S&P Global Inc.

Good morning and welcome to S&P Global's first quarter 2026 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 and Treasurer for S&P Global. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining today's S&P Global first quarter 2026 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'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. 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. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Martina Chung. Martina?

Thank you, Mark. We are pleased with the results that we achieved in the first quarter. Revenue increased 10% year-over-year, or 9%, on an organic constant currency basis. Revenue from our subscription products increased 6% year-over-year. We saw even stronger growth in our market-driven businesses this quarter, with ratings and indices both showing remarkable resilience. On a trading 12-month basis, we delivered 140 basis points of margin expansion and increased adjusted diluted EPS by 14% year-over-year in the quarter. We demonstrated a continued commitment to disciplined capital allocation, returning $1 billion to shareholders through share repurchases in addition to our cash dividends in the quarter. We delivered these results in an incredibly volatile and dynamic operating environment, making clear progress in each of the three pillars of the strategic vision we outlined at our investor day. While we're pleased with the innovation, execution, and results that we delivered in the first quarter, we acknowledge the macro uncertainty that has increased in recent months. Even if conflicts are resolved quickly from this point, we expect it to take some time for supply chains to return to normal. In recent months, the geopolitical and economic backdrop has shifted and become substantially more challenging for many of our customers. The conflict in Iran has shocked energy markets and supply chains. This has led to much higher energy and commodity prices while also elevating volatility. The longer the duration of this conflict, the broader and more severe the impact on global supply chains and markets across sectors. This quarter, we also saw private credit navigate increased scrutiny, wider spreads, and elevated redemptions. We expect strong growth in private markets over the medium term, but this growth will require increased transparency from data and benchmarks, which is an important area of focus for S&P Global. Throughout all of this, the pace of technology innovation has only accelerated. Clearly, the markets are reacting quite aggressively to new AI frontier model headlines, shifts in diplomatic initiatives, and the unpredictability of the current environment. That manifests in volatility across the global markets. We've seen broad dispersion in the performance of different sectors of the equity markets, elevated volatility in equity and commodity markets, and shifting expectations for central bank actions. Despite the turmoil in the macro environment, issuance was resilient. Build issuance increased 14% year-over-year in the first quarter, primarily driven by strength in investment grade. Investment grade benefited from hyperscaler investments in AI infrastructure. Notably, even without the hyperscaler issuance, investment grade delivered healthy growth, in part benefiting from several large M&A transactions. Growth was partly offset by a high team decline in bank loan volumes as we lapped a very difficult compare in the first quarter of 2025. We saw spreads widen slightly in the quarter as a reaction to uncertainty around AI, private credit, and geopolitical conflicts. However, spreads are still below historical norms. While first quarter build issuance was above our initial expectations, Much of the outperformance was driven by hyperscaler issuance that our original guidance assumed would be spread more throughout the year. Our full year expectations for the debt markets are largely unchanged. Everything we see reinforces our vision for the company, and our priority remains on executing our strategy. We are committed to our mission to advance essential intelligence by advancing our market leadership, expanding into high growth adjacencies, and amplifying enterprise capabilities and AIs. Customers are coming to S&P Global with increased urgency for our differentiated data and benchmarks, insights, and tools to make timely and informed decisions in this rapidly evolving operating and market environment. For instance, we saw record revenue and attendance at CERA Week, the premier global conference addressing the intersection of energy, finance, technology, and geopolitics. This year's conference hosted a record 11,000 attendees and more than 2,300 companies from over 90 countries. We are helping our clients make sense of and manage the spike in volatility. We posted record-setting revenue in global trading services and energy and record quarterly average daily volumes for the S&P 500 in indices. We are also advancing our leadership as we help our customers unlock the potential of AI. As we discussed at our Investor Day, we are deploying AI-native solutions and tools like Chat AI and Document Intelligence. for those seeking speed and scale on our platforms. For those who want to build their own AI-enabled or agentic solutions, we are increasingly making our data accessible via standard protocols like MCP. We've seen meaningful enhancement to the value that our products are creating for customers. More than a third of our CapIQ Pro users engage with the AI features we've launched, including ChatIQ and Document Intelligence. We also saw tremendous growth in the usage of S&P Global data in the quarter. In March, we shared that nearly 150 customers across the market intelligence and energy divisions were interacting with our data through AI applications like Cloud and Copilot. We now have more than 300 customers under contract or in trial periods for Kensho LLM Ready APIs. In addition to the rapid growth in customers, we are seeing large increases in the volume of data that's consumed directly via API calls from customers and through these platforms. For instance, in the first quarter, the volume of API calls made by our customers was more than five times the volume that we saw just one quarter ago. Volumes doubled month over month just from February to March. We can see early indications of this translating into economic benefits. ACV growth among customers who use our AI solutions is outpacing growth from other customers by a wide margin. Growth in market intelligence is 30% higher among AI customers compared to others. and growth among AI customers and energy is double the growth rate among other customers. Chief client office customers are also actively seeking the deep expertise of our in-house Kensho team. 25% of these clients are engaged with our Kensho Labs technologists to explore opportunities to leverage our technology and data to help solve their most challenging problems. All in, our approach to leveraging AI in S&P Global products and S&P Global data in AI platforms is resonating with customers in a meaningful way. While it will take some time to see exactly how this manifests in our financial results, we are confident that the value we create for our customers is increasing and the economics will reflect that over time. At our investor day, we provided a breakdown of the revenue that S&P Global generates based on different categories of our data, benchmarks, and workflow tools. We noted that less than 5% of total revenue comes from undifferentiated data. Even within market intelligence, undifferentiated data contributes only 12% of revenue, but we wanted to share the full breakdown of the division here. Advisory, consulting, and events constitute about 11% of market intelligence revenue, and our workflow tools, which include a portion of Capital IQ and all of Enterprise Solutions, constitute about 37%. Our proprietary and curated data includes proprietary data based on our intellectual property, as well as curated, contributory, and reference data. For our curated data, perhaps the biggest challenge in replicating some of these datasets like Compustat and SNL is the means by which we aggregated these datasets to begin with. Often, employees would have to physically scan microfiche and paper documents in local offices. While some of that data may be publicly available, many of these types of datasets are only available in digital formats from S&P Global. Importantly, Market Intelligence is also the distribution platform for our ratings content through Ratings Direct on Capital IQ Pro and Ratings Express. Contributory data sets include products and data like Visible Alpha and With Intelligence. We also have reference data in this bucket, which is based on intellectual property owned or co-owned by S&P Global, like the Global Industry Classification Standards, or GICs, and Lonex IDs, or LX IDs. We also generate unique proprietary data from our events, including our private markets events. The WIS intelligence team collects insights through engagement with LPs that help GPs target more accurately based on fund, strategy, sector, and regional capital commitments. This unique insight is available through our intentions and preferences data set. One important point is that we have attributed the revenue from Capital IQ across three categories, benchmarks, workflow tools, and undifferentiated data. While many of our customers would likely attribute less value to the undifferentiated data, we wanted to take a conservative approach to this analysis. That breakdown is important because it highlights the multifaceted value proposition for Capital IQ Pro. When we talk about Capital IQ Pro, many investors often focus on our core platform or desktop offering. However, CapIQ Pro's value to our customers extends far beyond the desktop to the data, business logic, and tools that are housed within the platform. As I mentioned earlier, we are deploying AI-native solutions and tools for those seeking speed and scale on CapIQ Pro, including ChatIQ and ChartExplainer. These features are already driving customer engagement, and we expect many of our customers will continue to consume our content and data primarily through an integrated desktop solution. Other customers will have an interest in interacting with our content in their own AI environments and in third-party productivity tools like Cloud and ChatGPT. Much of our data is accessible via Model Context Protocol, or MCP, and other standard protocols to customers in these environments. Our branded custom business logic and calculation engines, as well as many of the tools that exist in CapIQ Pro, will integrate with platforms like Copilot and Cloud. Our customers are on their own AI journeys and adopting these new platforms in different ways, depending on urgency, comfort level, and regulatory sensitivity. We will continue to invest in new ways to create value for our customers, including delivery through MCP and agent-to-agent protocol to ensure that customers can access our data and tools where they need it. And as usage increases and use cases expand, we expect to align the economics with the value we create through price. In the first quarter, we saw a great deal of innovation, including new products, new features, and new services for our customers. Within market intelligence, we continue to make progress in the private markets with our partnership with Cambridge Associates and Mercer. In our energy division, we just wrapped up the best CERA week we've ever had. We unveiled our new AI-native upstream product for data and insights called CERA Titan. As we've discussed with you previously, we are in the process of completely revamping the upstream business within our energy division. 70 customers were able to demo the new platform and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We immediately saw an increase in leads and sales pipeline for upstream data and insights. And one large strategic customer was so pleased with the new platform that we were able to close a large renewal with a meaningful increase in contract value. In addition to improving our data and insight solutions, we also announced in a separate press release that we have signed an agreement to divest the software portfolio in our Upstream business. And we expect that to close in the second half of 2026 or early 2027. This allows us to more tightly focus our efforts on the proprietary data and insights within Upstream. And we believe this will allow us to make faster progress toward returning Upstream to sustained positive growth. We continue to innovate within S&P Dow Jones indices with the launch of IBOX US Treasuries Index as the first major index available as a native digital asset on a blockchain. We also launched an additional tokenized S&P 500 index on blockchain in partnership with Centrifuge. And we launched S&P Lincoln US and Europe Senior Debt Indices. We continue to focus on decentralized finance and fixed income as strategic initiatives and are excited about the slate of new products coming to market. In ratings, we rated the first esoteric ABS issuance backed by Bitcoin as we continue the innovation leadership and digital asset finance that we started in 2018. As we continue to execute our strategy, we are pleased with the results we're delivering for our shareholders with strong revenue growth and margin expansion in every division. With that, I'll hand it over to Eric to walk through the quarter's financial results and the guidance.