S&P Global Inc. Barclays 24th Annual Global Financial Services Conference

Yeah. I think I spent, as you know, 20 years in banking in your corner of the world, and it has been really exciting to come to S&P Global. I have worked with S&P Global as a partner, a supplier, a vendor, whether it is around ratings, benchmarks for asset management, market data. Energy data is probably the one area that I spent less time on before coming. What I found is, much as I had expected, just a set of growth businesses focused on transparency, clarity, scenarios, and what can make financial institutions, corporations, and energy companies even more successful. That is where I spend my time is where do we grow, where can we accelerate, what is next? There is a great innovation engine, which I think is a little different than what you see in banks, because banks have to be constrained by definition, and innovation is at the heart of what we do.

The areas I focus the most is around creating really transparency and MIS into our commercial activities. Some of how we think about pipeline, some how we think about sales, some how we think about segments and targeting different segments. How we think about product offerings in one area that supports a different group of clients. As we have become larger and larger, there is so much to bring to our clients. What we have to do over time is measure and operate at scale, and that requires a set of insights. Over time you can launch campaigns, you can roll out products more quickly, you can drive more productivity over time, so that then we can deliver the margin expectations that our shareholders have, that we have for ourselves while we reinvest in the business.

I think Martina and the team have brought a lot to the company over the last 2 years. Really thinking about, we've had a great run, 5, 10 years. Really thinking about how do we drive the next round of growth, the creation of the Chief Commercial Officer organization, where we cover 130 clients, which are the top third of our revenue base, is really a sea change for how we operate. What we found is it's brought our product lines together at a level of sophistication and seniority, where now we're having discussions in the boardroom with CEOs about the wide range of what they're facing out in the marketplace. You think about all the hyperscaler issuances, for example. You've got CEOs of enormous banks like yours, thinking about, what does that mean for underwriting a hyperscaler issuance?

We've got our ratings understanding and insights there. Some of that's in the public domain, some of it's in the private domain. What kind of market data do I need to really understand that? How do energy supply chains and electricity grids and so forth in different parts of the world play out? How do I want to underwrite electricity prices, which are inherent portions of datacenters which support those hyperscalers and those AI companies? There's a wide range of activities that I think Martina has really thought about, how do we bring together to our clients that they can really value? That's really an opportunity, one that we think is unique to us, because without the fortitude and the depth in each of those areas, we wouldn't be in the C-suite, right?

We'd be working with the CEOs of divisions or COOs of various divisions, but that client connectivity really is an opportunity. What we find is that the stature, the sophistication, the trust that they have in S&P Global is just second to none.

Well, there's always been speculation, just about every industry I've been in, probably you've been in, and it's a matter of principle. We're just not going to comment on unwarranted rumors. Just not helpful. I would say that right now, as we said, as late as our second quarter earnings, we're highly focused on growth in MI. We've had a very strong, I'd say, solid start to the year. Growth is up north of 6%, comfortably within our guidance of 5.5%-7% for the year. And we feel comfortable in delivering on that. And I think importantly, we've also said, look, we'll selectively trim elements of that portfolio, but we talked about small sub-scale product lines, which is the kind of thing we've done before.

We've done it recently in the energy business, where we thought that kind of software layer wasn't as valuable, because in truth, we're really a data company, and what we're really doing is trying to find a share of benchmarks and data to our business.

It is actually not analogous to energy because the Market Intelligence data business is really quite strong. As I said, growth of north of 6% top line first half of the year and comfortably within our guide. Continued growth in platforms, including some big announcements we made in the second quarter around clients. Enterprise Solutions, which is not just software, it is really system-of-record software solutions with a data component. That grew 10% year-over-year in the first two quarters of the year. So we are seeing real momentum there that is important. In the data space, we are growing at high single digits, low double digits, depending on which quarter we are looking at. We are signing up more clients for MCP connectors. We are up to 500, which is 50% more than the prior quarter. And data usage rates through API and LLM call volume is up 5X.

5X Q1 to Q2, and it was 5X for Q to 1Q. Think about the economic value that we are bringing to clients. Just recently, we have continued the integration of S&P data into the ChatGPT financial services workflows. Just last week, OpenAI released a study of those workflows and shared how error rates with the trusted proprietary branded S&P Global data are below 3%. Our nearest competitor was at just around 6.5% errors. It is something that clients have been telling us over the year, which is that our data is particularly valuable. They trust in it because of its quality. They can ingest it and process it in ways that are, in many cases, better than our peers and brings immediate value.

I think there is a lot to come over the coming quarters and year as we see AI develop, interfaces for clients develop, either within their own organizations, through new channels that they are ingesting data for. But that is going to be the heart of growth of MI.