Martina Cheung
President and Chief Executive Officer at S&P Global
Thank you, Mark. By any measure, 2024 was an incredible year for S&P Global. Excluding Engineering Solutions, which was divested in 2023, revenue increased 15% and revenue from our subscription products increased 7%. We benefited from strong market trends, including record debt issuance for our ratings business and strong equity valuations for our index business. However, we also continue to demonstrate the discipline and operational excellence our shareholders have come to expect from us, delivering accelerated revenue growth in Commodity Insights and strong steady growth in both Market Intelligence and Mobility despite some market headwinds on those two businesses.
We continue to take a balanced approach to profitability and investment, which allowed us to make important investments in technology, AI and products while still expanding margins more than 300 basis-points. We delivered 25% growth in adjusted EPS in 2024. This exceeded the midpoint of our initial guidance range by more than 13%. Our disciplined approach to capital allocation allowed us to return $4.4 billion to shareholders over the course of 2024 through our cash dividend and the repurchase of 6.7 million shares.
We expect to continue strong capital returns in 2025 as we recently-announced the 52nd consecutive increase to our cash dividend and a newly approved share repurchase authorization up to $4.3 billion. In total, you'll see this would allow us to maintain our target of returning 85% or more of the $6 billion in adjusted free-cash flow we are expecting in 2025. I've been very impressed with our people's ability to execute and deliver such strong results, embracing the leadership transition and the increased focus on our customers and our enterprise advantages. With that increased focus on serving our clients at the enterprise-level, we announced the establishment of the Chief Client Office and the Enterprise Data Office.
We're excited to share the successes from these initiatives with you as we progress through the year. We're also pleased to share that our new Chief Financial Officer, Eric, will be joining us officially on February 19. We are gaining momentum in our product innovation and AI initiatives across the organization as well, as I'll share with you in a moment. Lastly, we continue the cycle of optimizing our portfolio of businesses so that we are best-positioned for long-term profitable growth. In 2024, we acquired best-in-class solutions to support strategic growth through Visible Alpha, and LP and World Hydrogen leaders.
We also divested non-core businesses and Prime One. One of my first priorities as CEO was to strengthen and deepen our relationship with key strategic customers at the highest levels of leadership. I had more than 100 meetings from some of our most important stakeholders to ensure a smooth transition of these key relationships. These important discussions include not just our customers, but also strategic commercial and technology partners. Together with our new Chief Client Officer, I met 85% of our largest strategic customers just in the last 100 days. We are instilling in our executive leadership team a clear need to be where our customers are. Our success depends on the value we create and deliver for our customers.
So I've asked our division leadership to make these relationships a personal priority for them as well. This emphasis on customer engagement is a natural evolution for S&P Global. We've always made customer value a focus, but by making customer engagement a higher priority at the executive level, we are building stronger relationships so that we can accelerate our response to customers' challenges. This engagement can also surface opportunities to partner or co-invest with our customers. One such example is the UBS Leverage Loan Index partnership.
Through these many meetings, I'm picking-up a consistent set of themes, which align very well with our competitive advantages and reinvigorate our optimism and confidence in our ability to compete and win. While generative AI is not a new topic for our customers, they're moving beyond just considering what this technology can do and focusing on use cases that can scale quickly and contribute to strong financial results. Customers increasingly turn to us to benefit from our years of experience scaling AI technology from Kensho. We continue to see impactful headlines and market news on a near daily basis.
Customers are deeply engaged to determine the potential impact to their business from tariffs, regional competitiveness and other aspects of global trade. S&D Global is a world-class provider of data insights and thought leadership in these vital areas and our customers are turning to us for that expertise. Customers continue to feel the impact of the innovation taking place in financial markets with the flow of capital to pass the funds, but also increasing need to private markets and digital assets. Through our leadership in benchmarks, private credit, private-equity workflow tools and innovation like our stablecoin assessments, our customers see us as a critical partner in navigating this sea-change over the coming years.
Additionally, customers recognize our leadership and seek our insights in energy transition. Energy transition is a complex issue encompassing energy security, technology innovation and the financing of the various investments needed over the coming decades. For example, in utilities, the depth and breadth of our expertise and data sets across oil, liquid natural gas, carbon, renewable energy, electric utilities and reporting all helped drive the 23% growth in revenue from our energy transition and sustainability products in the 4th-quarter.
As we look to 2025, we are hearing general expectations for some improvements in the macroeconomic environment. There is some variability by geographic region here with caution and uncertainty around Europe and Asia, providing some ballast against general optimism we're seeing in the US markets. We are seeing strong demand for our products and some modest tailwinds from vendor consolidation. We continue to see the benefits from the breadth of our offerings as our enterprise approach allows us to meet more of our customers' needs in a more cost-effective way.
As we've discussed for some time now, we continue to see conditions in the financial services end-market below what we would consider normal, though we do expect a gradual improvement over the course of the year. We are also experiencing a highly competitive environment in financial services and somewhat elevated price sensitivity, most notably impacting Market Intelligence. Now turning to the 2024 issuance environment. We saw nearly $4 trillion in build issuance in 2024, significantly outpacing our expectations. With extremely favorable market conditions, including tight credit spreads and lowering interest rates, we saw many issuers take advantage in 2024 to refinance debt and felt very strong activity in CLO volumes as well as repricing and amendment extend activity.
While this does create a very difficult compare for 2025, we believe the refinancing models and a recovering M&A environment will contribute to modest growth in billed issuance this year, as we'll discuss in more detail in a moment. As we look next to the Vitality Index, I'm encouraged that this index continues to accomplish its intended purpose. When we introduced this metric at our Investor Day in 2022, we discussed the importance of making sure we were prioritizing new products that can contribute to our financial performance over-time. We also noted that new products would remain in the Vitality index for a finite time and would eventually mature out.
The focus is to make sure that revenue from maturing products is replaced by new and enhanced products that can scale quickly. At the beginning of 2024, we had a number of meaningful products mature out-of-the Vitality Index. Those products contributed a combined $330 million to the index in 2023, nearly 25% of the total index. By continuing to innovate and invest in fast-growing products, we were able to more than replace that mature revenue and end the year with an index of $1.5 billion, representing nearly 11% of total revenue. At the end of 2024, we had another group of products mature out-of-the Vitality Index, and we are confident that our focus on customer value and rapid innovation will once again enable us to deliver a vitality index at or above 10% this year.
Turning to just a few examples of that innovation. As the world's leading provider of benchmarks, we continue to invest in innovation to launch new benchmark products and make our existing benchmarks better. In 2024, we expanded the collection of multi-asset class indices offered through S&P Dow Jones indices and we launched the leveraged loan indices in partnership with UBS. We continue to introduce new price assessments every year and 2024 saw the launch of new assessments for various chemicals, beef and poultry. We also introduced a first-of-its-kind product in the digital asset space to assess stablecoins. We know that data and technology lay at the heart of almost everything we do.
So we continue to make meaningful investments in our internal technology and our technology products. We are finding new ways to leverage the remarkable data estate that we have. And just one example of that in 2024 was the introduction of the market fixed-income securities data in Capital IQ Pro. Part of our focus on technology must include a strategy to leverage the incredible technological advancement taking place in the world today, such as generative AI. First, beginning with our people, we are continuing to build a culture that embraces AI and we are empowering our people with the tools, training and resources they need to thrive. In 2024, we introduced our internally-developed co-pilot called S&P Spark Assist.
Since introducing Spark Asist, we have seen over 1,300 different use cases developed and shared internally across what we call our Spark store. As we focus on developing AI skills across our entire workforce, we are seeing our people truly embrace the use of these powerful tools to automate workflows, more quickly ingest new information and more efficiently generate their own work products. We firmly believe that as we embrace the use of AI internally, it will unlock significant potential for product innovation as well. Just as we've learned with Kentu's incredible innovations over the years, tools and resources that improve our productivity and efficiency will likely benefit our customers as well.
Through ongoing customer meetings, we hear again and again, they want to be able to access and integrate S&P Global's data into their AI workflows. In order to expand and facilitate how and where customers can connect to our data, we launched a new solution, LLM ready API that enables users to seamlessly integrate complex, high-priority S&P Global datasets into generative AI models for their own internal-use. It integrates with large language models like GPT, Gemini or Cloud, allowing customers to use natural language to query our tabular datasets.
This is all part of our ongoing effort to bring our data into this new era of Gen AI and ensure that we are meeting customers where they are and where they are going-in their AI journeys. We also embedded generative AI functionality in our major desktop applications, including Chass AI for Connect, as well as Chass IQ and Document intelligence for Capital IQ Pro, all with the same vision of empowering our customers to more quickly and effectively gain insights from our data with AI. We also identified and acquired market-leading solutions that we believe strengthen our competitive position in multiple areas while contributing to the immediate financial results of the company.
These include Visible Alpha and Pronzo NLP in our Mark Intelligence division and World Hydrogen leaders in our Commodity Insights division. With the ultimate goal of driving profitable long-term revenue growth, we will continue to lean into these kinds of innovation, development of tools for our own efficiency and productivity, organic development of new products for our customers, partnerships to develop new products and tuck-in acquisitions to accelerate the pace of scale and leadership. You'll notice that across these examples of innovation runs a common thread of generative AI.
When we look at the potential for generative AI across the business over the next several years, there are seemingly endless opportunities to innovate and add value for our customers. Amid all this possibility, we will ensure that S&P Global remains an indispensable partner to our customers as they adopt AI into more-and-more of their workflows. We're doing this in many ways, including building sophisticated Gen AI experiences, laying the groundwork for workflows and investing in foundational AI capabilities that help our customers more quickly and effectively gain insights from our data.
In the coming quarters and years, you'll see us lean more into practical applications that have the potential to move the needle on financial performance and enhance the value of our products. We will prioritize those use cases that improve our revenue growth potential, improve our operational productivity and efficiency, improve the capabilities and skills of our people and safeguard the security around our proprietary data and our systems. This will require us to say no to a lot of things, but will allow us to effectively put investment dollars to work-in ways that have the greatest potential to create real value.
You've seen us do that in recent years with Sparcasus, Chat IQ and many of the important innovations from our Kensho team and we will continue to highlight our progress in this important area going-forward. Now turning to our financial results. Chris will walk-through the 4th-quarter results in more detail in a moment, but we are pleased and encouraged by the results we delivered for our shareholders in 2024. We continue to see strong growth in our market-driven and our subscription businesses with total revenue increasing 14% or 15% excluding the impact of Engineering Solutions.
We also delivered over 300 basis-points of margin expansion in the year. As Chris will discuss in a moment, we saw some elevated expenses in 2024 related to incentive compensation and commissions due to the very strong revenue beat this year. Were it not for that increase in compensation expense, we would have had year-over-year margin expansion in every division. Now, I'll turn to Chris to review the financial results.
