Moody's Corporation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Moody's Corporation second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded and that all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the request of the company, we will open the conference up for question and answers following the presentation. I will now turn the call over to Shivani Kok, head of investor relations.

Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining us to discuss Moody's second quarter 2021 results and our revised outlook for full year 2021. I'm Shivani Kark, Head of Investor Relations. This morning, Moody's released its results for the second quarter of 2021, as well as our outlook for full year 2021. The earnings press release and a presentation to accompany this teleconference are both available on our website at ir.moody's.com. Rob Sauber, Moody's President and Chief Executive Officer, will lead this morning's conference call. Also making prepared remarks on the call this morning is Mark Kay, Moody's Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we will also be presenting non-GAAP or adjusted figures. Please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings press release filed this morning for reconciliation between all adjusted measures referenced during this call and GAAP. I call your attention to the safe harbour language which can be found towards the end of our earnings release. Today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In accordance with the Act, I also direct your attention to the management's discussion and analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2020, and in other SEC filings made by the company, which are available on our website and on the SEC's website. These, together with the safe harbor statement, set forth important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such forward-looking statements. I would also like to point out that members of the media may be on the call this morning in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to Rob Fowler.

Thanks, Shivani, and good morning, and thanks to everyone for joining today's call. I'm going to begin by providing a general update on the business, including Goody's second quarter 2021 financial results. And following my commentary, Mark Kay will provide further details on our second quarter 2021 performance, as well as our revised 2021 outlook. And after our prepared remarks, as always, we'll be happy to take your questions. Rudy's delivered strong financial results in the second quarter of 2021. Revenue growth of 8% and an increase in adjusted diluted EPS of 15% highlighted the robust demand for our best-in-class integrated risk assessment offerings. Favorable market conditions and heightened M&A activity provided the backdrop for sustained leveraged finance issuance in the second quarter, and it supported growth in our ratings business. The ongoing expansion of our risk assessment solutions combined with strong retention rates drove MA's significant recurring revenue growth. Top-line performance as well as expense discipline contributed to adjusted operating margin expansion, and our cost-efficiency initiatives continue to fund key investments in product innovation that should support ongoing growth. As a result of our solid execution in the quarter, we've revised our full-year 2021 guidance and now forecast Moody's revenue to grow in the low double-digit percent range. Additionally, we've raised our adjusted diluted EPS guidance to be in the range of $11.55 to $11.85. Now, turning to second quarter results, MIS revenue grew 4%. That's despite the tough prior year comparable, while MA achieved its highest ever quarterly revenue, up 15% from last year. On an organic constant currency basis, MA revenue increased 8%. Rudy's adjusted operating income rose 12% to $861 million, and the adjusted operating margin expanded 200 basis points to 55.4%. adjusted diluted EPS was $3.22, up 15%. On the last earnings call, I highlighted that issuance volumes reached their highest level in over a decade. This quarter, as anticipated, investment-grade activity declined, as many issuers had already substantially fulfilled their funding needs in recent quarters. Although overall issuance declined by 16%, as you can see on the chart, second quarter issuance was still well above the historical 10-year average as shown on the blue line. While the growth in leveraged loans outpaced high yield bonds, the demand that we saw earlier this year from both asset classes persisted, albeit a bit slower sequentially. We also saw increased momentum in the CLO market driven by opportunistic refinancing as spreads remained tight. We frequently comment on our revenue relative to issuance levels, which relates to issuance mix. And in the second quarter, transactional MIS revenue grew 3%, while MIS-rated issuance declined 16%. And this chart provides an illustration of our second quarter issuance and revenue mix by asset class. So, for example, the dark green bubble on the bottom left corner represents investment-grade issuance. And you can see that issuance was down 68% in the second quarter versus the prior year. However, leveraged loans, which has a greater proportion of issuers on per-issuance or pay-as-you-go commercial programs, represented by the dark blue bubble on the far right, saw issuance up over 200%. And that significantly contributed to this quarter's favorable issuance mix. Similar to last quarter, favorable market conditions led issuers to access the debt markets for a variety of reasons. Credit spreads tightened as default rates trended lower, keeping the overall cost of debt low and allowing issuers to opportunistically refinance existing debt. And as economies started to recover and equity markets continued their strong run, we saw an acceleration of M&A as companies used a combination of cash balances and debt financing to acquire growth and position businesses for the post-pandemic economy. We expect this constructive environment to persist, providing issuers further opportunities to tap the markets. That said, we forecast activity for the remainder of 2021 to moderate from historical highs that we saw in the first half of this year. And Mark's going to go into further detail on our issuance guidance by asset class later in the call. Now, let's turn to MA. MA's growing recurring revenue base and strong retention rates demonstrate the market demand for our products. Our emphasis on renewable sales has increased the proportion of recurring revenue by four percentage points in the trailing 12-month period to 92%. We continue to see significant opportunities in know-your-customer and financial crime compliance solutions, as well as areas like insurance and asset management, both of which contributed to recurring revenue growth along with research and data feeds. We briefly discussed some of these businesses on the first quarter 2021 earnings call, And I want to further spotlight these two high growth areas. I'll start by highlighting a few key trends in the KYC market. First, as I've mentioned before, the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in know your customer and customer onboarding. Second, regulators are requiring organizations to know more about their customers and suppliers than ever before. And finally, financial crime continues to become more sophisticated, which requires advanced detection and monitoring capabilities. Our industry-leading product offerings and solutions leverage information on hundreds of millions of entities and ownership structures, as well as detailed profiles on over 13 million politically exposed individuals. Using artificial intelligence, we combine our world-class data sets to map and analyze adverse media, together generating insights and identifying risks at a scale, speed, and precision that is difficult for others to match, and creating a compelling solution that is unique to Moody's and enables our customers to make better and faster decisions to combat financial crime. Similar to our Know Your Customer and Financial Crime compliance products, our expanding offerings for insurers and asset managers are contributing to revenue growth for MA and are a core part of our integrated risk assessment strategy. We initially entered the insurance customer segment by providing market-leading regulatory compliance software. We then moved into actuarial models to support global life insurers enabled by our acquisition of GGUI. We further expanded our capabilities to include asset and liability management and balance sheet solutions, portfolio analytics, and other tools to help address new accounting standards such as IFRS 17 and CECL. Now the data, analytics, and domain expertise from across our business enables us to provide insurers and asset managers with more comprehensive solutions to manage a wider set of risks. As the industry continues to evolve, our holistic approach allows us to build on our existing position in the insurance space, while at the same time provide a broader range of increasingly important analytics and insights, such as climate risk scenarios. Together, this has contributed to our ability to deliver 20% organic revenue growth over the trailing 12 months in this segment. And we're excited about the opportunity ahead to serve new and growing risk assessment use cases for insurers and asset managers, leveraging our vast data sets and analytic capabilities. I've also talked a number of times about the importance of innovating and integrating our data and analytics across our product suite. For example, this quarter we launched an industry-first ESG score predictor. This offering combines Moody's ESG scoring methodology with company-specific data and predictive analytics to produce ESG scores for over 140 million small and medium-sized enterprises. These scores allow our customers to screen ESG risks on public and private companies to monitor portfolio and supply chain risk and are a great example of integrating our SME and ESG capabilities to address a key market need, which is ESG assessment to support sustainable supply chains. Now, staying on ESG for a moment, there's been a proliferation of climate-related financial disclosures over the past few years, and we recently partnered with the TCFD to provide insight on the quality of climate disclosures leveraging our natural language processing and machine learning tools. In MIS, we expanded our proprietary ESG credit impact score coverage to companies in a broader range of industries, as well as to U.S. states and cities. And we believe this is a unique offering that will allow investors to understand more clearly the impact of ESNG on any issuer's creditworthiness and enhances our credit ratings relevance and thought leadership. In MA, as a leading provider of Know Your Customer data and analytics, our customers are increasingly needing to comply with regulations relating to modern slavery and human trafficking within their supply chain. Working with various stakeholders, we added new AI-enabled features to help our customers screen and track previously undetected instances of human trafficking and modern slavery risk across their supplier base. providing an opportunity to further broaden our KYC customer base beyond financial institutions. I'm frequently asked how we are differentiating ourselves in the ESG space, so I thought I would take a minute to provide a few customer case studies that illustrate how we're combining our capabilities to meet the risk assessment needs of different customer types. In the Americas, we worked with a leading global commercial real estate firm to embed physical climate risk analysis into their global funds and client portfolios. The detail and rigor of our climate scores and data on individual properties allowed them to analyze thousands of properties in a more sophisticated and a more efficient way. In Europe, a large government agency requested our expertise on their green bond financing framework. Through our second-party opinion, we assessed that the proposed framework not only aligned with their climate and environmental agenda, but also with the 2021 Green Dawn principles. And since 2012, we've provided hundreds of second-party opinions across 30 countries, with over 60 second-party opinions provided just in the first half of this year. On to Asia, a large regional bank, also an existing MA customer, recently selected Moody's to create a robust framework to quantify the ESG and climate risk of customers' portfolios, leveraging our ESG assessments, ESG and climate insights and data, and our ESG score predictor that I just talked about. They also requested in-house training on how to integrate ESG and sustainability into their in-house risk management practices. So, it's a really great example of commercializing ESG and climate across our risk assessment offerings and our customer base. Before I turn it over to Mark, I also want to highlight a few examples of industry recognition that Moody's has received through the first half of this year. And these matter because they are independent third-party validation about the strength of our offerings across the firm. MIS was named Best Credit Rating Agency in multiple areas in the Global Capital Bond Awards and the Best Global Credit Rating Agency by Institutional Investor again. MIS was also ranked the number one securitization rating agency of the year in the Global Capital European Awards. As I noted, within MA, we are investing in our products to help our customers make better decisions on a wider range of risks. Industry participants recognize the pace of our innovation, awarding MA's credit sentiment score the best AI-based solution in the 2021 AI Breakthrough Awards. I'm pleased that we ranked number two on Chartas' Storm Top 50, demonstrating our position at the forefront of digital transformation in our sector. Moody's ESG Solutions also won the Climate Risk Solution of the Year Environmental Finances Sustainable Investment Awards. I'm also enormously proud that Moody's was named a Top 50 Company for Diversity by Diversity, Inc. And together, these recognitions underscore our commitments to customer delivery, innovation, sustainability, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, all of which are critical to our sustained success. And finally, I'm thrilled that Moody's joined the Fortune 500 earlier this quarter. This milestone is a testament to the dedication our employees have shown both to our customers and to one another. And on behalf of the executive team, I would like to thank all of our employees for their ongoing efforts, which contribute to these great recognitions. And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Mark to provide further details on Moody's second quarter results, as well as an update to our outlook for 2021.