S&P Global Inc.

Good morning and welcome to S&P Global's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings.

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're 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. As noted in the press release and slides, financial guidance provided today assumes contributions from mobility for the full year and excludes any impact from anticipated stranded costs. The company expects to update adjusted guidance to exclude mobility and institute gap guidance upon completion of the spin. 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 the press release. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Martina Chung. Martina?

Thank you, Mark. We had an excellent year in 2025, and we're very pleased with the results we delivered. We saw strong revenue growth meaningful expansion of our operating margins and 14% growth in EPS. We exceeded our initial guidance from last February on revenue growth, operating margin and EPS while returning 113% of adjusted free cash flow to shareholders. We just announced the 53rd consecutive year of dividend increases and we repurchased more than $5 billion in stock in 2025. Financial results like this are the evidence of a committed, tightly aligned and disciplined executive team and underscore the talent and dedication of our people. I'm exceptionally proud of what our people accomplished in my first full year as CEO. We launched our new strategic vision at our investor day in November, and we're delivering against that vision of advancing essential intelligence. As we'll discuss today, we continue to see real momentum in our strategic initiatives, and across our enterprise capabilities. While a very dynamic macroeconomic and geopolitical backdrop persists, we believe we are entering 2026 with more tailwinds than headwinds and the strength to seize the opportunities ahead of us. Our financial guidance, which Eric will outline in a moment, calls for strong organic constant currency revenue growth, continued margin expansion, and EPS growth. Our confidence in that outlook is bolstered by strong performance indicators for our subscription businesses. While we're taking a prudent approach to our outlook for the market-driven components of the business, we see encouraging leading indicators that could provide incremental tailwinds to the business. As always, we carefully monitor and assess the macroeconomic environment, geoeconomic and geopolitical dynamics, and the health of our customer and markets. While it's difficult to predict many of the factors that could impact our business this early in the year, we believe there are more tailwinds than headwinds and expect to deliver real value to our customers and profitable growth for our shareholders. Now, turning to our enterprise financial results. As I mentioned previously, the financial results show the strength of the business and demonstrate the discipline and execution of our people. When we compare the full year results to the original guidance that we had given for 2025 back in February, we are pleased to see that every division delivered revenue growth within or above those original guidance ranges, and every division delivered operating margins at or above the high end of those original guidance ranges. We also see the strength that comes from the diversification of our revenue in 2025. Through the year, we saw disruption in the issuance markets impacting our ratings business, following Liberation Day in April. We saw incremental sanctions impacting our energy business midway through the year, and we saw volatility in the volume-driven products emerge in market intelligence. Despite these various challenges in 2025, we raised our enterprise guidance through the second half of the year, and we still delivered revenue growth at the high end, with margins and EPS very near the high end of that elevated guidance. We were able to do this while still making incremental strategic investments to drive future growth. Now, as we outlined for you back in November, our strategic vision for S&P Global is to advance essential intelligence. We've been providing essential intelligence to our customers for over 150 years. Over 95% of our revenue is tied to proprietary benchmarks, differentiated data, and critical workflow tools. And we expect that percentage to increase over time. We have been a trusted partner for our customers for a very long time. And every day our customers are telling us that they need our differentiated and proprietary data. They need transparency at opaque markets. They need trusted benchmarks and measures of risk and performance. The message from our customers is consistent and simple. What they need most is what we uniquely provide. Our mission is to advance essential intelligence and deliver that at scale better than anyone in the world. As I shared with you in November, we're going to achieve this through three strategic objectives. The first is advancing market leadership. We have some of the most trusted brands in our markets. We start from a position of great strength to continue to grow in our existing markets, identifying new use cases for our existing products and constantly innovating to develop new products in these foundational areas. The second is expanding into high growth adjacencies. These are the initiatives you hear us talk about frequently. private markets, energy expansion, supply chain, decentralized finance, and other rapidly evolving areas of the market. The third objective is amplifying our enterprise capabilities. We've made great progress with our enterprise data office and our chief client office in 2025, and we're scaling out additional enterprise capabilities through process engineering, upskilling and training our people on new technologies, and leveraging leading AI solutions, including those we've built ourselves. These advancements generate value for our customers and our people at scale. In 2025, we made great strides in several of our key strategic focus areas. We delivered exceptional results in private markets. We expanded in private credit ratings. We significantly enhanced our private markets tools like iLevel with new AI functionality and launched private equity benchmarks and indices. We announced and completed the acquisition of WithIntelligence, and our partnership with Cambridge Associates and Mercer. We are well on our way to building the most comprehensive solution set in the world for the private markets. In energy expansion, we launched AI capabilities, making much of our research and insights available through Microsoft Copilot. We launched enhanced gas, power, and commodity flow intelligence, and introduced new integrated energy scenarios to help market participants make sense of a challenging global energy environment. And we integrated the 451 team with our power team to connect the most sought after themes from our customers and unlock new insights on data centers and power. We also continue to see capital flowing into the energy ecosystem, which benefits multiple divisions, including ratings. 2025 was truly a leap forward for S&P Global in AI. We launched new AI products and features in every division, many of which were on display at our investor day. Using a platform agnostic approach to GenAI solutions, we have announced collaborations with several major technology partners. We are also moving quickly in decentralized finance. We'll have more to share in this exciting area in the quarters to come, but we were thrilled to launch the world's most well-known index, the S&P 500, on-chain in collaboration with Centrifuge in 2025, in addition to other exciting innovations. Now, turning to our enterprise capabilities. Two of the most impactful accomplishments of 2025 are the establishment and development of our Chief Client Office and our Enterprise Data Office. As you know, the Chief Client Office was established to deepen engagement with our large strategic customers at the most senior levels. In 2025, the CCO enabled S&P Global to bring the full enterprise value proposition to our clients. We have elevated engagement not just with our clients' business leaders, but also with their heads of technology, AI, and data science. Not only does that give us commercial advantages, but also gives us early insight into our customers' needs and challenges. In addition to the strategic meetings with the C-suite, our technologists are meeting with data scientists, AI experts, and developers that work in customer organizations to co-develop solutions that we can leverage across our customer base. We are finding time and time again that the challenges impacting our largest customers are mirrored in many ways among our other customers, and the solutions that we bring to CCO clients can be sold at scale. While still very early, we believe that the CCO, in collaboration with division teams and with Kensho Labs, will be a meaningful driver of both revenue growth and product innovation going forward. Our Enterprise Data Office also made meaningful headway in 2025. We are finding more ways to bring our data together, faster methods to ingest, integrate, and distribute data, and are communicating more effectively across the technology teams to drive efficiencies. One of our goals with the EDO is to reduce run rate expenses by more than 20% by the end of 2027. And we are well ahead of pace to achieve that goal. In 2025 alone, we reduced manual data processing meaningfully with more than half of our total data workflows now processed via automation tools. We also eliminated more than 10% of applications in use and simplified the EDO technology stack to standardize on the best applications and reduce costs. One of the areas where we quickly saw the impact of our enterprise progress is in the integration of with intelligence. Through our collaboration across teams, including strategy, corporate development, finance, technology, legal, and others, we were able to shorten the close process to less than six weeks. That was an incredible accomplishment for an acquisition of this size and was much faster than our original assumed timeline. What our data and technology teams were able to accomplish after the close was no less impressive. We linked more than 75% of the fund manager and investor data sets in less than a month through the application of Kensho Link. We enabled single sign-on or SSO through Capital IQ Pro in January, which immediately helped us identify cross-sell opportunities. In collaboration with our chief client office and market intelligence, we held 20 regional training sessions for commercial teams and generated more than 200 new sales leads and cross-sell opportunities within the first 60 days. We've also already realized millions in cost synergies since the deal closed at the end of November. It's been truly exciting to see our people embrace the enterprise mindset and come together to create value. 2025 was an incredible year of progress and results. Now I'd like to turn to 2026. We're entering 2026 with a strong backdrop for build issuance, but we're lapping another record year. In 2025, build issuance increased 11%. and surpassed $4.3 trillion. This creates a challenging compare for 2026, but there are several drivers that give us confidence in the potential for continued positive growth. Our base case assumption therefore starts with bill issuance up low to mid single digits in 2026. We continue to see favorable market conditions with spreads remaining low and our expectation for two rate cuts from the US Fed in the back half of the year. We also see encouraging maturity walls, as I'll discuss in a moment. M&A tends to be more challenging to predict, but we saw a strong pipeline of deals announced in the back half of 2025 and continue to see pent-up demand given the dry powder in the market. We also saw significant debt issuance from hyperscaler investments in AI infrastructure in the second half of 2025, and we expect that to continue in 2026, albeit spread more throughout the year. Given the phasing of issuance in 2025 and the expectations for 2026, we would expect growth rates to fluctuate from quarter to quarter. We expect build issuance growth year over year in the first quarter, with acceleration in the second quarter as we lap the disruption from last April. Given the difficult compare, we would then expect deceleration in the third quarter before build issuance growth turns negative in the fourth quarter. In the event of macroeconomic distress, elevated market volatility or uncertainty, or a slowdown in economic growth, we would expect build issuance to be lower than our forecast. We could see potential upside if we see elevated M&A, additional pull forward from out-year maturity walls, or greater than expected debt for technology and infrastructure projects. Given that refinancing activity tends to be the most predictable issuance in a given year, I wanted to spend an extra moment to discuss what we're seeing for 2026. When comparing the 2026 maturity wall now to the 2025 maturity wall a year ago, we see 12% higher maturities and a stable mix of high yield versus investment grade. The two-year and three-year cumulative maturity walls are also up from last year. While our base case assumption is that we do not see dramatic pull forward from the 27 and 28 walls into 2026, we note that if credit conditions remain highly favorable and we see additional reductions in interest rates, we may start to see more of that debt coming to market early. Now, let me turn to the market factors and commercial conditions we're focused on in 2026. The list of factors on the slide illustrates the market dynamics that could influence our business either positively or negatively in 2026. Importantly, some of these factors can impact different parts of our business in different ways. Market volatility, for example, may temper issuance volumes and create temporary headwinds for ratings. while at the same time driving revenue in the exchange traded derivatives of our indices business. Generally speaking, S&P Global and our customers tend to do better in relatively stable market conditions with strong economic growth. As we look to our customer end markets, we see a reasonably healthy environment for financial services customers and our commercial engagements have been strong. The energy space continues to evolve in the changing geopolitical landscape. We expect oil prices to remain fairly stable but lower in 2026 than we saw on average over the last few years. We continue to see great engagement from our customers, strong demand for our differentiated offerings and excitement as we push forward on product innovation and growth. Before I turn it over to Eric, I want to pause and reflect on everything we accomplished in 2025 and what gives me so much confidence in the long-term success of S&P Global. We have a clearly defined and well-articulated strategy. We have assembled an incredible team of leaders and we are all aligned behind the mission of advancing essential intelligence. When I speak to our large strategic customers, I routinely get the sense that we have deeper and more constructive relationships there than we have ever had before. We see both cyclical and secular tailwinds driving our business in the coming years. We've executed very well in our subscription business to create great momentum into 2026, and we continue to find new avenues to leverage processes and technologies, to improve our productivity and free up capital to invest in future growth and steadily improve margins. I'm very proud of what we've delivered in 2025, and we're excited about our opportunity to drive value in 2026. Eric, over to you.