S&P Global Inc.

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 .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 today's S&P Global Second Quarter 2025 earnings call. Presenting on today's call are Martina Chung, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Eric Obwoff, Chief Financial Officer. 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 .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 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In today's earnings 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 company's business from the same perspective as management. The earnings release contains financial measures calculated in accordance with GAAP that corresponds to the non-GAAP measures we are providing, and the press release and the supplemental deck contain reconciliations of such GAAP and non-GAAP measures. The financial metrics we will 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% 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 Martina Chung. Martina?

Thank you, Mark. We're pleased with the strong results we saw in the second quarter this year. Revenue increased 6% year over year with subscription revenue increasing 7%. We are balancing important strategic investments with disciplined expense management which allowed us to deliver 150 basis points of trading 12-month margin expansion. We continue our track record of very strong capital returns returning nearly $950 million to shareholders in the second quarter through dividends and share repurchases. Impressive financial results like these are the result of consistent execution across our divisions. But we are particularly pleased with the results we're seeing from our market intelligence division which saw an acceleration to 7% organic constant currency revenue growth and more than 200 basis points of margin expansion in the quarter. The new leadership team in market intelligence has made real progress on a revenue transformation effort and we are seeing the impact across the global book of business. They have also linked arms with our chief client office and embraced the opportunity to help each other engage more deeply with large customers as I'll discuss in more detail shortly. We also continue to see strong growth in private markets revenue and will provide update on our efforts in our ratings business today as well. We are pushing forward in exciting ways to expand our leadership and artificial intelligence. In the last few months we've introduced a number of exciting new products but also reached meaningful milestones with hyperscale partners to expand distribution of our differentiated data and thought leadership content while still preserving our intellectual property and direct customer relationships. Before I move into the deeper discussion of our results I wanted to provide a quick update on the mobility separation we announced last quarter. We are excited to announce that Bill Eager, currently CEO of Carfax, has been named the president of S&P Global Mobility and the CEO designate for the planned standalone public company. Bill is a tremendous leader with over 20 years of experience at Carfax and we look forward to introducing him to investors and at the appropriate time. Edward Tavernier will remain on as a strategic advisor through September 30th of this year. Edward has been a great partner in our executive leadership team since the merger with IHS Markets. We want to thank him for the incredible leadership and vision he has provided for the mobility division over the years and wish him all the best going forward. Shifting to what we're seeing in the markets and the business now. I want to begin with the momentum we've created in our commercial team so far this year. We created the chief client office as part of our leadership transition late last year and we have seen a very promising first couple of quarters. The CCO is focused on making sure that our largest strategic customer accounts view S&P Global as an essential partner in their success. Currently about 130 customers are part of our CCO initiative and we will continue to add customers selectively over time. We're maintaining some flexibility as we continue to learn but the ultimate goal will be to capture the largest and most strategic relationships we have while making sure we can still provide individualized attention to these accounts and keep the team relatively small. We've strengthened relationships at the C-suite with these customers and we've established efficient communication channels with dedicated reps who can help address any subject across all divisions. We continue to focus on increasing awareness with these customers and making sure that they know everything that we can do for them. This is especially impactful when we can align our world-class products with the strategic priorities of our customers like private markets, wealth management, AI, and energy transition. In recent months we've been able to demonstrate that value clearly to a number of customers evidenced by a 20 million dollar multi-year contract we signed for direct indexing in the last year. We also announced a contract with Barclays that includes a comprehensive suite of S&P Global products, data, and solutions powered by Capital IQ Pro and will support Barclays businesses across the enterprise. I also wanted to provide an update on the transformation we're driving in our market intelligence division. With 7% organic constant currency revenue growth in the second quarter it's clear our initiatives are already bearing fruit. Sugata and his team have led a remarkable effort to align the product and commercial teams and improve sales execution and customer engagement. With new leadership across the commercial organization we have already seen the results of the discipline, operational excellence, and focus on execution. We simplified sales incentive programs to better align with our key priorities with respect to customer retention, new sales, pipeline performance, and competitive wins. Beyond the headline financial metrics we're also seeing further improvement in retention rates with our net renewal rate up more than one full percentage point year over year. Our deep engagement with customers is helping them to realize more value from S&P Global's products and allowing us to better realize the economics of that value while still improving win rates. Just to offer a few more examples in the second quarter alone. In addition to the deals I already mentioned the team closed a multi-million dollar deal with a global technology company that included a 20% increase in annual contract value. Another multi-million dollar deal with a global investment bank that included a 25% increase at ACB and a multi-million dollar expansion deal with a large European bank. This is nowhere near a comprehensive list of wins in the quarter but highlight the clear trends that we're seeing that our largest customers are looking for ways to consolidate vendors and they increasingly view S&P Global as strategic partner that can help them do that. We're excited about what we're seeing in the division and remain confident in our ability to continue accelerating the organic growth and deliver the financial results we've guided to. These results are even more impressive given the uncertainty we saw to start the second quarter. Build issuance declined 4% year over year in the second quarter. As noted in our last call the issuance environment was negatively impacted by global trade and tariff uncertainty especially in April. We saw market concerns moderate as we progressed through the quarter leading to better than expected build issuance. Bank loan build issuance was materially below the levels we saw in the second quarter of last year. Recall last year's second quarter included a triple digit increase in bank loan issuance which we lapped this quarter. Importantly we saw some recovery in June which was the second highest June we've seen since at least 2019 coming in just shy of last year's high watermark. Structured finance was strong in the second quarter though we did see a modest decline as we lapped a 60% growth quarter from last year. Equity markets were also stronger than we expected in the second quarter with U.S. equity markets rebounding quickly from the lows we saw in April. We also benefited from strong net inflows for our indices and strong volumes in our exchange traded derivatives. As Eric will discuss in a moment our outlook for the rest of the year assumes flat build issuance in the back half of the year and assumes that U.S. equity markets are flat from June 30th. To touch briefly on the broader macroeconomic picture we're expecting one to two rate cuts from the U.S. Fed in the second half of the year and we're expecting slow but positive GDP growth across all major economic zones. We're also expecting oil prices to be slightly lower in the back half compared to the first half with dated Brent crude expected to be in the mid 60s. Now turning to private credit. While private credit still represents a relatively small portion of our total ratings revenue our private credit strategy is an important part of our broader private markets initiative. Our total private markets revenue saw solid growth in the second quarter with the private credit component being a major driver of that growth. For decades S&P has brought transparency, credibility and objective assessments of risk to the public debt markets and we are focused on creating that same value in private credit markets. We offer an array of products in private markets including middle market CLO ratings, fund ratings, structured credit ratings, entity ratings, credit estimates and private credit analyses. Crucial to our and our customer success in this market is the fact that our criteria and methodologies are consistent across public and private markets. When assessing private credit we utilize the same risk factors that we use to assess public market debt. That consistency across public and private markets empowers us to create similar customer value and realize similar economics across those markets. That consistency is highly valued by the various important stakeholder groups we serve in private credit. We moved early several years ago to engage frequently and deeply with major private market participants to make sure we were well positioned to serve that market. We have very strong relationships with sponsors, bankers, institutional investors and asset owners. These crucial stakeholders frequently reach out to S&P Global to leverage our expertise across the broad spectrum of risk and we see incredible opportunities to further develop these relationships. We have taken a global approach over the last several years as well. Even before the spike in private credit that in 2022 we were engaging with stakeholders not just in the Americas but also in Europe, the Middle East and in Asia. Regions outside the US and Europe have rapidly developed and evolved in credit markets and there is a growing interest in private markets. Now looking to the latest in our AI innovation. In the last few months we've seen some incredible progress in our AI and data distribution strategy as we work with hyperskill partners across the ecosystem. Through the introduction of AI ready data sets from all divisions we're able to make our differentiated data available through hyperskill platforms around the world. We've made our renowned thought leadership content from Commodity Insights available through Copilot and we announced a collaboration with Anthropic to integrate S&P Global data sets with CLAWD through the Model Context Protocol or MCP. Through MCP CLAWD users can access our proprietary data sets in real time during conversations but only for S&P Global subscribers. Our data is not part of Anthropic's training data. These are just two examples of the many .E.I. collaborations leveraging our model agnostic Kensho LLM Ready API. These integrations require customers to have subscriptions to these data sets from S&P Global and we maintain both the intellectual property rights and the direct customer relationships. We're really excited about the growth opportunities these partnerships present as we look to give customers access to our data and products wherever they want to work. Ultimately we may also see new customers accessing content over these channels. We also launched the .E.I. powered Credit Companion for Ratings Direct on Capital IQ Pro. Credit Companion has been fine-tuned by our ratings analysts who use it in their own research work and now Ratings Direct customers will have access to this powerful tool. Credit Companion was designed to enhance credit analysis workflows and powers comparative credit risk analysis between peers. It also provides intelligence summaries and insights from the vast library of published research. We're confident that Credit Companion can improve productivity and efficiency for our customers because we've seen it work for our own analysts already. We're also very excited about the innovation in the digital world space with our indexes division. We recently developed the SPICE index builder which gives professionals access to over 400,000 indices and enables them to create custom indices. While we've enabled custom indices for some time the launch of an AI powered index builder can decrease the time to develop equity indices from an average of approximately one month down to two days. Lastly our efforts to upskill and develop our people are showing incredible progress. When we started talking about Spark Assist our internally developed AI assistant we noted that in its first few months we had seen 14,000 of our people start to use the tool representing about 30% of our workforce. In the years since then we've seen that increase to more than 65% of our people globally actively using Spark Assist. Our people continue to build out new use cases and publish those sparks to our internal Spark Store so colleagues around the world can also use them. The number of sparks on the store has more than doubled since February with well over 3,000 published sparks now available to our people. These innovations are enhancing the productivity of our people in meaningful ways. This innovation is all part of a years-long strategy we've had in place to build out this functionality with the ultimate goal of powering agentic ecosystems and really unlocking the potential of the data and technology we have at S&P Global. Building on the foundation of our data we've built an embedded powerful AI enablement tool through Kensho and we now see Gen. AI enhancements are becoming a standard across our product portfolio. The next evolution is true grounded agentic ecosystems and we are looking forward to sharing the broader multi-year vision for S&P Global's agentic AI strategy at our investor day in November. Now turning to our financial results Eric will walk through the second quarter results in more detail in a moment but we've had a great first half of the year. In the second quarter we had revenue growth in every division and our disciplined execution drove 150 basis points of margin expansion on a trailing 12-month basis. We're encouraged by the results so far and confident that we'll be able to deliver a strong second half as well. Eric over to you.