S&P Global Inc.

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 and Treasurer for S&P Global. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining today's S&P Global Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. Presenting on today's call are Martina Chung, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Eric Abouaf, 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 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 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 the 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'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% 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 a press release. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Martina Chung. Martina.

Thank you, Mark. In the third quarter, we delivered record revenue, record operating profits, and record EPS. On every headline financial metric, it was the strongest quarter we've ever had. Revenue increased 9% year over year, with subscription revenue increasing 6%. We continue to make important strategic investments while focusing on productivity and disciplined execution. This allowed us to deliver 180 basis points of margin expansion on a trailing 12 month basis and increase our adjusted EPS by 22%. We also returned nearly $1.5 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks since our last earnings call. We're also announcing today that we expect to launch an additional $2.5 billion share repurchase during the fourth quarter following our investor day. This will allow us to return approximately 85% of 2025 adjusted free cash flow while still using the net proceeds from the OSTRA divestiture for additional share repurchases. We now expect to fund the acquisition of WIT Intelligence through a combination of $1 billion in incremental debt and cash on hand. The double-digit revenue growth in our ratings and indices businesses really highlight the incredible value of our global franchises. The investments we've made in prior years, particularly in capacity, new products, and technology, allow us to efficiently meet market demand in these periods of favorable market conditions. Market intelligence also saw another quarter of revenue acceleration on both a reported and organic basis. Improvements in productivity and execution have supported the acceleration of revenue growth and margin expansion in the quarter. We continue to be pleased with the results the teams are delivering. We've been focused on innovation across the company, and we made some very exciting announcements recently that we believe will accelerate our leadership in strategically important areas. As I'll discuss in a moment, we've announced a number of important advancements in AI. We also announced the planned acquisition of Wythe Intelligence, and we announced an exciting partnership with both Cambridge Associates and Mercer. This multi-pronged approach to innovation and growth allows us to be nimble and decisive in our approach to strategic growth and combine assets in unique ways to serve our customers. We also wanted to call attention to our progress in artificial intelligence. And later in the call, I'll give a bit of a preview into some of what we'll be discussing at investor day. This morning, we announced in our press release that we have signed an agreement to divest our enterprise data management and think folio businesses subject to customary closing conditions. This is a continuation of our efforts to streamline and simplify our business while making sure that our products and services are strategically aligned. We will always strive to be good stewards of our portfolio of businesses, and we may continue to make tactical divestitures from time to time. However, with these announcements, we can say that this multi-year exercise of portfolio optimization within market intelligence is substantially complete. Before I get into further details of our performance this quarter, I want to touch on some leadership announcements we've made recently. First, Dan Draper and Swami Kochalakota will be departing as previously announced, and second, Mark Aramo will be retiring. I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to each of them for their meaningful contributions and leadership over the years, and for their help to ensure a smooth transition. With Mark's retirement, Dave Ernstberger will assume the role of sole president of Commodity Insights. We're also thrilled to welcome Catherine Clay as the new CEO of S&P Dow Jones Indices, who will be joining next week. Now turning to the current market conditions. Build issuance increased 13% year-over-year in the quarter, with particular strength in high yield and structured finance. Equity markets continue to perform well in the third quarter, as equity prices and equity inflows both contributed to a very strong quarter in our indices business. With volatility tempering from the elevated levels we saw in the second quarter, our ETD growth moderated somewhat as well, but remained positive against a difficult compare from last year. While we have seen some pull forward of high-yield refinancing from the 2026 maturity wall, we remain encouraged by the fact that for high-yield specifically, the Q4 maturity wall is 6% higher than what we saw at this point last year, while the one-year forward maturity wall also remains healthy. In investment grade, the Q4 wall is very modestly lower than what we saw last year, while the one-year forward maturity wall is still higher. Our outlook for the rest of the year assumes build issuance growth in the mid to high-teens range in the fourth quarter and assumes that U.S. equity markets are flat from September 30th. Eric will walk through what that means for guidance in a moment. Now, turning to some very exciting news from earlier this month, we announced the planned acquisition of WithIntelligence, which we expect to close by early 2026, subject to customary conditions. WithIntelligence brings an incredible amount of differentiated data on private markets, including extensive data in private equity, private credit, infrastructure, hedge funds, and family offices. Importantly, this data is sourced directly from asset allocators and fund managers, S&P Global can combine that contributory data with our already massive data estate covering more than 50 million private companies, our pricing and valuation data from MI, credit ratings and estimates, energy data from CI, and infrastructure and data center information from 451 Research. This unique combination of differentiated private markets data will allow S&P Global to provide essential intelligence to customers that they will not be able to get from any other provider. The team at WithIntelligence has built a truly incredible company, and we believe that we will be able to accelerate the growth of WithIntelligence as part of S&P Global's Market Intelligence division. Our goal is to create the most comprehensive solution for private markets participants anywhere in the world. We're excited to tell you more about our long-term vision for private markets at Investor Day in a couple of weeks, but this acquisition helps us take another meaningful step towards turning that vision into reality. The acquisition of width intelligence is just one of the many ways we are adding to innovation. In the last few months, we've also made some very exciting announcements around our organic product innovation. In the third quarter, we announced AI-powered document search within iLevel. This comes quickly after the launch of automated data ingestion, or ADI, in iLevel earlier this year. iLevel is already the leading platform for private markets portfolio monitoring. And while ADI made it easier for users to bring new data into the platform, document search makes it easier for them to get portfolio intelligence out of the platform. Just last week we announced the launch of Document Intelligence 2.0 within CapsuleIQ Pro. The new document intelligence allows users to extract real insights across multiple documents simultaneously. We've brought deep research functionality and allowed users to leverage that within our data and content without ever having to leave the Capital IQ platform. Users can now analyze multiple documents from different sources, including filings, transcripts, investor presentations, news, and proprietary research, all simultaneously through a familiar conversational interface. We're not just making our products better either. We're also innovating new ways to let users interact with our data and content. In recent months, we've announced collaborations with Microsoft, Anthropic, Google, Salesforce, IBM, and others to make sure that wherever our customers are working, they are doing it with S&P Global differentiated data. While still in early stages and with strong IP protections in place, we view these collaborations as important ways to reach new customers and help our existing customers to get the most out of the leading tools in the market. We'll have demos of all of these innovations available in the products showcase at our investor day in just a few weeks. Back in September, we announced a strategic collaboration with investment firms Cambridge Associates and Mercer to deliver comprehensive private markets performance analytics, and we expect to launch a beta by year end. We also announced a collaboration with Centrifuge to bring the S&P 500 index on-chain, expanding access to the world's most widely recognized benchmarks. Centrifuge is a decentralized infrastructure provider specializing in real-world asset integration. And this collaboration lets us enter the fund tokenization space by licensing the S&P 500 index. In addition to the acquisition of Wythe Intelligence, we also recently announced the completion of our acquisition of ARK Research. ARK Research is the leading independent provider of investment performance data, benchmarking capabilities, and insights in the private wealth market. It maintains the world's largest proprietary data set of more than 500,000 private client portfolios with decades of history. We're thrilled to add ARK Research's impressive capabilities to our wealth initiatives within S&P Dow Jones indices. We continue to look for new ways to meet our customers' needs, and these recent announcements of organic innovation, strong partnerships, and the acquisition of truly differentiated assets are all examples of S&P Global driving greater customer value. We're seeing that show up in our customer conversations as well. In the third quarter, we had another major investment bank adopt Capital IQ Pro as its primary desktop solution in a competitive displacement, driven by the value in our data transparency, modeling flexibility, and strategic support through a full migration to Capital IQ Pro, Visible Alpha, and our Gen AI capabilities. We also had a very strong expansion with a large global asset manager in the quarter where we were able to demonstrate clear customer value across multiple products, particularly within the software solutions of market intelligence and more than triple the total value of the contract. Perhaps the best example of S&P Global moving from strength to strength is in the area of artificial intelligence. S&P moved early and powerfully into the AI space many years ago, And we have continued to grow the business profitably ever since. As many of our investors will recall, we acquired Kensho back in 2018. Including that acquisition since 2018, we have invested over $1 billion in AI innovation across three developmental stages. From 2018 through 2021, we invested to build out foundational capabilities through products like Kensho Link, Kensho Scribe, Kensho Nerd, and Kensho Extract. These tools have enabled us to look across our global data estate, scrub, process, and tag data, and link that data across multiple datasets. We can also create machine-readable files from unstructured data, like audio recordings of earnings transcripts, and automate the ingestion and tagging of new datasets. These foundational capabilities are incredibly important in a world where machine-readable metadata is a prerequisite for usage of any data in an LLM. In 2022, we shifted to early innovation in GenAI. With the advent of large language models, our early actions in AI positioned us very well to leverage our expertise in the field and find exciting applications of LLMs in our ecosystem. We launched the first version of Document Intelligence, as well as ChatIQ within Capital IQ Pro and Conversational Search in our S&P Global Marketplace. As more and more of our customers were coming to us for help finding ways to marry S&P data with the rapidly evolving technology, we accelerated the deployment of GenAI in our products over the last three years. You can see that on the slide. Almost all of the new GenAI-powered products, features, and enhancements were built leveraging the foundational AI technology built by Kensho over the past seven years. Importantly, our AI innovation serves as a powerful example of our ability to leverage our scale our expertise, and our fiscal discipline. The fact that we made such bold investments early on means that we've been able to innovate very efficiently from a financial perspective. Aside from 2022, we have delivered meaningful margin expansion every year since we acquired Kensho in 2018, while still accelerating our AI innovation. We are confident we'll be able to continue driving both technological innovation and margin expansion in the years to come. Which brings me back to our stellar financial results in the third quarter. Eric will provide more details shortly, but our results in the third quarter really spotlight the hard work, dedication, and spectacular execution of our teams around the world. Not only did we see accelerating revenue growth for S&P Global, but we saw another consecutive quarter of acceleration in MI on both a reported and an organic basis. We also achieved meaningful margin expansion on a trailing 12-month basis in every single one of our divisions. We are pleased with the results in the quarter and look forward to seeing many of you at our investor day in just a couple of weeks. Eric, over to you.