S&P Global at Bernstein Conference: Strategic Growth and AI Integration

On Thursday, 29 May 2025, S&P Global (NYSE:SPGI) participated in the Bernstein 41st Annual Strategic Decisions Conference 2025. Martina Chung, President and CEO, presented a balanced strategic overview. She emphasized strong customer relationships and growth opportunities, while acknowledging challenges such as macroeconomic volatility affecting certain business segments.

Key Takeaways

• S&P Global focuses on leveraging AI and data integration to drive growth and efficiency.
• The mobility business spin-off is expected to enhance growth as a standalone entity.
• Market volatility presents challenges, but recurring revenues remain promising.
• Capital allocation remains disciplined, with an 85% capital return guideline.
• Post-merger synergies with IHS Markit are a priority for inter-divisional growth.

Financial Results

• S&P Global reaffirmed its commitment to a disciplined capital allocation strategy, maintaining an 85% capital return guideline.
• The proceeds from the Astra sale, approximately 1.4 billion euros, are earmarked for share repurchases.
• The company anticipates minimal impact on synergies due to the mobility spin-off, which is expected to be tax-free.

Operational Updates

• The integration of generative AI across the enterprise is a major focus, with Kensho playing a pivotal role.
• S&P Global aims to enhance operational efficiency and innovation through AI, targeting deep pools of talent in technology and data.
• The spin-off of the mobility business is projected to take 12 to 18 months, promising growth and investment freedom for the new entity.

Future Outlook

• Despite market volatility, S&P Global remains optimistic about recurring revenues and commercial execution.
• The Market Intelligence division is expected to see margin improvements, with a 300 basis point increase since the merger.
• S&P Global is committed to evolving its strategic direction, building on existing foundations and focusing on customer needs.

Q&A Highlights

• Chung highlighted the importance of customer relationships and data integration for future growth.
• The ratings business is adapting to market volatility, with private credit viewed as a growth opportunity.
• S&P Global plans to maintain consistent ratings methodology and pricing for both public and private credit.

In conclusion, S&P Global’s presentation at the Bernstein Conference underscored its strategic focus on AI integration, disciplined capital allocation, and sustainable growth. For a detailed understanding, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Bernstein 41st Annual Strategic Decisions Conference 2025:

Unidentified speaker: Alright. I think we’ll, we’ll get started. Thank you everyone for joining this session with S and P Global. I’m very pleased to have, Martina Chung, president and CEO of S and P Global. Martina took over the role as CEO late last year following several years in various senior leadership positions at S and P, including head in the ratings business and then the market intelligence business.

So very warm welcome to your first SDC, Martina, and, thank you for participating.

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Yeah. Great. Thank you. I’m delighted to be here, and hello, everyone.

Unidentified speaker: Good stuff. Alright. So we’ll we’ll jump in. Maybe, start with the CEO transition, Martina. Been a very busy start to your to your your role here.

You’ve announced the spin off of, the mobility division. You are dealing with very significant policy and macro volatility. Maybe just reflecting your time as CEO so far, has your view on the company evolved? Maybe what changes are you making at the firm relative to the last management team? Yeah.

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Well, thanks. It’s, an incredible time to be at the company. It’s in a company that always excites me in terms of our opportunities to grow both within the divisions as well as across the overall enterprise. And every day there’s more to get excited about quite frankly and a lot of that comes through the amount of customers that I’m meeting, senior leadership team is meeting and the feedback that we are getting. We have incredible trusted and very strong relationships with our clients across the world.

I would say the activity that is happening and the changes that we’ve been making, areas of focus, these are all things that are building on the very strong foundation from Doug and his leadership. The focus on the customers, for example, is something that I think is, you know, has first come from Doug. He had put together a commercial council across the organization several years back, and we essentially took that and formalized it by creating a full time dedicated Chief Commercial Office or Chief Client Office. And so that’s really off to a great start. We’ve had some very good deals won as a result of the work between the Chief client office and the divisions.

And that that team has good momentum, and we’re excited about how that’s gonna progress going forward. We also took the step of bringing our enterprise data organizations, all of our data teams across S and P Global into one group. And this is really to give us the opportunity to integrate our data and to apply generative AI to our data at scale. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity given the magnitude of capabilities from the technology, and we felt that it was an easy way for us to move much more quickly just simply by bringing the teams together. And that team is off to a phenomenal start as well with the standardization of various activities across the organization, the linking activity that’s happening between different datasets, some really good momentum for that team as well.

Overall, I think the amount of opportunity that we have continues to be very, very strong. Some of that I think comes from just the fact that we closed out the IHS Markit merger and we now can move to even greater areas of, synergy between divisions. Whereas over the last several years, we’ve been a little bit more focused on opportunities within each division, in the post merger construct. And so great opportunities overall. It’s a very exciting time.

Unidentified speaker: Good stuff. Couple questions around the outlook, for the business. Maybe start with longer term over the next three to five years. So what’s your vision for S and P Global?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: The way that I think about us is we’re incredibly compelling and comprehensive as well as deep from a market’s perspective. And so, we cover credit, fixed income, privates. We cover derivatives, commodities. So incredibly, broad in terms of our asset class, coverage or multi asset class coverage. As you know, we also cover tremendous depth and breadth across sectors.

So against these areas, we have, the best capabilities around benchmarks, analytics, platforms, and data. And so to me, this is a very compelling set of businesses, very compelling opportunity for us to deliver value for our clients and to accelerate our growth. And and these are areas that I think will be core to how we think about the go forward strategy over the next three to five years. Within each division, there’s obviously opportunities for growth, whether it’s in Index, Smart Intelligence, etcetera. As you know, we’ve also been looking at our strategic growth thematics.

Those are private markets, generative AI and some of the other areas that we’ve been talking about. We continue to work around those, and, I would say we’ll come out with a lot more detail on that, at our Investor Day in, November. But we see really good opportunities to continue to grow in the business, and and we look at it as, as an evolution as opposed to a revolution in how we think about our strategy.

Unidentified speaker: Maybe more near term given all the macro volatility, are there any areas of the business you’re seeing incremental revenue pressures or a sales cycle elongation?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: So as you know, most of our revenues across SME Global are recurring revenues, and those are insulated from the very near term puts and takes around volatility from one day to the next or one week to the next. We are watching very closely to make sure that there are no major changes in customer behavior. So far, we haven’t seen any major changes in customer behavior. We hear reasonably, I would say, reasonable stability around anything from pipelines, still good robust pipelines across divisions. And we’ve also been seeing and experiencing, generally speaking, solid retention.

And so nothing that has, I would say from a subscription perspective, nothing that indicates massive changes in customer behavior, as of now. And clearly, market driven businesses are much more sensitive on a day to day basis to, what’s happening in the environment. And you’ve seen us evolve our thinking around ratings from an issuance perspective for the full year, and we also evolved our thinking around the index business. And those are going to be sensitive to not just the volatility, but also to the extent to which there is a settling, for example, in the market. And so the the ranges that we provided in our most recent earnings call for the market businesses, ratings, and index reflect the ups and downs that we think will happen throughout the course of the year on those businesses.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Let’s move to the mobility business and the, you know, the decision to spin that business off. Maybe why now and the strategic rationale for spinning it off.

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Yeah. Mobility is something that we’ve been thinking about for some time. We I mean, I can say I personally love the business. It is a leadership team that has grown that business at a really compelling level. I think there were 8.4% growth last year and 39% margin.

That business has consistently innovated at really high levels, and so it’s a very exciting business. I think the way to maybe think about the rationale for our announcement around around an intent to spin is to think about the mobility end customer. So the mobility business we view as a deep vertical SaaS based business serves the entire automotive value chain all the way from suppliers to OEM to dealerships and to the end consumer. About 70% of the business is directly related to the used car market, and the largest customer there from that used car market revenue base is a dealership. So in absolute numbers of customer terms, the largest number of customers in mobility are actually dealers.

And we did not see an environment where we would be going to a dealer and saying, here are all the other S and P products that you can buy. So it it really becomes a question of how can we, if we think about the opportunity to unlock value across the enterprise, where was Mobility gonna play in that? And and while there have been synergies and we’ve we’ve performed well against those synergies, we think that business is best served as a stand alone company. Phenomenal products, phenomenal leadership team, phenomenal customer base, growth and margin profile, and great opportunities for it to grow in multiple paths and multiple trajectories going forward.

Unidentified speaker: How do you think about the impact to the rest of the S and P businesses, with the mobility spin? Does it impact any synergies, shared data platforms, or even the margin profiles of any businesses that work with mobility in the past?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: So we have said that we think the synergies would be very limited, very minimal. And so I think, that’s important point to start with around this. The parts there are parts of the Mobility business that operate very much, I would say, independently today. And so it’s not as integrated from the perspective of, let’s say, you know, something like a ratings division or something like that. I would also say that the ability for the business to actually continue to provide some of the data, which other groups and S and P have been using, that will be something that we can handle very easily through arms length agreements as we, obviously, as we go through the spin process.

Practically speaking, it’s gonna take about twelve to eighteen months. So, you know, we have plenty of time to work through the details around this. Obviously, the teams are moving extremely fast to get through the first phase. And, we’ll have an opportunity to talk a lot more with, all of you about this, as we, as we prepare, for, additional, information sharing disclosures, etcetera, as you go throughout the course of the year.

Unidentified speaker: So, clearly, your point of view is it’s a great business, but it can probably do better of outside of S and P. What what kind of constraints has that business had, been been under S and P’s global, governance? What operational advantages maybe would it have as a stand alone business?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Well, I think the the business itself has an incredible amount of innovation that happens in there. And so they’re very strong at converting investments into fast growing products. And they have even more opportunities. We’re watching, for example, a number of areas where we made investments. We’re just starting to see the benefits of those investments coming up as well.

And so it is a group of leaders who can turn investment dollars very quickly around opportunity and runway for additional growth. I do think that when you look at that business and think again about the composition of the end customers, their ability to grow both organically and and different pathways, you know, whether it’s organic, inorganic, etcetera, we think will be much better served as a as a stand alone business. And and the the pace at which they can grow, and invest, according to their distinct strategy, will certainly be, I think, very compelling, from, from a financial profile perspective and and ultimately deliver, great value for shareholders.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Switching back to the ratings business, clear a lot of volatility in the backdrop, and you recently evolved your thinking around the full year outlook. How would you characterize the state of the global debt markets today? Is activity any better or worse than you expected given sort of, like, what feels like a rebound in in sentiment at least?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: So I would say we are experiencing an interesting phenomenon this year with the volatility that we’ve seen in the market. But remember, this is not the first time we’ve seen volatility. It was highly volatile in in 2022, for example. And so we we’re coming into this with at least a very good foundation for understanding how investors, fixed income and credit investors, are behaving and how issuers are behaving. And that’s really what’s informed the guidance that we gave at the end of Q1, which is really flat year over year build issuance as well as some of the factors that went into that.

So we started this year thinking that we obviously, we have 3% to 5% maturity walls renewing this year. And so that the 2025 maturities will absolutely refi. We started the year with certain assumptions around how much of ’26 could get pulled forward. We think that that there will be a little bit less pull forward from 2026 at this point. We had very modest assumptions around M and A.

We see M and A as being broadly flat. We do know that there is pent up demand from an M and A perspective. And so if it’s not a back half of this year phenomenon, we would expect for that to be maybe, you know, a 2026 phenomenon, for example, and so tracking all of that carefully. Generally speaking, the guidance that we have for the full year now around ratings does assume ups and downs. And so we’re always gonna see at this point, we we know that issuers have gotten very good at choosing the window during which they go to market, and we’re gonna continue to see that.

So there’ll be weeks where issuers will sit it out because of the volatility, and there’ll be weeks when issuers rush because they think they have a window during which they can execute successfully. So those are the the things that we’re watching for. I would say none of the feedback that we’ve been hearing from issuers, you know, throughout the course of q one, for example, would give us any, any view that it would be any different from that, notwithstanding sort of like the ups and downs that we’ll we’ll tend to see throughout the course of the year because of the volatility.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Speed of growth drivers within within, ratings, private credit seems to be now fools. I think people agree now it’s a tailwind rather than a headwind, for for the ratings business. Maybe talk through the overall size of private credit within the ratings business, maybe what products you are seeing that resonate most with clients, and how you think about the growth trajectory, of private credit within ratings.

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Yeah. So our our private credit revenues, we don’t break them out by division, but overall, that, the private credit piece of S and P Global Enterprise has grown very strongly. We’re very pleased with that. We had about 21% growth in our enterprise private private markets, I would say, revenues rather, in ’20 in ’1 this year. Generally, I would say from a ratings perspective, the the opportunity for ratings in private markets and in private credit is not just to rate the individual portfolio company or an individual loan.

It is really to service the whole ecosystem that has has come up to support the growth of the asset class more broadly. And so LPs who, you know, are allocating to the asset class wanna make sure that they have an S and P rating, for example. And we’ve had ample number of GPs over the last several years tell us that LPs are asking for an S and P rating. But even beyond that, the GPs themselves need to be able to manage their own balance sheets. We’ve seen securitization opportunities come from this.

We’ve seen banks who are lending to GPs, for example, come to us for ratings as well. And we’ve also been working on interim you know, let’s say, new new ways of assessing credit against different types of financing options. NAVs is one example that has come up several times in the last couple years. And so it goes beyond, the idea of, a company can go to the market public or private. It’s really the private ecosystem and how that’s evolving, and and we’re at every point in that ecosystem.

We’ve always said that we would raise debt whether it came publicly or privately. It’s really important that we don’t change our methodology whether it’s public or private. It is the same. And, you know, last year in the prior year, we saw, for example, some deals refinanced from, private back to public when the public markets were functioning well and were much cheaper than privates. A rating from us can travel into the public markets in in that context as well.

And and that’s how we view it going forward. We will always rate the debt wherever it comes, and so we’re positioned and staffed with the expertise and the capacity to, to do that. I think we can give you a lot more, of, an insight into how we think about, privates in November, including across the entire organization where we have market leading platforms, innovative new indices, and other ways in which we serve this broader ecosystem as well.

Unidentified speaker: And on on private credit, how do you think about monetization and pricing of private credit versus versus public? The fee structures, they similar, particularly given I think the public market’s a little bit different. It’s more of a issue of pay model. So maybe some thoughts around that.

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Yeah. The same way that the methodology is the same, the pricing doesn’t change either whether it’s public or private.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Sure. Alright. Maybe switch to market intelligence. And this is a question I’ve asked risk allocation I’ve asked, you know, Doug in the past.

I’m curious maybe your philosophy around allocating resources to market intelligence. It has been the slowest growing business at S and P or the slowest nonreadings business yet feels like it receives, the most, investments historically, whether it’s big m and a, like IHS IHS deal or things like Cap IQ revamp. What’s your philosophy around investing in that business?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: I think the market intelligence business has a really fantastic overall profile. So if you think about that business, it includes the, what a lot of people will say Market Intelligence, they think Cap IQ Pro sort of is it’s synonymous. In fact, the business itself is highly diversified, across our enterprise solutions which includes, many of our highly differentiated private markets products such as Wall Street Office and iLevel, but also a tremendous amount of our unique data in the credit risk and overall risk solutions business as well. And so the the the complexion, if you like, of the Market Intelligence business is very interesting and and I think very comprehensive. A few points I would make around capital allocation to the business.

We’re extremely disciplined about how we think about capital allocation both in terms of the opportunity in and of itself within a division, but also thinking about it more holistically in the context of where the next best dollar next best opportunity is to spend the next dollar if you like. And Market Intelligence can serve multiple forms for us. Of course, there’s, you know, the return on the investment itself in in that business. But oftentimes, Market Intelligence business is actually creating capabilities that will be used outside of Market Intelligence across the rest of the portfolio. So when we created, composable services architecture for Capital IQ Pro, some of those services are actually being used in the ratings workflow.

For example, they’re also being used in Platts Connect platform. And, of course, the data work that was done in Market Intelligence, since the enterprise data office, but also before the enterprise data office was set up. The data capabilities around, automated data extraction and things like that were being used in other areas such as ratings and sustainable one. And so, the the organization in and of itself by virtue of having a lot of the, you know, largest concentration of customers, largest concentration of tech, largest concentration of data has functioned as a little bit of a sort a hub for a lot of capabilities that have translated across the rest of the organization. I would say that we have a number of places where we’ve made investments that we’re extremely pleased about.

Visible Alpha is one that constantly comes up in conversations with customers. I’m really proud of the MI team that they were able to launch the integration of Visible Alpha early this year, and we’re getting great feedback from our customers on that as well. And know, I think on balance, when we think of Mark Intelligence, we think of it as, opportunities both for Mark Intelligence customers specifically as well as how we we can leverage those opportunities across the rest of the, the portfolio.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. As a user of Visible Alpha, I can attest to its utility. On on revenue growth in MI, feels like we’re we’re hitting an inflection point here. You’ve talked about ACV growing faster than revenues in that business, which is typically, I think, leading indicator for revenue growth acceleration. Any way to sort of help quantify what that gap is and, maybe give us some sort of timeline in terms of when it should lead to accelerating revenue growth?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Yeah. So, we talked about ACV exceeding revenue growth both in q four as well as q one of this year. And we didn’t quantify it, but I will say, q four is noteworthy because it’s the largest renewing quarter. So, you know, that is a really good indicator, and we saw that continue into Q1 in terms of the outpacing of ACV growth over revenue growth. Generally, I’d make a couple of comments on the shape of the year in Market Intelligence.

The first thing I would say is the team has been very focused on commercial execution and has done a lot of work to align the go to market activity and the sales motions with our customers. So one good example of that is greater transparency and accountability on an account by account basis. And that’s not just with the chief commercial office or the chief client office, but also across all the accounts that Mark Intelligence serves. The second thing I would say is the teams have been observing, I would say, good stability around retention, which is great to see since, as you know, we called out cancellation rates throughout the course of of several quarters last year. And so that in combination with stable pipelines at levels that the team feels good about sets that team up for a stronger back half of the year than first half of the year, including the lapping of those cancellations from last year.

So I would say generally the team is extremely focused on delivering the commercial outcomes. Conversations have been very positive with our clients, a lot of client engagement. There’s a bit of benefit here as well through early benefit, I would say, through partnership with the Chief Client Office. So the team has closed some very large deals in partnership with the Chief Client Office, including one large investment bank closing a counterparty manager software deal. And we also had a large commercial bank who closed an issue book deal for, from one of their teams as well.

So I’d say overall good momentum with that team.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Let’s talk about AI, and I wanna frame a bear case with a bull case and kinda get your thoughts on on both. I guess the bare case, particularly in the agentic AI world, is, you know, these systems can have you know, they can act autonomously to go gather information and to put them, synthesize financial market data. Is there a risk, or long term risk that these tools could disintermediate S and P’s global S and P’s market intelligence platform?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: So maybe I’d say two things most more broadly. The first is we are integrating GenAI, and and we’re doing that, I would say, also across the enterprise. So, it would be remiss for me to say we’re only thinking about it in the context of market intelligence. It’s important for us to think about it everywhere across the organization. Let me just start with, like, the the piece of it that is you know, it’s important for us, I think, with Kensho and the power of Kensho working with our division teams like the Mark Intelligence team to accelerate as much as we can to where the puck is going.

And that’s incredibly important obviously from a Gen AI perspective. The teams have a very long pipeline of capabilities and enhancements as well as interesting standalone product pipeline ideas to deliver out. From MI specifically, I think there’s a lot to get excited about in terms of what we’re doing there. At level though, I think what’s important to to to contemplate is that Market Intelligence is, I would say, pretty diversified division, and it has businesses that are in there that have different profiles in terms of what they actually do for our customers. So, the workflow and software products that we have, for example, power a lot of the, you know, the reporting, the recording of various different transactions, whether it’s in private markets.

You know, we have a lot of tools around k y three p and then we have vast numbers of data sets. And the way that there’s no one simple way to say actually Gen AI is gonna impact all that stuff in the same way. It’s gonna be quite dramatically different and it’s gonna happen at different times. The things that, I am excited about when it when I look at the Market Intelligence division, the first is that while it may be possible to generate a dataset on financials, and by the way, Yahoo’s been doing that for, I don’t know, for how long, it’s maybe not as possible to integrate that dataset using, metadata and, identifiers and connectors to other more critical data sets that may not be as easy to get. It may not also not be easy to get the 10 data sets you need to make a decision on something that’s tilted one way or another.

Right? And so these are the types of ways in which market intelligence provides value. I also think that, while, you know, we ourselves have seen this, by the way, at S and P while it’s maybe easy for an individual to build out, you know, capability or use case, and we’ve seen hundreds of examples of this as we’ve deployed Spark Assist to our own employees. A lot of benefits on a one to one basis of employees generating, you know, small efficiencies here, there, working in their tools. Much much harder to do that at scale across an entire process.

Right? And so, you know, the pace at which, at which this moves is gonna vary. Our, I would say, proactive stance on this through the integration of our Kensho capabilities starts to show up in many different areas. For example, the automated data ingestion tool that we deployed in q one to eye level was really highly anticipated by our clients because it gave them a first time opportunity to have seamless processing throughout the entire value chain from the extraction of data and reports straight into eye level, faster time to market, faster time to results. And so we have clients actually lining up.

We had a pipeline before we even launched that. So we’re gonna continue to take, you know, take the opportunity to improve ourselves as we do this, and and the pace at which we move will be helped by the fact that we brought together the enterprise data office so we can integrate our data more. It’ll be helped by the fact that we’re scaling more with Kensho who’s developing really great, really great capabilities that can be, deployed and also that we’re open to doing partnerships to move even faster.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. Maybe the bull case for AI would be operational efficiency across the organization. So maybe just talk through how you think about the opportunity for AI to drive, meaningful efficiencies over the next sort of three to five years.

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Yeah. So, if I go back to, I mean, it’s it’s reasonably simple to to sort of break this down. We deployed Spark to everybody in the organization. Everybody have to get trained, and we now have over 30,000 people who’ve used it. And way that I sort of think about it is wonderful for every individual but sort of too diffused to measure in terms of productivity.

But of course, we have to do it. It’s almost like, you know, you come in with a phone or a laptop when you start your job and you expect the standard spec or the standard image from that company to include some sort of LLM type interface. And so that’s what Spark is for our our employees. And it’s not to say they’re mean, they’re they’re getting benefits. We have employees been building agents, you know, to help them with their jobs, etcetera, but it’s just it’s every person’s individual opportunity.

We’re now in the next phase of saying, okay. We’ve learned a lot from that. We’ve also learned which LLMs are better at certain tasks than others, so it’s not just necessary. We’ve always said we wouldn’t just be dependent on one LLM, and there oftentimes have been cases where we’ve chained LLMs together to use LLMs in a particular process where it’s better than, let’s say, a different LLM at doing one task. The next opportunity for us is to look across our organization at what we’re calling deep pools.

And those deep pools will be areas where we have large groups of talent who are performing things that are reasonably similar. You very easy to think about what they would look like. We have technology. We have data. We have research.

We have analytical. And then I think also commercial is an interesting one to consider as well. When you think about those deep pools, that’s basically the vast majority of our employees. The task that we’re undertaking right now for the deep pools is to essentially model the end to end processes within those deep pools and actually where we could integrate generative AI, where it can be agentic, etcetera. And so a good example would be, our market intelligence division is working on the scrum team of the future, the AI scrum team, figuring out what roles within the scrum team would actually be for be performed by agents.

And that’s gonna take some iteration. It’s gonna take some fine tuning. The other divisions are looking at this as well. The technology leadership team will essentially come together and decide whether or not one they feel has solved the AI scrum team, concept, and then it will get rolled out and adopted across the across the enterprise. Obviously, the enterprise data office has been off to an earlier start on this.

They’ve been together now for seven months integrating generative AI at scale across that. I think what’s key for us as we do this is to ensure that we are being really thoughtful about the process, end to end and and engineering that process so that it’s fit for purpose going forward and not just sort of throwing Gen AI on something that, you know, might need to evolve because certain things in the process simply don’t need to happen in the future maybe, because generative AI will, will perform that step. So there’s some basic process reengineering as part of this that’s required as well. So take a take a step back. What does that mean?

It obviously means that there will be some opportunities for us to achieve efficiencies. Some of those efficiencies will be ways in which we will be able to basically improve our margins. Others may be opportunities for us to invest organically in additional areas for growth. And we’re gonna be able to, you know, provide more light on that as we go through the course of of the next several years. Certainly, we’ll provide more light on that as we as we think about Investor Day and and how we paint a picture for you for the next medium term plan.

But even this year, we have benefits and productivity from GenAI integration baked into our plans already.

Unidentified speaker: K. Maybe sticking with margins in MI. You know, that business had actually decent revenue growth over the last you know, if you look at over the last seven years, revenues have tripled, part acquisition, part strong organic growth. But, margins have been stuck in that sort of low thirties area. Can we talk about, you know, structural operating leverage within MI?

If there’s an opportunity going forward to meaningfully move that higher?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Well, I think, Martin has done a great job in the last several years of expanding margins. Our 2025 midpoint margin guidance actually implies about a 300 basis point improvement in margins since the merger. And so it’s a team really that has demonstrated the ability to not just deliver margin improvement but also to do that while delivering growth as well in the overall portfolio. So I would say if you think about some of the things that we’ve talked about here around generative AI, for example, I think there’s some opportunities there for Market Intelligence the same way that there would be for other divisions to benefit from the integration of that and to have that contribute to margin improvement over time. I would also say that obviously we’ll be coming out with a greater amount of transparency and story around the overall medium term growth trajectory for Mark Intelligence when we get into our Investor Day in November.

Again, I would definitely highlight the focus of the team execution and, and delivery this year, including, against the, the margin, improvements and and expansion that we’ve committed to for this year. And looking forward to to talking more about further opportunities on that in, in November.

Unidentified speaker: Well, yeah, we’re definitely looking forward to November. Maybe more broadly in the organization, particularly as your new role as CEO here, how do you foster a culture of innovation and agility in in what is is going to be a very large organization like S and P Global? And as you move into a lot of cutting edge areas of of technology, how are you how are you able to sort of attract and retain sort of top talent?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: So on culture, the first thing I I would say is I think Doug did a phenomenal job conceiving of SparkAssist, with the the Kensho team. And the reason why I say that is because it is one of the most obvious examples of how we are innovating as an organization at an enterprise level, and it’s, it’s kind of a cottage industry, which is in some ways the best kind of innovation that you can have. And and what I mean by that is for the 30,000 plus people who use Spark, if you recall, we said in prior earnings calls, for example, that those using Spark can have an opportunity to sort of graduate their prompts or their models to, the column sparks, to a Spark library. And that library then becomes available to every employee in S and P Global. So if you have developed an agent to, extract certain content from a file format that is similar to what others can be doing in different parts of the organization, suddenly, the capability is available to everybody.

It’s essentially completely democratized to everybody. And we have think, of the end of q one, north of 1,600 sparks that have been published to the library. And so it’s a phenomenal way to think about the level of innovation that’s happening across all employees across the organization. The other ways in which I’ve been thinking about the culture and how we’re evolving the culture, we have been very clear that we wanna recognize an increasing recognition of areas where we see the innovation happening. And so we have quarterly recognition, and we have a big annual recognition profile called the CEO Center of Excellence session.

And and that’s an opportunity for us to really elevate and recognize teams across the organization. It’s it’s interesting. It’s it might seem, somewhat, trivial in the context of a shareholder perspective, but it is in fact one of the highest things that we see commented on in our employee satisfaction surveys that they wanna see more, recognition for innovation, more recognition for what’s done by various different teams. And we’ve essentially responded and put in place a bunch of recognition mechanisms, which are being which are appreciated by the employees. And so this is all incredibly important.

I do think that, we will continue to evolve that as we go forward. There are pockets in the team in the organization where we have capabilities, which gets to the second part of your question, where I think we’ll need to, you know, to really boost those over time. And so, of course, Kensho is a prime example of that, not the only example, but it is a prime example of where we have a very specific skill set around data science and around machine learning. And, of course, that team has been developing some phenomenal capabilities that we’ve been scaling into our commercial facing products and other places in the organization. Making sure that we have the right capacity there is gonna be incredibly important to us.

But I think as important is making sure that we found the right way to cycle people in to absorb and actually become Kenshins as they call themselves Right. And then go back out to the, division. So these are all things that we’re considering as we think about increasing the knowledge base, the expertise, and the capacity around critical skills like that.

Unidentified speaker: Yeah. No. Innovation and, I think can acquiring Kenshin for AI was a a sexy topic because it’s kudos to the team. On capital allocation, maybe just speak to there’s a lot going on. Astra, being being sold, mobility separation pending.

How are you thinking about and early thoughts here. I know we’ll get more, in November. But early thoughts here around optimal capital structure for, a New Look S and P? Any priorities you can share with us in terms of how you’re thinking about allocation?

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: Well, I I’m not gonna say see you in November. What I would say is, we have been, as you know, very consistent around our 85% guideline for capital return. And we remain, I would say, committed to that in terms of the importance of it to ourselves and to our shareholders in terms of how we run the business. Austria in and of itself will yield about €1,400,000,000 And we’ve also said in the past that we would expect to use that for share repurchases. From a Mobility perspective, we’ve also said that we would expect that to be a 100% tax free spin.

And so I think that’s important as shareholders understand the implications of that or potential implications of that for for yourselves. And then I think, you know, more broadly, we’re always gonna be really disciplined owners of shareholder capital. With Eric on board, he’s bringing incredible amounts of transparency to how our capital is allocated, how our investments are performing, organic investments are performing across divisions. And and those would not just be the ones that we’ve, you know, kind of blessed at a kind of a higher level, but also going very, very deep into each division to understand true business as usual cost versus true investment and really understanding those choices. And so I think the picture for us is very much one of evolution as to revolution in terms of how we think about the strategy and and how we think about, capital allocation.

Unidentified speaker: Fantastic. I think with that, we’ll end it. Thank you very much, Marcinia, for the time. Thanks,

Martina Chung, President and CEO, S and P Global: everyone. You.

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