S&P Global Inc.

Good morning and welcome to S&P Global's third 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 investors.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 2026 earnings call. Presenting on today's call are Martina Cheung, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Eric Aboaf, Chief Financial Officer. In addition, Cathy Clay, CEO of S&P Dow Jones Indices, will be joining for the Q&A portion of today's call. 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 Security 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 documents and during the conference call, we are providing non-GAAP financial information. Thank you for joining us. All financial information presented in the earnings documents and to be discussed on today's call reflect the company's results on a continuing operations basis unless otherwise stated and prior periods have been recast accordingly to conform to this current presentation. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Martina Cheung. Martina?

Thank you, Mark, and thank you to everyone joining us this morning. I'm also very pleased to have Cathy Clay, CEO of S&P Dow Jones Indices, with us for the Q&A portion of the call. I'll start with the bigger picture before I get into the quarter. Our strategy rests on three priorities, advancing our market leadership, expanding into high growth adjacencies, and amplifying our enterprise capabilities and AI. Today, we're taking the next step on that first priority, sharpening our focus on the markets where we lead. S&P Global is the trust anchor in three of the world's most important markets, credit, equities, and commodities. The strategic review we announced this morning is about putting our investment where we're strongest. Now turning to the quarter, we delivered solid performance in the quarter, driven by strong execution and deep engagement with our customers, and our AI initiatives are starting to show real traction. Revenue growth accelerated in indices, energy, and market intelligence, and we expanded margins in each of these divisions. Ratings revenue growth decelerated modestly, as we expected. but the point I'd make is that the durable, profitable growth of our benchmark franchise remains robust. Benchmarks revenue increased 7% and total recurring revenue across the enterprise increased 8%. With acceleration in subscription revenue, strong incremental margins and continued productivity gains, we delivered 60 basis points of margin expansion in the quarter. On capital return, we have repurchased $4 billion in shares so far this year and we are on track to complete more than $7 billion in repurchases by year end. We're also seeing real improvement in customer traction and in our speed of execution, and that helped to drive revenue growth acceleration in both market intelligence and energy. Our benchmarks remain critical components of market infrastructure across credit, equities and commodities. Supply chain diversification and data centers are topics in nearly every customer conversation we have, and our customers are turning to S&P Global more than ever to make their most important decisions. As you saw in the release this morning, we also announced a strategic review for Capital IQ and associated data businesses, which I'll be discussing more in a moment. Turning to the operating environment, this year has brought geopolitical conflict, shifting rates and swings in commodity markets, but also strong activity across credit and equity markets. Our clients have remained resilient, and as AI and massive capital investment reshape markets, what we're seeing is that trusted benchmarks and data matter more than ever. In the debt markets, there was strong demand for rated debt in the quarter. The issuance environment was favorable, with the impact of higher treasury yields offset by continued near record-tight credit spreads. And S&P Global remains the rating agency of choice for AI-related and hyperscaler issuance. We continue to see above average returns in the U.S. equities market and we made good progress in high growth adjacencies like DeFi and prediction markets. In energy, customers are adapting to geopolitical and supply chain volatility. Our global trading services business stabilized in the third quarter and renewals are returning to the levels we saw prior to the Iran conflict. Demand for our AI products is also very strong. During the quarter, we combined our MCP tools and adaptive retrieval agents into one holistic AI data portal offering. Demand for our mission critical data is very strong, and we launched ratings, energy, and visible alpha data in MCP during the quarter. What we hear consistently from customers is that they are choosing S&P Global data because it's highly performant with lower error rates compared to other providers. And our adaptive retrieval agents are also resonating strongly with customers. We signed a large multi-year competitive displacement in the quarter that combined CapIQ with our AI data portal solutions from MI. We also signed a very large deal with a global energy company that combined an upstream win back with our AI ready data. Negotiations with customers on AI rights are normalizing and we're signing deals with robust pricing that protect our IP. Customers see the value in leveraging our AI ready data while respecting our intellectual property. Sales cycles stabilized following some temporary noise last quarter, contributing to the acceleration in subscription revenue growth in both market intelligence and energy. The strength of the S&P Global Ratings franchise was clear in the third quarter, with total build issuance up 8% year-over-year. The first three quarters of this year are the three strongest quarters on record for build issuance. Hyperscalar issuance remained strong in the quarter, bringing the year-to-date total to approximately $240 billion and we continue to expect between $250 and $300 billion for the full year. We've seen continued strength in investment grade issuance outside of the hyperscalers. Excluding hyperscaler issuance in the third quarter, investment grade issuance would have increased around 15% while total billed issuance would have been up low single digits. We expect issuance to remain robust in absolute terms but we are lapping a difficult year over year compare in the second half. Our updated guidance assumes high single digit build issuance growth for the full year, reflecting our continued expectations for $250 to $300 billion in hyperscaler issuance. We now expect 20 to 30% growth in M&A issuance this year, given the strength of M&A related issuance in the third quarter. Moving on to indices, S&P Dow Jones Indices remains the global leader in indices, both in terms of assets under management and in index-based derivatives. We had more than $600 billion in net inflows into our ETF products, and we ended the quarter with ETF assets under management up 26%. Continued market volatility drove a 15% increase in average daily volumes for our exchange-traded derivatives. The strength of this franchise creates powerful opportunities for partnership and collaboration in new and existing markets. We announced several agreements in the last few months that demonstrate the importance of partnering with S&P Dow Jones indices for leading market participants. The extension of our S&P 500 options agreement with SIBO solidifies our partnership through the next 25 years and creates meaningful value for customers and shareholders. We're actively pursuing opportunities to expand the addressable market for our intellectual property in areas like prediction markets. And we continue to innovate and explore opportunities and partnerships that take advantage of the rapid innovation in this space, enabling our customers to leverage our products in new ways. We don't expect these announcements to have a meaningful impact on 2026 financial results, but we do expect to benefit in 2027 and beyond. As we expected, energy revenue growth accelerated in the quarter, though energy and commodities markets remain volatile. Oil prices remain elevated, and we expect oil to stay around $100 per barrel through the fourth quarter. We saw better traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, with flows reaching almost two-thirds of pre-war levels. That made it easier for customers to transact with confidence and drive subscription growth in the quarter. We're also seeing market participants return to the derivatives products based on our benchmark prices, as traders and others adjust to more volatile markets. LNG, refined products and chemicals, remain more constrained, and our customers are using our data to help identify and plan for alternative sources and partnerships. I'd also say our recent acquisition of Data Center Hawk could not have been timelier. Combined with 451 Research, S&P Global is now a leading provider of data center data and insights. Demand for data center build-out is unprecedented, with our teams forecasting significant increases in demand for power, chips, and materials to deliver that infrastructure. In fact, our team forecasts nearly $900 billion of capex this year for the six largest hyperscalers, nearly doubling from 2025 levels. The intensity of investment in this area is benefiting every one of our divisions, highlighting growing convergence between financial markets and commodity markets. Obviously this year, debt issuance and equity valuations have been driven higher by AI and data center investments. Demand is also increasing for supply chain insights, counterparty credit analytics, power forecasts, and logistics data among financial services and industrial customers who need to understand these dynamics in depth. Demand for our AI products is strong. For several quarters, customers using our AI solutions have increased their spend with us at a much faster rate than average. In market intelligence, ACV growth is now 1.8 times the growth rate of non-AI customers. In energy, it remains approximately three times. This is a strong signal of the value of our AI solutions to our customers. Over time, we believe growth rates will converge as more of our customers become AI customers. API call volume grew rapidly, up nearly 50% since Q2 and more than 4,000% year over year. More customers are expanding in-house solutions and integrations with frontier models powered by our data. Negotiations with customers on AI rights are normalizing, and we are signing deals with robust pricing that protect our IP. As I mentioned earlier, that comes down to the quality of our AI tools and our unique data sets like VisibleAlpha. Turning to slide 11. We announced today that we have initiated a strategic review of alternatives for Capital IQ and associated data businesses within market intelligence, including their potential separation. The businesses being considered for separation include the Kensho Data and Platforms businesses within market intelligence, specifically Capital IQ and associated data businesses. While the exact perimeter remains under review, we expect to retain Ratings Direct and Ratings Express, as well as Enterprise Solutions. These businesses operate at scale with high recurring revenue and a large long-standing base of more than 15,000 clients and more than 355,000 users. Demand for their trusted data continues to grow as customers increasingly seek to integrate it directly into their own systems and tools. We are confident in the ability of these businesses to create incredible value for our customers while rapidly innovating to bring differentiated data and insights to the market in an AI-first way. and we believe separate ownership would give them the dedicated investment and focus needed to continue the revenue growth acceleration and rapid innovation that we delivered this quarter. Given the commercial and data relationships between S&P Global and the businesses under review, we would seek to keep our interests closely aligned in any transaction. At the same time, a more focused S&P Global would allow us to prioritize investment and reinforce our strengths in the markets where we have the strongest position and are best enabled to create value. S&P Global is deeply embedded in the world's credit equities and commodities markets, providing trusted benchmarks, mission-critical data and insights that are essential to how those markets operate. Our expected go-forward portfolio benefits from durable secular tailwinds and attractive incremental margins. This allows us to invest while delivering consistent margin expansion over time. We expect that when and if this process is completed, S&P Global will be a focused and synergistic organization of high growth businesses positioned for strong growth in organic revenue, profit, and EPS. We believe this portfolio can also generate significant free cash flow, enhancing our capital allocation flexibility, and ultimately our ability to return capital to shareholders. There is no definitive timetable for completing this strategic review. What I can tell you is that maintaining continuity for our customers and our colleagues throughout this process is of the utmost importance. Existing contracts and service commitments remain in place and we will ensure that our valued customers continue to receive the innovative products and differentiated data they rely on today. While this process is underway, we will be thoughtful about the impact it could have on our customers, our people, and our shareholders. We'll provide updates at appropriate times, but we are very early in this process. and we expect the earliest meaningful update we would be able to provide will be on our February earnings call. With subscription growth accelerating, margins expanding and an improving outlook, we're pleased with the excellent results we delivered in the third quarter. We're excited about the opportunities to come for Capital IQ and its related businesses and we are excited about the prospects for S&P Global. We look forward to finishing the year strong. Now I'll hand it over to Eric to take you through the details of the quarter and the guidance.