S&P Global Inc. — 2024 Q1

Toni, it's Adam. Thank you for the question. So yes, we're seeing many of the things that others are seeing in our markets, particularly for our financial services customers. We're seeing that particularly in the smallest of those customers, and that's probably comparable to what some others are seeing. But for us, that's really where the concentrations are.

Okay. Thanks, Manav, and thank you for the question. Let me just start with the last piece, Visible Alpha. We do expect that transaction to close here in the second quarter. We're quite excited about it. I think it's an important part of one of our strategic areas, which is the continued expansion and improvement in quality of the Cap IQ Pro set of solutions that we offer to the market.

Heather, it's Martina. Thanks very much for the question. So we look at a variety of factors to give us a good sense for the issuance pipeline in the immediate time frame. Typically, we would look at 180-day pipelines, for example, as well as more near term, but also throughout as much as we can, next 9 to 12 months.

Thanks for the question. Well, as you know, we've said numerous times in the past, we're solving for long-term sustainable margin in the Ratings business. And we are a very disciplined stewards of capital in the business. So our guidance for the year, which we reiterated at 57.5% to 58.5%, as Doug said in his remarks, at the midpoint represents about 150 basis points of margin expansion year-over-year.

Andrew, thanks very much for the question. I would say a couple of things. So the context on a lot of my commentary on intra-year, I would say I'd lean more on the investment-grade side where we think we saw a 2H pull-forward. I think we did see pull-forward of '25 and '26 maturities, for example, on the refinancing front for high-yield and bank loans. So a little bit of a mix there between the spec-grade asset class and investment-grade asset class.

Thank you, Alex. Well, as you know, we run the company with an approach to budgeting and management, where we always start the year with a positive jaw. That's just our philosophy. We look and see how we're going to do in our core businesses. We go out to see our customers. We understand what we can build as a forward-looking pipeline, forward-looking expectations for the market. We then ourselves say, "What would be the expense level that we want to have to support that growth?" On top of that, we then come back and say, "How much can we afford to invest?"

Thanks, Ashish, for the question. So we watch our recurring revenue growth very carefully in this quarter, more than 7% growth in our recurring revenue. Some of that comes from volumes in our businesses that are affected by capital markets volumes. Over the years, we've sought to actually temper that a bit using more fixed contracts. Our customers in most of those markets prefer it. And for us, it adds a little bit more stability and regular growth to the business.

Jeff, it's Martina. Thanks for the question. So to your point, billed issuance was up 45%. But transaction revenue, which is the revenue portion or revenue category that is most closely correlated to billed issuance, was up 54%. So we grew faster than billed issuance in the quarter. Overall revenue growth of 29% represented both the transaction revenue growth of 54% and the non-transaction revenue growth of 8%. So really just the evening out of the performance across those to get to the 29% growth.

Thanks, Scott. Let me start, and then I'm going to hand it over to Adam. When it comes to our tracking of the revenue synergies, it's something that we look at every quarter. We look at them. We actually looked at it with our Executive Committee earlier this week. We have a combination of cross-sell as well as new products.

Thanks, Doug, and thanks, Scott. It's Adam. We're very excited about our synergy progress. We've got 15 more new products that will come to market in 2024. The combination of businesses, the strength that we have in the marketplace, the receptivity of our customers to what a combined offering can do, that's all been a tremendous uplift, and I think it's given us the path to achieve the revenue synergy targets that we outlined.

Okay. Great. Well, first of all, we've been out seeing our customers, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks. We've been out seeing customers everywhere we can. We've been around the globe. I myself have been traveling extensively this year seeing customers. As you know, in the financial services market, there's been a little bit of a slowdown in sales cycles. We've talked about that in the past, which we've seen it just takes a little bit longer to close some transactions. You've heard about that from us before.

Thank you, Craig. As you know, when we've been looking at our artificial intelligence road map, it's something that we've been very explicit about going back many, many years. This isn't something new for us. It started with our acquisition of Kensho 6 years ago. We since then have come up with a very structured approach to AI, which starts with a vision and a strategy.

Yes. Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate the question. We do have a number of unique solutions and a pretty diversified set of solutions to the marketplace. So you do see dislocations in the market or volatility affecting parts of our business differently than other parts of the business. You mentioned some of our capital markets platforms.

Yes. Thank you for that, Russell. When you look at Commodity Insights, we've continued to advance incredibly well. We've had -- this is one of the home runs when it comes to the integration of the ENR business and the Platts business. We very quickly been able to bring together products like Price Assessments. Cross-sell has been strong if you think about being able to sell in ENR products to Platts clients as well as selling Platts clients to ENR clients. So that was, right out of the gate, a very strong approach.

George, this is Mark. The updated guidance on Indices is really driven just by strength across that business. But just giving you the underlying assumptions for the full year guide, we're expecting the S&P 500 to be essentially flat from 3/31 through the end of the year. The guidance assumes modest growth in the ETD volumes. And then we are expecting that subscription line to accelerate a little bit as we progress through the full year.

Thanks, Owen. Yes, we think that, that volatility is something that helps drive more people to try to understand what's happening in the markets. But as we've seen over time, the volatility doesn't seem to go away. There's always something else that comes up to create interest in the area.