Moody's Corporation

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Moody Corporation fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings 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 today. I'm Shivani Kok, Head of Investor Relations. This morning, Moody's released its results for the fourth quarter and full year 2024, as well as our outlook for full year 2025 and updates to our medium-term guidance. The earnings press release and the presentation to accompany this teleconference are both available on our website at .moody's.com. During this call, we will also be presenting non-GAAP or adjusted figures. These refer to the tables at the end of our earnings press release filed this morning for reconciliations between all adjusted measures referenced during this call in U.S. GAAP. I call your attention to the safe harbor 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 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 10K for the year ended December 31, 2023, 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'll now turn the call over to Rob.

Thanks, Shivani, and thanks very much, everybody, for joining today's call. After our prepared remarks, Steve Tolenko, the president of Moody's Analytics, and Mike West, president of Moody's Investor Service, are going to join Noemi and me for the Q&A portion of the call, and that's something that we've done for a few years now. Before I get into our results, I just want to acknowledge that it's been a difficult for many members of our team, following the tragic loss of our dear friends and Moody's colleagues Chris Collins and Melissa Nacandri in the Washington, D.C. plane crash. They really were cherished members of our team, and their loss leaves an immeasurable void, and our thoughts are with their families during this incredibly difficult time. Now, on to our results. Moody's delivered a record year in 2024. We grew revenue by 20% to over $7 billion, with strong growth across both businesses, and through disciplined cost management, we expanded our adjusted operating margin by over 400 basis points, and that translated into a 26% adjusted diluted EPS growth, all while executing on strategic investments across both of our businesses. So MIS finished the year on a real high note, 18% total revenue growth powered by 29% transactional revenue growth in the fourth quarter, and our ratings teams were really active, and it wasn't just in the fourth quarter, but throughout the year, delivering 33% revenue growth for ratings and over 500 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion for the full year. Moody's analytics also had a strong finish to the year, with 10% recurring revenue growth in the fourth quarter and 9% ARR growth. Decision solutions continued to lead the way, with $1.4 billion in ARR growing at 12%. And as we look to the future, we're continuing to invest to deliver market-leading growth and attractive shareholder returns. And there are some very powerful deep currents that are driving demand across our business, and we've been making investments to ensure that we can capitalize on that demand. Thinking about the future, as we enter the third year since we introduced our medium-term targets, today, Noemi and I are going to provide an update on our key metrics and what underpins our higher adjusted diluted EPS growth range. So as we set out this time last year on last year's fourth quarter call, 2024 was a year in which we really doubled down on our investments in order to help us capitalize on some big opportunities that are in front of us. And we executed on those foundational investments that we called out on that earnings call at the start of last year, and those included platforming and modernizing. It included new products and also Gen. AI. And we focused on the accessibility of our data estate and also enhancements to our risk and resilience posture. We continue to invest in the rating agency and our positioning as the agency of choice for investors and issuers. And I have to say, I'm really proud that we were named best rating agency for an impressive 13th year in a row by XTEL, formerly Institutional Investor. It's our experienced analysts, insightful research and an active market engagement that really reinforce our leadership position in the market. And that allows us in turn to capitalize on robust periods of issuance like this past year. We've also made investments to address the big shifts that are going on in the capital markets. The first of those is private credit. And I'm not just talking about direct leverage lending, which is a roughly $1.5 trillion market and growing, but also fund finance, infrastructure debt and asset-backed finance, to name a few. And with dedicated analytical and commercial focus on private credit, we made really good progress in this space this past year, rating nearly 400 private credit-related transactions in 2024. Similarly, we have a product suite to serve transition finance. And we issued over 150 second-party opinions and more than 20 net zero assessments in 2024. And we have a very strong pipeline there as well. We also have a coordinated commercial and analytical initiative focused on digital infrastructure and data centers to ensure that we are the agency of choice in this space for the years to come. Now, our strong financial performance this year allowed us to accelerate the buildout of MIS's technology applications for our analytical, commercial and operational teams. And these investments are driving improvements in operational efficiency and are allowing us to be increasingly volume agnostic within a range of issuance. And you can see this come through in our 60% margins in 2024 and our guidance for 2025. So I thought I'd just put this in perspective for you for a moment. We rated nearly $6.2 trillion of issuance in 2024. That's an increase of 42% compared to 2023. And Mike West has given me an interesting statistic that throughout last year, our ratings teams issued a press release related to a credit opinion on average every 20 minutes. And that's without needing to meaningfully increase our analytical staffing levels. And very importantly, we did this while maintaining the robust controls that the market and our regulators expect from us. And as you've heard me say, we're always looking for ways to invest inorganically in ratings because it's a great business. And if you recall, in mid 2024, we invested further in GCR. That's the leading domestic credit rating agency in Africa, taking our ownership up to almost 100%. And in November, we expanded Moody's Local again, this time into six more countries across Central America. And we're really pleased with the growth that we're seeing in Moody's Local. Revenue is up 16% in 2024. And we signed several hundred first time mandates. So that's a great expansion of the rated portfolio across the region and really bodes well for the future. So let me turn to Moody's Analytics for a few moments. We've invested there to enhance our product platforms and go to market strategy as we We've also expanded our data coverage and workflow solutions to serve large corporate customers in in-demand third party risk domains. That includes things like KYC, supplier risk, trade credit, transfer pricing, and master data management. And within the last six months, we also made three important acquisitions that have enhanced in our banking and insurance businesses and added valuable data and analytics to our risk operating system. And those include Numerated, which extends our loan origination system for banks, Predicat, which adds to our capabilities and casualty underwriting and analytics. And most recently in January, CAPE Analytics, which enriches our insights on properties and will integrate with our cat risk models. So just a little bit more on Numerated for a moment. We've been collaborating with their team on joint offerings for some time and that really highlighted the great fit between our respective lending workflow solutions. So there was an obvious industrial logic to this and we've had some really encouraging response from our customers. In fact, we've already had a few noteworthy wins with tier two and tier three banks in the fourth quarter with our enhanced end to end commercial lending offering. And it's really resonating with our customers. Switching over to insurance, over the last several years, we've talked about the foundational investments that we've made in our cloud-based intelligent risk platform. We call that IRP. And these investments are now delivering meaningful ARR growth for our insurance business. In fact, in 2024, we grew the number of customers on the IRP by almost 20%. And migrating to the IRP then enables insurers to reduce, sometimes by as much as half, the time that they need to model complex scenarios across billions of property locations. And as our platform hosts the most modern, sophisticated, high-definition models, our customers are able to better measure and quantify their financial exposure as well as monitor the evolving risks in their portfolios at scale. And this is helping to deepen our relationships with our customer base and expanding our strategic relationships with the largest global insurers, reinsurers, and brokers in the world. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that for the third consecutive year, Moody's was ranked number one in the Chartist RiskTech 100, providing market validation of our best in class solutions, serving nearly 15,000 analytics customers. So a lot to be proud of in 2024. And while we had a strong 2024, I'm very excited about 2025 and beyond due to a set of deep currents that are changing the way that businesses and markets operate. And given the investments that we've made over the last several years, we really are well positioned to ride those deep currents. And there are five that we are particularly focused on. First, the ongoing expansion and evolution of the debt capital markets that I just touched on. Second, the increasing pace of digital transformation and automation across banks and insurers. Third, the imperative for businesses to know more about who they're doing business with. Fourth, the growing needs across industries to understand the financial impact of extreme weather events and a changing climate. And fifth, the transformative power of generative AI and the potential unlock for owners of proprietary data and insights. So let me just double click on the impact of extreme weather for a moment, because this has been so much in the headlines lately. And on past calls, we've talked about the need to better understand the physical risk relating to extreme weather events and climate change. And when we announced the acquisition of RMS a few years ago, some folks asked us, why why did we think it was important to have these capabilities? Well, after Hurricane Selene and Milton and the LA wildfires, I don't think anyone is questioning the need to better understand this. I really believe we are at an inflection point. In fact, the issue of insurability of assets, both whether insurance is available and what the cost will be over time, has become a very important issue in property and financial markets. And we've witnessed the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events combined with ongoing property development and inflation, which have made these events even more costly. And the demand to better understand these risks, not just by insurers, but by banks, investors, companies, governments is only going up. And that's why we acquired Cape Analytics, their AI powered technology delivers address level risk insights, which are a natural complement to our catastrophe models. And these sophisticated models combined with our really rich and deep data and insights on credit and economics and properties means that we are uniquely positioned to be the authoritative voice on quantifying the financial impacts of physical risk. And we see this need continuing for years into the future. So we feel good about these deep currents as durable demand drivers for our business. And Noemi is going to walk you through our full year 25 guidance assumptions in a moment. And as we look forward after delivering a remarkable performance in 2024, we're going to provide an update on the progress against our medium term targets. But let me give you the bottom line. We have fundamentally strengthened the earnings power of this business, and that should support Moody's as a serial compounder in the years ahead. So with that, Noemi, over to you.

Thank you, Robin. And hello, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. Starting with our Q4 results, we delivered a very strong finish, tapping a year of remarkable financial performance in 24. You can see the highlights from our four year results on slide nine. The Q4 MTO revenues were nearly one point seven billion dollars, up 13 percent year on year. And our adjusted utility EPS was two dollars sixty nine cents, sixty two cents, up 20 percent year over year. MIS delivered second highest Q4 revenue on record with growth across all business lines. The anticipated volatility around the US election didn't materialize and with spreads at their tightest levels in over a decade, particularly in spec grade. And the robust demand environment continued throughout the quarter until the last days of December. MIS revenue in Q4 were eight hundred and nine million dollars, up 18 percent year on year. The growth was driven primarily by three key factors. First, healthy leverage loan issuance activity, which was up one hundred and thirty four in Q4. However, with the mix weighted towards refinancing and repricing, transactional revenue for that asset class was up twenty seven percent. Second, the continued strengths from infrequent issuers in the banking and insurance sectors. And third, strong performance from structured finance, particularly in US CLOs and CNBS, reflecting strong demand in a very favorable spread environment. MIS's fourth quarter performance and corresponding higher incentive compensation translated into a 51.3 adjusted operating margin, which exceeded our implied guidance. Turning to MA, we also had a strong Q4 with revenue of eight hundred sixty three million dollars, up eight percent year on year. Recurring revenue, which accounts for ninety five percent of total revenue in MA, grew ten percent year on year, broadly in line with the nine point four percent growth in AR. As Rob said, decision solutions drove the performance with twelve percent growth year on year. We delivered strong growth across lines of businesses in decision solutions with banking, insurance and KYC, achieving AR growth of nine percent, twelve percent and seventeen percent respectively. More specifically, KYC AR grew seventeen percent with strong demand from customer and supplier rich data usage and sales from new customers. Insurance AR grew twelve percent driven by improved customer retention and strong demand for cat model tools as extreme weather events are becoming more pervasive and impactful across industries. This is generating demand for best in class risk modeling solutions with the IRP. And our Q1 2025 acquisition of KEEP Analytics only builds on this, as Rob highlighted. Banking AR grew nine percent, reflecting strong customer retention and expansion of relationships with subscription based offerings that are enabling customers' lending, risk management and finance workflows. The other two lines of businesses in MA include our more established data and research franchises. Data and information grew AR by eight percent driven by demand from Arbis within the corporate sector. Research and insights grew AR by six percent with the attrition events from the asset manager space we discussed earlier in the year affecting the growth rate. That said, sales, meaning cross sale, up sale or upgrades, grew meaningfully above AR trends in FOIA 24. And some of this was from upselling research assistants to our credit view customers, which accounted for twenty five percent of our overall research and insights AR growth. We are encouraged by the customer engagement for research assistant, one of our GNI offerings, and that's building a healthy pipeline for 2025 and has already reached more than 100 customers in Q4. MA adjusted operating margin of thirty three point eight percent increased two hundred and forty basis points versus Q4 last year, leading to a four year margin of thirty point seven percent, which is towards the high end of our annual guide. Now, turning to FISCOIA 25 guidance, we expect MCO revenue growth in the high single digit range with an adjusted operating margin expanding by about two hundred basis points to approximately fifty percent. And this is on the back of FISCOIA 2024, where we increase the adjusted operating margin by four hundred and twenty basis points. Our adjusted deleted ETF guidance range is a range of fourteen dollars to fourteen dollars fifty cents. Now, for MIS, we expect market conditions will remain constructive this year with tight spreads, declining high yield default rates and an uptick in M&A activity. You'll see our issuance outlook for individual asset class on this slide, but all in all, we're projected MIS rated issuance growth to be in the low single single digit range for 25 with seven hundred to eight hundred percent main date. For MIS revenue, we expect growth in the mid to high single digit percent range for the year, benefiting from a positive issuance mix. We expect the revenue performance to translate into an adjusted operating margin of sixty two to sixty three percent, which at the midpoint represents about two hundred and fifty basis points of margin expansion year over year. For M&A, we expect revenue growth in the high single digit range with AR growth in the high single digit to low double digit range. We expect M&A adjusted operating margin to be between thirty two and thirty three percent, which at the midpoint represents two hundred and eighty basis points of margin expansion year over year. Turning to what underpins M&A and the expected MCO margin expansion, we took a hard look at our operating model and believe we have an opportunity to simplify our organizational structure. In our analytics business, we are for the most part through the integration of the businesses we've acquired over the recent years. We are also gradually reorienting our go to market from selling individual products to selling end to end solutions to our customers in the banking, insurance and corporate segments. This puts us in a position to combine resources in our customer facing marketing, product and data engineering functions and further consolidate our real estate footprint. And also more broadly across the organization, we're starting to reap the benefit of the investments we made in automating our workflows, which translates into expected improvements in operating leverage. So in connection with this, today we're announcing an efficiency program to simplify the organization, allowing us to accelerate profitability expansion and redirect some investment capacity to strategic growth areas. We plan to incur between two hundred and two hundred fifty million dollars in restructuring charges over the two year duration of the plan, primarily in personnel related costs for an expected total annualized cost savings in the range of two hundred fifty to three hundred million dollars upon completion of the plan. We accrued approximately forty five million already in the fourth quarter and expect to record an additional charge in the range of eighty million to one hundred million dollars in FOIA 25, primarily in WIDIS analytics and to a lesser extent within our corporate functions. I note that we have included the FOIA 24 to FOIA 25 operating expense bridge in the appendix of this presentation to assist with modeling questions. And here's some color on how to think about the calendarization of top line and margin. We expect MIS revenue in FOIA 25 to follow a similar quarterly pattern to 24 with first quarter revenue up in the mid single digit range from the first quarter 24, ramping up in the second quarter before declining sequentially in our third and fourth quarter. For MA, we expect our -over-year total revenue growth to be consistent in the high single digit percent range throughout the year, with Q1 revenue being sequentially flat versus Q4 24, a pattern that's consistent with the prior year. For operating expenses and excluding the impact from restructuring and asset abandonment charges, we expect expenses to follow a normal seasonal pattern. Sequentially, we anticipate expenses to increase about ten million dollars from Q4 to Q1, and then we anticipate operating expense to follow a typical seasonal pattern, but to remain relatively stable throughout the remainder of the year, as savings associated from our efficiency program offset annual salary increase and variable costs associated with revenue. In terms of margin, we expect MIS to be in the mid 60s in the first half before declining in the second half in line with revenue. And for MA, we expect approximately 30 percent in the first quarter, sequentially improving in the second half to achieve a four-year guidance of 33 percent as revenue ramps and as we start to see the savings from our efficiency plan in the second half. In terms of how these different dynamics translate into adjusted diluted EPS, we expect this to follow the MIS revenue cadence, and more specifically for Q1, we expect adjusted diluted EPS to be at the high end of the implied quality adjusted diluted EPS range of $3.50 to $3.60. So finally, looking beyond 2025, I'd like to talk about how we're tracking against our medium term targets. It's been three years since we published those, and with almost a year in the CFO seat, I'm using this as an opportunity to take stock on how our performance has stacked up. The headline is this 2024 adjusted diluted EPS is up 46 percent from two years ago. And the midpoint of our four-year 2025 guidance implies an 18 percent adjusted diluted EPS K-GAR through the first three years, significantly above the low double-digit medium term target growth rate. Now, a lot of this outperformance has been driven by very good execution during a robust issuance environment, with MIS revenue up 40.5 percent in the last two years and MIS adjusted margin already exceeding 60 percent in 2024. We also have delivered strong organic growth in MA, reporting AR growth consistently in the range of 90 to 10 percent over the last two years. As we look forward, we expect our retention rate to remain in the low to mid 90s percent range and to continue to grow our new business at low to mid teens percent pace, enabling us to sustain AR growth in this nine to 10 percent range in the coming years. Of note, what's most notably different now from what we envisioned when we initially published our medium term guidance is that our recent M&A has been at a smaller scale and focused on enriching offerings to fuel durable growth in our strategic growth areas, including lending and casualty underwriting. On profitability, we've invested in GEN.AI and process automation more broadly for internal efficiencies. We've invested in the build out of the MA platform and our data interoperability, all of which are expected to generate increased operating leverage in the coming years. We expect that this, coupled with our program to simplify our organizational structure, will translate into MA margin expansion in the mid to high 30 percent range by 2027. Now bringing this all together, for MTO, we are increasing the range for our adjusted diluted EPS growth from the low double digit percent growth to low to mid teens percent growth range, reflecting our ongoing effort to improve the earnings power of our business. To wrap up, we believe that demand drivers and the execution of our strategy will deliver attractive and sustainable growth and profitability expansion across market cycles. We remain committed to executing on our capital allocation strategy and anticipate consistent strong free cash flow returns to continue as we work to deliver on both our customers and shareholders. I'd like to thank all of our colleagues around the world for their remarkable contributions to another great year for Moody's. And with that, Rob, Mike, and Steve and I will be happy to take your questions. Operator.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please dial star one on your telephone keypad. If you are on a speakerphone, please pick up your handset and make sure that your mute function is turned off so that your signal reaches our equipment. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question. The option to rejoin the queue will be unavailable. Again, that is star one to ask a question. We'll take our first question from the line of Manifat Nayak with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Thank you. I just wanted to ask you about the medium term guide. I just wanted to confirm if those were organic numbers, particularly on the MA side and just some of the moving pieces in there. It sounds like, Naomi, from your last comment, maybe there's less M&A than what you initially thought. Is that correct?

We're in the third year of the medium term target. As I said, I'm almost a year in the CFO seat, so it's a good time to take stock and look at how we did, how we're tracking. As I said, we're tracking ahead on MCO revenue and adjusted deleted EPS metrics. And MIS operating margin is already at 60%. We've delivered strong organic growth in MA. We had reported growth consistently in the 9% to 10% range over the last two years. I think that's what you should expect us to deliver over the medium term. To your point, what's to note, we had a bit lower contribution from M&A than what we initially envisioned when we published those medium term targets initially. We had a different rates environment back then. Again, we're committed to deliver a 9% to 10% AR growth, as I said, over the medium term. And that's mostly organic. We may do a bit of tucking, but that's really what's driving the main change here.

Our next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabhadra with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on that midterm questions, particularly on margins. So the MIS margins are already at low 60%. So just wanted to better understand, is there not much room for margin expansion with issuance just given the high incremental margins there? But also, what does it imply for earnings growth in the midterm? Are we implying a much more modest earnings growth profile? Any color that will be helpful. Thanks.

So on MIS margin for 2025, just to kind of give you a little bit more color on what's on our guidance, we've got to remember we had a higher incentive compensation of growth in 2024 as a result of the extraordinary performance. We re-baselined that at the beginning of each year. So obviously, that gives us a bit of tailwind in margin for 2025. And then in terms of further out in the medium term, we're continuing to make investments in our ratings business. We mentioned the workflows, the rating workflow, the analytical tool, so that we can make our analysts more efficient and really focus on what they do best, which is talking to our customers, our issuance and doing some research. And we're continuing to invest in our risk and resiliency program. As you know, we are regulated. And so we continue to improve and enhance our internal controls with automation there. And we're investing in a lot of areas that are going to fuel the growth of the ratings business in the long term, like private credit, sustainable finance. And I'm sure Mike and Rob can give some color on that as

well. Our next question comes from the line

of Tony Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Thanks so much. I wanted to ask about MA margins, really great corridor and higher than expected guide. You talked about the efficiency plan, which was very helpful. Are you pulling back on investment at all? And just any additional color on simplification or the efficiency plan and maybe embedded in the whole thing is sort of AI and if how you're thinking about investment there and cost savings from it. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks. I'll start and I'll have Steve provide some color as well. As I said, we said, I think in the last earnings call, we're mostly through our large investment cycles. We were deploying now capital internally, we'll self funding some major investments around sales to go after the corporate segment with me or making some investments there. We're continuing to invest in our platform and our data estate as well. Now, the efficiency is really coming from, you know, that's the where's the point where we've integrated for the most part, the acquired entities, we're shifting a little bit or go to market to focus more end to end solutions towards our customer segment. That gives us some opportunity to simplify the organization and Steve can talk about some of the things he's doing. We've also to your point invested in Gen. AI that delivered some very nice efficiency gains in engineering as well as in our customer success group. So obviously, we're starting to reap the benefits of that as well.

Everything you said there makes good sense. I would say the simplification dynamic is a rich one and I think a very valuable way to think about this. Maybe most importantly, we're concentrating on those use cases and those areas where we perceive the demand to be the richest among our customers. Rob talked about big drivers of growth in the future and we're making investments in those, concentrating on those and redeploying toward those, sometimes redeploying out of some areas that aren't going to be as fast growing. So that's probably the other big change there. But just to reinforce, Gen. AI really is making a difference internally. We're pretty excited about the productivity gains we're seeing in engineering especially and starting to see some on the sales side as well. Already seeing some in customer service, so pretty excited about that.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Cram with UBS. Please go ahead.

Yes, hey, good morning everyone. I guess good afternoon now. But very quickly on the rating side, obviously laid out some of your expectations, but maybe you can dig a little bit deeper for 2025 to put some takes on the range. Where do you think some upside can come from, for example, M&A and what you see as the biggest risk for the outlook here? Thanks.

Hey Alex, it's Rob. Thanks for the question. So let me give you a little insight into maybe a few of the key assumptions here in the outlook. First of all, economic growth we think is going to support broader market activity. Spreads are tight. They may widen a little bit during the balance of the year, but will still be well below historical levels we expect. And we think we're going to see continued strong investor demand. Refinancing and improved M&A activity are going to be key drivers. In regards to refi, there's a fairly wide range of assumptions about refi volumes for leveraged loans in particular for 2025 when you look across all the banks. And it ranges from leveraged loan issuance being substantially down to being up. And you can see in our webcast deck, we're kind of somewhere in between down mid single digits. So that's one. And the second is the second key variable is M&A activity. And we've assumed there's something like a 50% increase in M&A for 2025, meaning that M&A will be an increasing percent of the use of proceeds. And that is favorable to revenue mix. And just to give you a sense of the sensitivity there, if it was something like 20 to 25% increase, that might be two to three percentage points of revenue growth. We also haven't assumed any risk off periods. When you've got a forecast that calls for more than six trillion of issuance, we've assumed virtually all blue sky days. So there are a lot of things obviously that go in to issuance. It's not just one assumption, but taken together, Alex, that explains our guidance range for revenues that spans mid to high single digits on

low single digit issuance growth.

Our next question comes from the line of Scott Wurzel with Wolf Research. Please go ahead.

Hey, good morning, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to go back to Moody's Analytics. I'm wondering if you can speak to just the sort of broader demand environment that you're seeing and how sales cycles are trending. I know if we go back a quarter or two, maybe on the GEN.AI side, there were some longer sales cycles. So I'm wondering if we can get an update on that and just demand more broadly. Thanks.

Yeah. So maybe I'll take that. Thanks, Scott, for the question. So I think first of all, the length of sales cycle has not changed materially over the last 18 to 24 months. I would say that's been a question we've heard a couple times. And I think in general, we're seeing patterns that are consistent with the patterns we've seen in the last couple of years. I'd say we're very encouraged by the pipeline. Our new business production has actually been very good in 2024 across the board and across segments. Retention strong in 2024 as well. We held, in fact, at the same level, actually slightly higher than what we saw in 2023. So retention about the same, maybe a little bit better. New business production in general, better across the board. And I would say pipeline going into 25 is very strong as well. So

very encouraging.

Sorry, just going to add on the new business growth. That was really an encouraging sign that we saw in research and insights and across all the businesses, actually, where we had a new business growth going faster than AR. And we had some very interesting use cases on research assistance. And that gives us confidence on the outlook.

Our next question comes from the line of Owen Lau with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. So again, Emma, sorry for multiple questions here. But you expect your revenue to grow high single digit, even though your ARR is expected to grow high single to low double digit. Should we expect this dynamic, there's still like, I don't know, maybe 2, 3% gap between the two, like this dynamic to continue in the near to medium term? When and what does it take for revenue to actually accelerate to low double digit? And how much have you baked in some of the new initiatives such as AI, MSCI partnership, and other new product launch in your guidance? Thanks a lot.

So just a couple of things on revenue. First of all, that can include some M&A effects. And so AR is an organic constant currency growth number. So that's just one clarification. In terms of the and recurring revenue over a trailing 12 months period should be pretty consistent. If you look at 2024, for example, our recurring revenue was in 9%. And that's very consistent with AR. What's really driving the difference is transactional revenue is going down and provides a bit of a headwind. We'll continue to see that in the foreseeable future as we have still customers remaining on our more on-premise platforms outside of the US in banking and insurance. But we expect that to continue to narrow as we migrate those customers over in the platform. I think that's the best way to look at it.

How about guidance? Have you baked in any AI and MSCI or decent to your guidance?

We incorporate those into our plans. I would say the sales pipeline is big enough that they are contributors to the pipeline, but they're not major contributors or material contributors across the whole business.

Yeah, I would say though that so it's all baked in, but research assistant has been very helpful to sales in Research and Insights. And 25% of the growth in Research and Insight ARR is from customers who subscribed to Research Assistant. And the weighted sales pipeline for Research Assistant is double the total sales for fiscal 24. So we've larger opportunities around workflow automation and we're seeing good momentum. So it's an important contributor to growth even though it's modest in terms of the overall base

of revenues. Got it. Thanks a lot.

Our next question comes from the line of Jeffrey Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much. With all the discussion coming out of Washington, DC, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about first your exposure to federal government as a customer and then more broadly in terms of some of the expected policy changes, what the impact on your business might be. Thanks.

So in terms of the overall impact, it's pretty small. We have an overall at MCO level, it's less than 1% of our consolidated revenue. And maybe I'll let Rob talk a little bit about some of the policy changes and how we're looking at that.

Yeah. So I think it's important to kind of zoom out for a moment and just think about what the world's been through over the last five years. And we've had a pandemic, we had a huge negative shock to GDP and employment. Then we had a huge monetary and fiscal stimulus in response. Then that led to record inflation and an interest rate shock. And as the pandemics subsided, we had two military conflicts in key energy producing regions. But through all of this, the global economy has been surprisingly resilient and has been able to adapt. So I think it's important just to keep that backdrop because obviously there's a large volume of executive orders and policy directives that span a number of different issues. But the headlines don't tell all the story. I think we'll see some impact in certain sectors based on what happens with tariffs. And you can imagine sectors like autos and retail and steel and aluminum, immigration, sectors like agriculture and hospitality and construction, you could see on fossil fuel producers. So there are going to be, I think, again, some puts and takes here. We may see more broadly a stronger economic environment that's going to be good for issuance in general. So I think also from a rating agency perspective, we're really going to anchor on the credit impacts of all this. And we're putting out a lot of research

about

what

those impacts could be.

Our next question comes from the line of David Modomadden with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I had a question just on the higher medium-term outlook for MIS revenue, the high single to low double-digit growth now versus mid to high growth. When you guys last updated these medium-term targets, could you help me think through what's driving that uptick? Were there any big movements in the long-term building blocks that you've given in the past? Or is it just M&A coming back that's driving that? And maybe also, if you could just talk about how we should think about the third-party private credit rating assessments, contributing to that as well would be helpful.

Yeah. So I think maybe the first thing just to anchor on is, we're still anchoring off of the base year of 2022 and the medium-term targets that we put out. So we're now a couple of years into that. We've got guidance out for the third year. And we're kind of looking out to now, where do we think we're going to be five years out in 2027? So we've got two years in the books. We've got a year of guidance and two years of unknown. And so what you're seeing is us now just updating. And an important part of that is the performance that we've already achieved. So hopefully that gives you a sense. But Mike, maybe just talk a little bit about some of the demand drivers for issuance, because I think that also gives some insight into the durability of growth in ratings.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Rob. As Rob mentioned earlier, what you've got is a lower rate of M&A over the last

few years

that we do anticipate to come back, because there's large pent-up demand. But if I move away from some of those traditional M&A refunding studies and think a little bit more broadly about growth of private credit, whether that is in direct lending, whether that's in securitization, whether that's in fund finance, or whether it's in the broader reallocation of capital into the private market away from the banks. Then on top of that, got to think about some of the drivers in that sustainable and transition finance area. There are clean energy commitments around 93% of global GDP, which is expected to translate in investment needs of about two and a half times by 2030. Rob also talked about digitalization and digital infrastructure, which again is another multi-trillion dollar market that needs long-term financing for long-term assets. That could be project finance, it could be corporate finance, or it could be some form of securitization. When we think of that third building block, the evolution of the debt capital market, these are some of the things that we're investing in, we are engaging in with market participants and feel

very good as parts of that medium-term story.

Our next question comes from the line of George Tong with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Hi, thanks. Good afternoon. With respect to the MA segment and your medium-term target of high single low double-digit growth, how are you thinking about growth by subsegments, so decision solutions, research and insights, and data and information? What do you see as driving the differences

in

growth

between those

segments?

Maybe I'll take a, I'll

talk to that, George. Thanks for the question. It's Steve. So first of all, if you just think about the core franchises, these franchises have been around literally for decades, the data information business, the research and insights business. These businesses have demonstrated a good track record of solid growth, maybe above average for the industry or above average for a peer group, with ARR numbers in the high single digits. We think that's going to continue very reliably into the future. You've got continued investments in terms of data quality, data coverage, and as well as tools like the GNI tools we've talked about as well. So we believe these to be strong, solid performers in the future, delivering good retention and good new business numbers. The decision solutions unit, where you have some of the higher growing businesses, most notably KYC and third party risk management work that we do to help people understand who they do business with. That's put up some really nice numbers in terms of ARR numbers in the recent past and continues to do so, we think, in the future. So you should see higher growth in the decision solution segment, maybe high single digit growth in these core franchises that have been around for a long time. High growth in decision solutions is driven by a lot of innovation and a lot of work to make our customers' jobs easier, leveraging our data, our analytics, and our software together to solve problems and to help them do their jobs. So

I think you'll see a differentiation in that way. Very helpful. Thank

you. Our next question comes from the line of Peter Christensen with Citigroup. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Great to be a part of the call. Really nice execution here. I want to get back on the MA side. You've had some really good speed to market on some new products, some enhancements. I was just talking, just like to hear any color on your ability to pass on value-based pricing across a number of your products and sub-segments there. And then lastly, just curious how you're thinking about the headcount for MIS and growth there potentially. Thanks.

Maybe I'll start with the questions about

MA. Welcome to the call there. Nice to have you on board, by the way. The value-based philosophy is I think one that we have long talked about and long maintained. We think it's really important to the process. Inflation is not as important as the value we create for customers. For example, in MA, we actually provide some statistics. I'm sure Shivani will have this in our investor deck where we dimension the contributions that come from upgrades in price. And you'll see those are contributions that are very stable and continue over the course of the last couple of years. And we expect it to continue in the future. I think that number is around 7% in 2024, just to give you a benchmark. So the contributions from pricing, I think, are stable and we expect them to continue going forward. Let's see, do you want to talk about the staffing question?

For MIS, I think we've talked about earlier, and that actually drove part of our performance in the fourth quarter. In the full year, we're invested significantly in automation and rating workflow to make our analysts more efficient. And you can expect us to continue to do that. We'll obviously continue to invest in our skill set. We have the best analysts and we'll continue to invest and grow, but probably less than the pace of revenue growth, given the investments we've made in automation.

Yeah, the one other thing I'd add, double-clicking on Steve's point about the value prop, it's really interesting. You have so many customers who are focusing on efficiency and digitization and automation and all of these things. And I think we've talked a little bit about the example of what's going on with our credit view offering with Research Assistant, where the value prop itself is changing. So credit view with no-GEN AI enablement is a research subscription product. And credit view with GEN AI enablement, Research Assistant, custom AI workflows, those kinds of things is actually something where people can start to say, how do I change the leverage model for labor in my, you know, whether it's my investment team or my research team or whatever it may be. That's a very different conversation and a very different value proposition. Now, the cycle time to have those conversations is different, but that's a pretty exciting evolution of that particular product.

Thank you. Compelling narrative. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Craig Huber with Huber Research. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Robert, Mike, can you just talk further about private credit? I'm curious, if you're willing to give this, what percent of your ratings revenue came from private credit last year? How do you see the market growing here to add your ratings growth rates in the coming years here? And then Naomi, if you could just throw in there, what was the incentive comp number in the fourth quarter and for the full year? How did that change year over year? Thank you.

Craig, yeah, let me give you, so we don't, you know, we don't break out exactly like you're asking, but we can give you some data points to give you an insight, give you some insight into, you know, the traction that private credit is getting within the franchise. So I mentioned in my prepared remarks that, you know, we had nearly 400 private credit mandates across all of ratings. Now that includes, you know, things like ratings on, you know, BDCs, sublines, closed end funds, you know, the suite of fund finance, but also, you know, asset-backed finance and middle market CLOs, private ratings for investors. So, you know, and that has grown very significantly in the course of one year. And also just to give you a sense, because fund finance is certainly a growing area. I think it's going to continue to grow for a number of years. And I think, you know, in the last year or so, we've seen a lot of, you know, a lot of growth in our FIG rating franchise. In 2024, 30% of our first-time mandates in FIG were private credit related. So, again, this goes back to the, when you look at it in the total base, it's still modest, but when you look at it as a percent of growth, you can see that this is starting to make a difference. Mike, do you have anything you want to add just in terms of how we're addressing private credit?

Yeah, and thanks for your question, Craig. I mean, as Rob said, we definitely see private credit as a tailwind. It's a rapidly evolving space across all those asset classes. And it's very important when you think about the originator, the transparency around the credit quality, they're looking to move on to the buyer. And then many of the buyers, again, want to know the credit quality and an independent view of that credit quality, because many of these buyers are sensitive with regard to regulation and their own capital allocation. So, again, there's many trends that support why independent opinion is very important in a growing asset class. And the way that we've organized ourselves is because it's across all of these different franchises that at the very highest level, we have to organize around leadership so we can engage with all these players that may be touching in these different franchises. And therefore, we have dedicated commercial people, dedicated analytical teams, but the very good thing is that we have depth and we have experience in each of our lines of business and the appropriate methodologies. So, as they start to develop as individual areas of asset class, we are able and available to discuss at a very early stage. And that's what's very important when you have an evolving market like this. I feel very good about

going into 2025 and over the medium term.

Our next question comes from the line of Jeff Moiler with Baird. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you. The medium term growth guidance, obviously really good, but as Rob said, a lot updating for performance already achieved. I think mathematically it implies lower growth in 26 and 27 relative to what I'd consider your longer term structural growth, especially in MIS. Are there any specific call outs there? Should we just not read too much into that? I think Rob said there's kind of blue sky assumptions for issuance in 25, but 25 MIS doesn't look overly inflated by any means relative to the long term trend and Mike sounded positive on structural growth. So, if you could just help us reconcile what's implied for 26, 29. Thank you.

Maybe the fundamental takeaway for me is we're not downgrading our growth assumption for ratings. And hopefully what you're hearing is some real confidence about the medium term drivers of issuance. So, that may be the math. Remember, we've got ranges and other things in here that we're expressing it in ranges. But I don't want you to take away that we think somehow the growth outlook has been dampened for the ratings business.

One other thing I would add is if you look at the overall picture is we're really reflecting the MA growth rates that we've observed across our different businesses. And Steve talked about the nuances between our mature franchises and decision and data and information research and insights and the faster growing businesses in decision solution. So, that's one element. And the other piece that I really want to point out is we're focusing on increased profitability, especially in MA. And that's something that's driving increased profitability going forward. That's what's behind partially the increase in the adjusted diluted ETF range.

Hear you a lot, and Claire, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Steinerman with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, Naomi. I just wanted to talk about the contribution of M&A in the quarter for both MA and MIS and also going forward is the CAPE acquisition and the guide. I'm not sure if that

was the right word. Yeah, so it was really small for the fiscal year 2024. Andrew, we had maybe 25 bids for revenue growth for MA. And then for the full year 2025, what's embedded in our guide, you have a little bit of tailwind from M&A, but you also have some effects headwind. So, net net, the net up to is really not material to our fiscal year 2025 guidance.

And CAPE is in

it. CAPE is in it, yes.

Okay, thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Russell Clelch with Redburn Atlantic. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi. Thanks for having me on. In respect to the AR growth in KYC, sorry, there had been some expectations that that would mature after the booms post the pandemic and the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. Can you talk about what's driving a re-acceleration of growth in that area and how sustainable is in the high teams range? And then separately, MSCI said on its conference call, it was having further conversations with you about expanding your partnership, which is currently in ESG, into perhaps other areas, including private credit. Can you provide an update perhaps on that from your perspective?

With the KYC? Yeah, so we are

believers that we have a better mousetrap when it comes to KYC and third party risk management. And whether you're talking about knowing who you're doing business with as a customer or supplier. And we've made investments across the board really, in terms of data, in terms of models that would help you make decisions on whether or not you should do business with this customer, as well as software to organize and coordinate your thoughts and remember why you decided to work with that customer. So we're releasing those features and those products literally all the time. Those investments we think are going to be very worthwhile and they contribute to this growth rate. So this has been a good grower for us and we can expect it to continue. And I would say the other thing I'd note here is that we are increasingly helping people with the labor associated with doing this work. So not just the databases, but helping and maybe coordinating and helping make things more efficient in that respect. But once they identify someone they want to investigate and learn more about, we're helping them do that much more quickly. So the number of people required to do this work can go down when they become a customer of ours.

And to be clear, it's not by us providing bodies to do that. It's providing software, data, and analytics and AI enablement. Just a couple of things I'd add to what Steve said. We had some nice growth in the quarter. We had some very large expansions of our relationships with several of the largest banks in the world. And I think that really is validation of the value of the Orbis data set and the other analytics that go along with it. The other thing is, and we talked about this on last year's call, that we were developing a platform to address a variety of use cases for corporates, all drawing on this massive company data and then other data sets to support things like customer onboarding and monitoring supplier risk and so on. Well, we've now launched that. And so we're excited about that because we think that's going to give us a good entree into the large corporate market and provide support for the growth in our KYC segment.

Hey, before we go to the next question, I just want to go back to Craig's question of incentive comp. I realize we passed that. So for 2024, incentive comp total was $507 million, Craig, with $133 million in Q4. And we're projecting around $440 million for 2025.

Our next question comes from the line of Slow Mo Rosenbaum with Steeple. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Hey, Rob, it seems like some of the early slowness that we saw in adoption in Research Assistant has turned around and it looks like things are really starting to pick up well there. I was wondering if you could update us on some of the other capabilities that you added, like the automated credit memo, the early warning system. What are you seeing there in terms of traction and do you expect a similar type of adoption path as what you're seeing for Research Assistant or do you think that those things are going to take a little bit longer because the customers might need to do a little bit more on their side in terms of process?

Yeah, maybe a couple things. And I'm also going to ask Steve to add on here. First, we have Gen. AI enabled a number of our products now through the course of the year. I think we talked about last year this concept of navigators, which helps our customers use AI as an interface and get more out of our applications. So we've done that across eight primary solutions. And that is not an a la carte offering that we've sold. That's included in the solution. But that's going to go to really helping with the overall value prop and retention and pricing opportunity for us. And we know that to be true because we have some really encouraging data points from Research Assistant customers, where we see the customer satisfaction is considerably higher. We see the usage on the platform is considerably higher. So that gives us confidence there. And you're right, we have launched several other what I would call a la carte products. They're early days and anything that again is selling into the bank. So there's lots of really good conversation, particularly about early warning. But like Research Assistant, these sales cycles take time with the bank. Steve, anything you want to add to

that? Well, number one, we have people meeting with some of your colleagues, not you, Shlomo, but some of the people on this call literally today talking about these things. I would say the big institutions are increasingly talking about this as a transformational moment. And we're starting to hear quotes like, Steve, can you help us save 1 million hours of work by leveraging your tools? Right? Is there a way for us to, and we literally have a proposal that is literally intended to displace a knowledge-based outsourcer by using some of these more refined workflows and persona-based gen AI tools. So the prompt engineering that we're able to do now is progressing to the level where we're able to help people literally do their job and replace some of the labor. And we're starting to see that in the pipeline, starting to see the adoption curve, a change in tenor from, I need to meet regulations to, I'm starting to get confidence that we can, and let's see if we can develop a business case to do that. So I think there's some pretty exciting green

shoots in that respect. Thank you.

Our final question will come from the line of Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to follow up on the MIS revenue growth in 4Q. It looked like I was looking specifically at the MIS transaction revenue growth. It was up 29% in 4Q, but the issuance growth was up 42%. So I was curious what drove that delta. It looks like it was maybe on the corporate finance side, but yeah, maybe you can help explain a little bit better why the revenue was weaker relative to issuance. Thank you.

Yeah, it really relates to bank loans. So there was very robust bank loan issuance by our definition. We include repricings as issuance volume. And so in the fourth quarter, something like 55% of bank loan volume was repricings. And that's the highest that we've seen in any order for a long time. And the economics on repricings are much different for us. So actually, if you strip out bank loans, essentially if you just take out bank loans out of issuance and take bank loans out of transaction revenues, we would have had, by our definition, issuance of something like mid-teens percent growth, but we would have had, call it 30% transaction revenue growth. So I think that's primarily what was going on there. One other thing I'd add is we do see a lot of repricing activity in January, so strong loan volume, but repricing activity. So keep that in mind.

And I will now turn the call back to Rob for any closing remarks.

Okay. Well, thanks everybody for

your time and your questions. And we look forward to talking to you in the first quarter. Goodbye.

This concludes Moody's Corporation, fourth quarter, 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, immediately following this call, the company will post the MIS revenue breakdown under the investor resources section of the Moody's IR homepage. Additionally, a replay will be made available after the call on the Moody's IR website. Thank you.