S&P Global Inc.

Good morning and welcome to S&P Global's third quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I'd like to inform you that this call is being recorded for broadcast. All participants are in a listen-only mode. We will open the conference to questions and answers after the presentation and instructions will follow at that time. To access the webcast and slides, go to investor.spglobal.com. If you need any additional technical assistance, please press star zero and I will assist you momentarily. I would now like to introduce Mr. Mark Grant, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations for S&P Global. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining 2024 Earnings Call. Presenting on today's call are Doug Peterson, President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris Craig, Interim Chief Financial Officer, and Martina Chung, incoming President and Chief Executive Officer, and current President of S&P Global Ratings. We issued a press release with our results earlier today. In addition, we have posted a supplemental slide deck with additional information on our results and guidance. If you need a copy of the release and financial schedules or the supplemental deck, they can be downloaded at investor.spglobal.com. The matters discussed in today's conference call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including projections, estimates, and descriptions of future events. Any such statements are based on current expectations and current economic conditions and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from results anticipated in these forward-looking statements. Additional information concerning these risks and uncertainties can be found in our forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In today's press release and during the conference call, we are providing non-GAAP adjusted financial information. This information is provided to enable investors to make meaningful comparisons of the company's operating performance between periods and to view the company's business from the same perspective as management. The press release contains financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP that corresponds to the non-GAAP measures we're providing, and the press release and the supplemental deck contain reconciliations of such GAAP and non-GAAP measures. The financial metrics we'll be discussing today refer to non-GAAP adjusted metrics unless explicitly noted otherwise. I would also like to call your attention to certain European regulations. Any investor who has or expects to obtain ownership of 5 percent or more of S&P Global should contact Investor Relations to better understand the potential impact of this legislation on the investor and the company. We are aware that we have some media representatives with us on the call. However, this call is intended for investors, and we would ask that questions from the media be directed to our Media Relations team, whose contact information can be found in the release. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Doug Peterson. Doug?

Thank you, Mark. S&P Global delivered exceptional financial results in the third quarter. Total revenue increased 16% year-over-year, marking the third consecutive quarter of accelerating revenue growth. Our ratings division continues to contribute meaningfully to our outperformance, with transaction revenue increasing more than 80% year-over-year. Revenue from subscription products across the company increased 8% year-over-year as customers continue to turn to S&P Global to provide the benchmarks, data, thought leadership, and tools they need to make crucial decisions in today's macroeconomic landscape. we delivered 330 basis points of trailing 12-month margin expansion and 21% growth in EPS as we continue to invest prudently across the business and return capital to shareholders. Year-to-date, we've repurchased $2 billion in shares and plan to repurchase $1.3 billion more through year-end. In addition to our strong financial results, we continue to invest in innovation, particularly around generative AI and our strategic initiatives, which we'll touch on shortly. We also continue the important work of optimizing our portfolio of products in order to create the most customer and shareholder value. We closed the divestiture of FinCentric during the third quarter and today announced the planned divestiture of PrimeOne. PrimeOne sits within our market intelligence division and won't have a material impact on either the division or the company's financial results. That said, the divestiture further enables the company to focus our efforts on the best opportunities to drive long-term profitable growth. Last week, we announced management changes in conjunction with our CEO transition. Martina will walk through that later in the call. Now, turning to market and commercial conditions, the debt, equity, and commodities markets all continue to show improvement, benefiting our businesses. With more than $1 trillion in billed issuance in the third quarter, we've surpassed $3 trillion year to date. It's very encouraging to see how participants in the debt markets, both public and private, consistently turn to S&P global ratings to help assess risk, balance exposures across portfolios, and assess credit conditions. The experience and expertise of our analysts, the breadth and depth of our coverage across credit asset classes and geographies, and the relevance of our methodologies and thought leadership has all served the markets very well thus far in 2024. We've also seen some improvement in equity markets as our flagship indices like the S&P 500 have performed very well year-to-date. We continue to see gradual increases in IPO volumes, which benefit some of our volume-driven businesses, and M&A activity has also started to show early signs of recovery. The commodities markets have remained strong as well, especially in end markets like energy that are important to our business. We continue to see retention rates improve year-over-year in commodity insights and are very pleased with both the execution and the market reception of the new products. That said, we've been calling out headwinds among our financial services customers for some time now. Those have continued in the third quarter with elongated sales cycles, as well as signs of increased price sensitivity and vendor consolidation. Vendor consolidation has historically been beneficial to SAP Global, given the breadth and diversity of products that we offer, though the pricing environment has had an impact this year. For the last few quarters, we've noted our expectation that retention rates in financial services would be slightly below last year. That said, cancellations among our smaller customers in market intelligence caused retention rates to dip below our expectations slightly in the third quarter, and we expect that to continue to impact the business in the fourth quarter. We'll discuss the impact of all these moving pieces on our guidance in a moment, but the aggregate impact is that we are substantially increasing our outlook on revenue growth, operating margins, and EPS for 2024. Now let's turn to activity in the debt markets. For billed issuance, we saw a 76% increase year over year in the third quarter, as we saw strong growth across all products. Refinancing activity remains very strong, including some pull forward out of 2025 and even out of 2026, but certainly within the normal ranges of what we would expect at this time of the year. We're starting to see more activity beyond refinancing, with some of the outperformance in the third quarter driven by opportunistic issuance around dividend recapitalizations and the beginning of a recovery in M&A activity. Market conditions, specifically the tight spreads and stability around the rate outlook, have continued to be major drivers of issuance in the third quarter and inform our improved outlook for the remainder of 2024 as well. As we look to additional rate cuts over the next 12 to 18 months, we continue to expect strong demand among investors for public debt. as the current yields are expected to moderate somewhat as rates come down. Turning to vitality, newer enhanced products generated $377 million in the third quarter. This represents 11% of our total revenue and is consistent with what we reported last quarter. Key contributors to our vitality index are updated from last quarter as we've seen strong demand for Carfax listings in the Carfax Banking Insurance Group. We also see strong growth in energy transition and climate and LNG price assessment products from our commodity insights division. We're encouraged by the acceleration and the pace of innovation at S&P Global and look forward to maintaining our vitality index at or above the 10% target. Now, turning to our latest initiatives around generative AI. Each quarter, we've been highlighting just a few of the many ways we've been leveraging both traditional AI and generative AI within S&P Global. In the third quarter, we had a number of new use cases within our products and services, but also within our own internal processes that are very exciting. Within market intelligence, we introduced new advanced analytic solutions and GNI functionality through CapIQ Pro, which allows users to build predictive models, automate workflows, and better identify patterns and data more quickly. Within commodity insights, we enabled cloud delivery of AI-ready data on clean energy technology. This is a great example of our efforts to make sure that the investments we've made to prepare a data sets for ingestion in AI models directly translate into benefits for our customers and economics for our business. Also in commodity insights, we introduced our AI powered chat bot called chat AI to improve the user experience, answer customer questions in real time and help users more quickly discover the valuable insights in our Platts Connect platform. Within mobility, We're leveraging GenAI and animation automation to embed the Carfax CarFox directly within the vehicle history reports that customers use. Soon, the animated Fox will appear on additional products, including CarCare user dashboards and our listings products, driving deeper customer engagement and enhancing brand affinity. Lastly, we continue to invest in our people so they can take full advantage of these incredible technologies as they emerge. Through our recently launched Spark AI Academy, Our employees received meaningful training on prompt engineering and other insights into how they can best leverage AI in their own daily work. Not only does this make our employees more productive, but it allows us to cross-pollinate new use cases across the organization. It's been inspiring to see some of these early use cases emerge in code development, document analysis, record keeping, and process improvement, and the way people are sharing their new skills across S&P Global. We're confident that AI will be a strong influence to improve efficiency, productivity, the quality of life for years to come, and that over time, you will see these improvements in our growth and profitability. Turning to our financial results, with our consistent focus on innovation and execution, we're pleased with the exceptional financial results across the enterprise this quarter. By serving our customers effectively and efficiently, we delivered exceptional growth and profitability in the third quarter. Now let me turn to Chris Craig, our interim CFO, to review the financial results. Chris, over to you.