world that has a top global franchise in equities and a leading global franchise in fixed income. We've got great commodities indices.
We can pursue opportunities with our asset management partners and with asset owners to create new indices that can target things like target date opportunities, right, target opportunities. We can look at leveraging cross-asset indices to an extent and a scale that very few in the world could do. That really is a fantastic franchise. I think we're very, very fortunate to have Cathy Clay coming in and leading that organization for us. She's a fantastic leader and an incredible operator, a visionary strategist. I think we've got a lot of confidence in the growth rates that we put out there at Investor Day.
That's great. I think that's all the time we have. Mark, appreciate the time. Thank you for coming. Thank you all for joining in.
Great. Thank you, Wahid.