NYSE:MCO Moody's Q1 2024 Earnings Report $438.86 -0.72 (-0.16%) Closing price 04/25/2025 03:59 PM EasternExtended Trading$438.10 -0.75 (-0.17%) As of 04/25/2025 07:56 PM Eastern Extended trading is trading that happens on electronic markets outside of regular trading hours. This is a fair market value extended hours price provided by Polygon.io. Learn more. Earnings HistoryForecast Moody's EPS ResultsActual EPS$3.37Consensus EPS $3.06Beat/MissBeat by +$0.31One Year Ago EPS$2.99Moody's Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$1.79 billionExpected Revenue$1.70 billionBeat/MissBeat by +$88.33 millionYoY Revenue Growth+21.50%Moody's Announcement DetailsQuarterQ1 2024Date5/2/2024TimeBefore Market OpensConference Call DateThursday, May 2, 2024Conference Call Time11:30AM ETConference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptSlide DeckPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfileSlide DeckFull Screen Slide DeckPowered by Moody's Q1 2024 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMay 2, 2024 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 18 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Moody's Corporation First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded and that all participants are in a listen only mode. At the request of the company, we will open the conference up I will now turn the call over to Shivani Kok, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Speaker 100:00:24Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I'm Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. This morning Moody's released its results for the Q1 2024 as well as our revised outlook for select metrics for full year 2024. The earnings press release and the presentation to accompany this teleconference are both available on our website at ir. Speaker 100:00:45Moodies.com. During this call, we will also be presenting non GAAP or adjusted figures. Please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings press release filed this morning for a reconciliation between all adjusted measures referenced during this call in U. S. GAAP. Speaker 100:01:01I call your attention to the Safe Harbor language, which can be found towards the end of our earnings release. Today's remarks may contain forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In accordance with the Act, I also direct your attention to the management's Discussion and Analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10 ks for the year ended December 31, 2023, and in other SEC filings made by the company, which are available on our website and on the SEC's website. These, together with the Safe Harbor statement, set forth important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such forward looking statements. I'd also like to point out that members of the media may be on the call this morning in a listen only mode. Speaker 100:01:50I'll now turn the call over to Rob. Speaker 200:01:53Thanks, Shivani. Good morning and thanks everybody for joining today's call. Before I touch on a few key takeaways from our Q1 results, I'm going to start by saying how excited I am to be joined today by Noemi Alon, who officially joined Moody's on April 1. And as I mentioned on our last earnings call, Noemi brings almost 25 years of global financial and accounting leadership experience at some very large public companies with a real depth of experience in technology and software as a service. And we're really fortunate to have her as our Chief Financial Officer and I look forward to all of you getting to know her in the coming weeks months. Speaker 200:02:35So with that, let me turn to our Q1 results. We delivered an impressive 21% revenue growth, capitalizing on a strong issuance environment and continued demand for our leading risk assessment solutions. We delivered strong top line performance and margin expansion in both businesses and that translated to adjusted diluted EPS of $3.37 for the quarter. Now starting with MIS, obviously a great quarter. And over the last several years, you all have heard me talk about the investments that we've been making in analytical talent and technology enablement to ensure that we are the agency of choice for investors and issuers and in turn position us to capitalize on more robust issuance periods. Speaker 200:03:25And in the Q1, we did exactly that and we showed the tremendous operating leverage in our business, with the 2nd highest quarterly revenue on record, up 35% year over year and an adjusted operating margin of 64.6%. Meanwhile, MA reported another quarter of 10% ARR growth, growing across all lines of business, including double digit ARR growth in both decision solutions and data and information. And during the quarter, we executed on our strategic investment roadmap across platforming, product innovation and Gen AI enablement. And this quarter highlights the unique strength of our business model. We're tracking to our medium term EPS target of low double digit growth while we are funding this investment program that will drive future growth, all while we expect to return over $1,600,000,000 to stockholders this year through share repurchases and dividends. Speaker 200:04:26That is the power of the Moody's compounding machine. We're also updating a few of our guidance metrics and Noemi will give some details on that a little bit later in the call. So we've got our eye on the ball. We're looking ahead and we are focused on our mission to be the leading source of insights on exponential risk. So with that, let's dive in a little bit more on the financial performance of our businesses this quarter and our latest expectations for the full year. Speaker 200:04:53And as I've said before, MIS really is one of the world's great business franchises. It's widely recognized as best in the industry with strong global coverage in cross border and domestic debt markets and it has a growing range of offerings to support growth areas like private credit and transition finance. And maintaining that leadership position really is critical in order to capitalize on the resurgence and opportunistic issuance that we experienced during the Q1. And that's what played out during the quarter. MIS delivered, as I said, growth of 35% in the quarter, including 57% growth in transactional revenue. Speaker 200:05:33And a key driver of this growth in the quarter was the leverage finance markets, real strength for MIS where revenue was up 144% versus the prior year quarter. That's quite a growth number. And as I explained a few quarters ago, we established a dedicated private credit team in MIS and that's starting to pay dividends as we're better positioned to service the continued growth of the private credit markets as well as a wave of deals refinancing from the private credit markets into public markets. And while it's early, we're encouraged by interest in our transition finance offerings and that includes our second party opinions and our new net zero assessment and we already have several major issuers like Electricity De France that have published our net zero assessment. And with discipline around expenses, MIS delivered an adjusted operating margin of almost 65%, again demonstrating the tremendous operating leverage in this business. Speaker 200:06:36Now while the Q1 issuance was very robust, it is still early in the year and there are some uncertainties. So we're a bit cautious in regards to changes to our full year outlook at this point in the year. Issuance in the Q1 benefited from pull forward given the favorable market environment and questions about the back end of the year in regards to upcoming U. S. Elections, ongoing tensions in the Middle East and uncertainty around U. Speaker 200:07:05S. Inflation and central bank rate cuts. So consequently, we have not changed our full year issuance and revenue growth guidance targets. However, our updated outlook now centers on the upper end of both ranges and there are some things that we're watching to determine if we've got some upside to our current outlook. The global economy has certainly demonstrated resilience and that's also going to be reflected in declining high yield default rates, which are now projected to range between 3% to 3.5% by year end. Speaker 200:07:38And we see some strong investor demand for riskier assets that's kept spreads tight. Notably, we're starting to see M and A activity pick up. Private equity funds are actively seeking exits and looking to deploy huge pools of capital. So again, there's some things that we're keeping a close eye on and I'm sure we're going to discuss that a little bit further in the Q and A. So now turning to Moody's Analytics. Speaker 200:08:04As we've seen over the years, MA continues to be a very consistent growth engine for us, achieving 65 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and now 6 consecutive quarters of double digit ARR growth. Our retention rate has held steady at 94% for the last 2 years and yet again for the Q1 of 2024. And that's a real testament to the stickiness of our solutions. As we look across our reported lines of business in MA, we can see our land and expand strategy in action. So starting with KYC, which I think you can see on the bottom far left of the webcast slide, about a quarter of our 18% ARR growth in the Q1 is from new customer acquisitions. Speaker 200:08:49So a lot of new logos adopting our solutions in this space. On the other end of the spectrum, about 90% of our insurance ARR growth of 10% is from really strong execution of our cross sell strategy across our existing customer base. And clearly, RMS is an important contributor to that and it continues to deliver against the targets that we set back in 2021. And I think a number of you will remember that at the time of the acquisition, RMS was growing at a low single digit pace and it's moved up very nicely as we've made progress on migrating customers to our SaaS platform and really activating our cross selling strategies. And that includes things like climate models to banks and conversely selling data and analytics and other Moody's solutions to the RMS customer base. Speaker 200:09:41So when we take all of this into account, in 2024, the ARR for RMS including synergies is expected to grow at a low double digit pace. Now switching gears a little bit. Last year at this time, we were just starting to mobilize around GenAI. In fact, we hadn't even deployed our internal co pilot or announced our partnership with Microsoft at that point. And it is interesting to look back because what a difference a year makes. Speaker 200:10:14And we now have a framework for our suite of GenAI enabled solutions that we're rolling out during 2024. It's no longer going to be just about research assistance. So we've categorized our capabilities into 3 primary buckets that we call navigators, skills and assistance. And really each of these capabilities deliver increasing levels of value to our customers and are going to have some distinct economics. So navigators leverage an AI powered natural language user interface to help our customers really get the most out of our products. Speaker 200:10:51And I would expect that almost all of our solutions will have some form of AI navigator or chat, what you might think of as a chatbot. And these will be table stakes, I think for both our offerings as well as competitor offerings, I would assume in the relatively near future. Then we've got skills. Those are specialized Gen AI capabilities that connect to Moody's data and content and analytics. And we're designing these skills to deliver automation and provide the tools to drive productivity and insight for our customers. Speaker 200:11:23And that includes things like the planned release of our, what we call our quick memo, which is our automated credit memo and our quick alert, which is our surveillance and early warning system. And then we're going to have a set of assistance for a number of our major customer personas, which are going to be a combination of skills and prompt engineering that are most relevant to their jobs to be done. So this go to market framework I think is going to address the needs of our customers as they move up the spectrum of Gen AI adoption in their daily work processes. And while it is still too early to quantify, we now have a pipeline that is coming to market in the coming weeks months and we expect that to help drive our value proposition and retention rates and open up opportunities to serve new users. So on that note, I am very happy to hand it over to Noemi to provide a little more color on our results. Speaker 300:12:21Thank you, Rob. Let me start by saying that in my previous role as a CFO of a public company, which was also an issuer, I've been in the building a few times over the years, but being here as Moody's CFO is both an honor and a thrill. As we get to know each other, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you my Moody thesis that drove my decision to join. Throughout the process, everyone I met has consistently told me what an exciting time it is to join the firm. Moody's has been a trusted source of financial insights through various economic cycles and every actor in the global capital markets benefits from the value of Moody's products and services. Speaker 300:13:06Coming from the enterprise software ecosystem, I can tell you that this network effect, if you will, is one of the hardest competitive advantages to disrupt. Also in my previous CFO role, I got the chance to interact with Moody's analysts and research teams frequently, and each time I left more impressed by the depth and rigor of their thinking. Moody's ratings is a powerful franchise with sustainable growth prospects, unparalleled reputation and an impressive industry knowledge and expertise. Now in addition to that, Moody's built a great set of assets based on proprietary data that goes back over 100 years. The value of that historical data is unmatched. Speaker 300:13:52And it is my strong belief that Moody's is well positioned to leverage GNAI capabilities as a result. Whether it's credit, KYC, climate or many other use cases, Moody's has integrated and innovated with our customers' needs at the core. In truth, I've spent the last 15 plus years talking to my peers about having the right data and analytics tools to make smart decisions in support of the business. And so I can attest the many use cases for Moody's Analytics solution set. As you can tell, I'm really passionate about that. Speaker 300:14:29Also, as you would expect of a CFO, I spent some time studying Moody's financial profile before joining. Some obvious attributes, this is and over 100% of free cash flow to net income conversion expected this year. This is an outstanding set of fundamentals. But they are also unique in that they provide flexibility for investing and innovating to fuel growth. Another CFO priority is execution on a disciplined capital allocation plan. Speaker 300:15:07I am very impressed with our focus and results. You saw us generate savings from resource redeployment and automation and then redirect investment spending on areas that will enable us to deliver on our medium term targets. And we are doing that while aiming to return about 80% of free cash flow to our shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks this fiscal year. In my experience, the operating leverage of this business and track record of long term sustainable growth are simply remarkable. I conclude before I get to the Q1 results and outlook that as a CFO of a company that must abide by a large number of regulations and help its customers deal with an increased number of larger, more interconnected risks, I'm very proud to have joined a team that puts risk management at the center of what we do with resilient operations and a fantastic culture. Speaker 300:16:06I've spent some time with Rob, his leadership team, the Board and many folks in finance and beyond. The culture, warmth and sharp intellect of the people at Moody's and the sense of belonging is very special. And for all these reasons, I could not think of a better place to be. Now turning to the Q1 results. As you heard from Rob, we started the year strong with reported revenue growth of 21% and adjusted EPS growth of 13% over the Q1 last year when as you may recall we saw a significant non recurring tax benefit. Speaker 300:16:47Strong growth and inherent operating leverage, while making selected investments in strategic areas, led to an adjusted operating margin expansion of 6 10 basis points at about 51%, which translated into a free cash flow conversion to GAAP net income of over 120%. Our quarterly free cash flows of close to $700,000,000 was the highest on record. Now let me touch on segment results. As Rob said, the issuance rebound led to MIS delivering its 2nd highest quarter on record. We saw a strong start across all lines of business as tightening spreads and investor demand propelled opportunistic issuance. Speaker 300:17:32Corporate Finance grew 49%, predominantly from issuance by leveraged loan issuers and pull forward activity. Financial institution issuance was the strongest since the financial crisis, with an elevated level infrequent issuer activity, which then led to revenue growth of 37%. On the margin front, the operating leverage of our Ratings business, coupled with our initiatives to drive operating efficiencies has allowed us to capture the significant rebound in issuance and flow the upside through the bottom with a 7 80 basis points expansion of adjusted operating margin year on year. Turning to Moody's Analytics. 1st quarter revenue was up 8%. Speaker 300:18:20Growth was driven by strong demand in our data and information line of business with revenue growing 13% year on year and continued demand for our KYC and compliance solutions with revenue growing 24%. As for Research and Insights, where revenue grew 3%, timing of revenue recognition of our on premise software subscription and transaction revenue, even though these are a small share of the business of this segment, affected the growth rate a bit this quarter, as well as a modest and but expected uptick in credit view attrition from banks and asset managers. If you look at the revenue from hosted software solutions though, the growth is trending closer to ARR growth. And overall, we expect Research and Insights ARR growth to tick up to the high single digit range by year end, particularly with pipeline momentum picking up around research assistant and unrated coverage expansion in recent months. Speaking of ARR, MA ended the Q1 with annualized recurring revenue of $3,100,000,000 up 10% from the prior year. Speaker 300:19:28Of note, we saw a sequential acceleration of growth within 2 of our three lines of businesses. Decision Solutions AR grew 12%, up from 11% in Q4 2023 and Data and Information grew 11%, up from 10%, supported by higher retention amongst banks and public sector customers. These two lines of business represent about 71% of total ARR, so we're really pleased to see the growth there accelerating. You heard earlier that our retention rate remains best in class at 94%, demonstrating the stickiness of our solutions. As communicated in February, we are actively balancing strategic investments that we believe will drive future growth, including in our cloud platform and product roadmap with operating efficiency initiatives. Speaker 300:20:21That said, I'm pleased to report we delivered 29.7 percent adjusted operating margin in Moody's Analytics segment, an increase of 80 bps year over year. Let me now turn to our assumptions around issuance that underpin our fiscal year outlook. As we said in February, our full year issuance outlook of mid to high single digit growth accounted for a stronger first half of the year. Indeed, 1st quarter issuance was strong across all business lines, but mainly from corporate finance and financial institutions, driven by refinancing activities with a significant proportion of that activity being pulled forward. That said, we are making modest revisions to select asset classes to account for what we saw in the Q1. Speaker 300:21:10Specifically, we now expect big issuance to increase in the low single digit percent range, up from approximately flat, driven by the elevated infrequent issuer activity in the Q1 that I mentioned earlier. And SFG to grow now in the high single digit percent range as a combination of jumbo transactions and increased CLO refinancing activity fuel growth. Our guidance for 1st time mandates in the range of $500,000,000 to $600,000,000 remains unchanged. I will conclude on issuance by saying it is early in the year and although we like what we saw in the Q1, our broader issuance outlook for full year 2024 remains largely unchanged. As such, we're maintaining our MIS revenue guidance of high single digit to low double digit growth for the full year. Speaker 300:22:03Our updated outlook incorporates various specific macroeconomic assumptions, which are detailed in our presentation. We are also adjusting our FX assumptions to reflect the appreciation of the U. S. Dollar against the euro and the British pound. We now expect the euro to U. Speaker 300:22:21S. Dollar exchange rate and the euro to GBP exchange rate to be 1.08 and 1.26 respectively for the remainder of the year. With that background, we're making the following updates to our full year outlook. Moody's Analytics revenue is now expected to increase in the high single digit percent range, primarily reflecting the strengthening of the U. S. Speaker 300:22:44Dollar I just mentioned. That said, our ARR growth expectation in the low double digit range for fiscal year 2024 is unchanged from our prior guidance. Of note, we are maintaining our full year operating margin outlook for Moody's Analytics in the range of 30% to 31%, as there is a partial FX natural hedge on our expense pool, coupled with ongoing disciplined expense management. For MIS, we just went through the issuance assumptions and we're maintaining our full year revenue outlook of high single digit to low double digit percent range. And we demonstrated in Q1 that we can capture the increased volume of issuance in MIS and at the same time expand our margins, which gives us confidence to raise MIS adjusted operating margin to a range of 56% to 58%. Speaker 300:23:39Last, we told you in February that we would narrow the EPS guidance range with increased visibility and that is precisely what we're doing. We are narrowing the adjusted diluted EPS range for the year to $10.40 to $11 And that ends our prepared remarks. I'm happy to open the call to questions. Operator? Speaker 400:24:04Thank Operator00:24:27We'll take our first question from Heather Balsky at Bank of America. Speaker 500:24:33Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question. I really appreciate it. I was hoping you could dig in a little bit more on what you saw in MA during the quarter, particularly in terms of some of your customers where you said you felt pressure. And how you're thinking about that and how you think that trends for the rest of the year? Speaker 500:24:54Is it 1Q specific? Is it assuming that it continues part of the reason you reduced the guide there? Appreciate it. Thanks. Speaker 300:25:05Yes. Heather, maybe let me start with the Q1 revenue performance and what we're seeing for the rest of the year and I'll pass it to Rob to provide some color on pipeline and sales. In the Q1, we delivered revenue growth of 8% and ARR growth of 10%. We had strong demand for our data solutions and KYC, those are the 2 that grew respectively 13% 24%. As I said in my prepared remarks, research and insight was a little unusual this quarter. Speaker 300:25:38We had revenue growth of 3% that was affected by some of the mix between a low share of on premise transaction and a shift into more SaaS subscription. But if you look at the ARR growth, we haven't changed our outlook for the full year. We still expect ARR growth to be in the high single digit growth and then low level digit growth, sorry. And then we have just adjusted the revenue outlook to account for a lower euro and GBP against the dollar. That's primarily what we're doing. Speaker 300:26:12There's a little bit of seasonality in sales as well, more towards the back half of the year, which drives a bit of the revenue upside updated outlook as well. But our retention rate remains very strong at 94% And our ARR again, which is an indicator of the strength of our underlying business, remains strong as well. Rob, anything you want to add? Speaker 200:26:35Hey, Heather. Just to double click a little bit, I mean, you asked about retention. I'd say we're seeing, obviously at the MA portfolio level, very strong overall retention. I'd say we do see a little bit of pressure from banks and asset managers. We saw a little bit of an uptick, Noemi just mentioned it, in the research business, but some improved retention in other areas. Speaker 200:27:01I would say kind of more broadly, you asked about the kind of sales pipeline. I'd say the sales pipeline is quite healthy at this point. We haven't seen any elongation of sales cycles. We continue to see some strong underlying drivers for our products around digitization and automation. And certainly, Gen AI has opened a whole new front in that regulation, 3 60 degree view of risk. Speaker 200:27:32So, the sales pipeline again, healthy and supports our comfort with the overall ARR guide for the year. Speaker 500:27:46Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Operator00:27:51We'll move next to Manav Patnaik at Barclays. Speaker 600:27:55Thank you. I just wanted to follow-up a little bit on that in terms of if you could help us with some of your end market exposures maybe in ME in terms of the client pressures we're seeing a lot of the other financial information services companies obviously call out pressure from both the buy side and the sell side. So just if you could help us out there going forward if we should be keeping an eye out on anything? Speaker 200:28:21Yes, Manav, let me take that. I guess I would kind of come back and say, while certainly there are cost pressures at financial institutions, corporates, like the one on the phone at the moment, everybody focused on having discipline around expenses. I'm sure we can all understand that. There are also some really important drivers of demand. And I'm going to double click on what I just talked about there. Speaker 200:28:49So you've got financial institutions in particular that are focused on these on the digitization and automation across the entire enterprise. And institutions have gone from these transformation programs over the last call it decade and now they're looking at GenAI as a way to really accelerate and in some ways de risk those transformation journeys. And so we're having some wonderful conversations around that. And I think the opportunity, look at the value proposition of some of the solutions that we provide Manav, when you start to think about labor substitution and the time and efficiency that can be gained from our solutions, that is a very important tool for our financial institutions customers to really address those cost pressures. So I think while the adoption of GenAI Technologies is going to take a little bit longer at regulated financial institutions. Speaker 200:29:46I think it's a very significant opportunity. And then the other thing I would go to Manav is, because this is a discussion I have with literally every single customer I talk to, which is this desire to have a 3 60 degree view of who they're doing business with. I mean, this is everyone that we talk to and you want to understand it. So to think about optimizing your sales and marketing efforts, you want to understand what customers you want to take on. You want to monitor those customers. Speaker 200:30:17You need to understand much more about your supplier network. So, institutions are really investing in that and there are some regulatory drivers that are forcing them to invest in that. When I talk to the big banks, they all tell me that the regulators are very focused on the resilience of their suppliers. So again, that's a place that with our data and analytics, we can actually help them and help them in a very cost effective way. So again, I feel quite comfortable Manav, despite the fact that we've got to face off with procurement departments from time to time. Speaker 200:30:54The value prop around our solutions, I think pretty compelling given what our customers are focused on. Operator00:31:04We'll go next to Toni Kaplan at Morgan Stanley. Speaker 700:31:08Thanks very much. Very strong 1Q issuance quarter, obviously that was expected. And you raised FIG and structured marginally, but kept corporate sort of the same and you're calling out sort of improved M and A activity and you're seeing the guide being towards the high end of the range. I guess, what gives you sort of reservation not to fully raise the MIS guide? I know you talk about sort of election uncertainty and rate uncertainty later in the year and the comps get harder. Speaker 700:31:45But just talk through the factors because I feel like 1Q would have given a little bit of room for having cushion and doing that? Thanks. Speaker 200:31:57Yes, Tony, thanks for the question. And I think part of this just comes back to it's 1Q. So let me talk to you maybe Tony about kind of what we see in the year in terms of both what I think could be tailwinds for issuance. So where there could be some upside as well as where we maybe have a little bit of uncertainty or caution. And first of all, I would just say that there has been a significant amount of pull forward. Speaker 200:32:30And there's 2 kinds of pull forward, right? There's pull forward of the issuance that issuers were planning to do in a calendar year and we are certainly seeing that. In fact, when we engage with the banks, the banks are telling their clients that they should bring forward the issuance that they were anticipating doing in the second half of the year and they should bring that forward into the first half of the year while the market is open, spreads are tight. So we're seeing that. The second kind of pull forward is really the pull forward of from maturity walls and refinancing. Speaker 200:33:07And we are seeing some of that as well. And in general, as we kind of step back, Tony, I guess as I think about where could there be upside? And you heard that we are kind of centering around the higher end of the guide at this point. So I think there is a bias to the upside, but stronger economic growth without inflation increasing, that's going to be very positive in particular for the leverage finance markets. They're the ones most exposed to fluctuations and changes in economic growth. Speaker 200:33:40But a real place that I think we're looking at is around the M and A environment. And a lot of the financing that's been done in the first quarter was refinancing. And so if we see some, what I think of as new money transactions to support M and A and in particular sponsor backed M and A. I think that that could be an upside for issuance for the year and that would not only would we see that come into leverage loans, but I think you will also see that in terms of new CLO formation. So the commercial benefit of that will be meaningful. Speaker 200:34:20I think just in terms of downside risks, obviously there are more questions now about inflation prints and the timing and trajectory of Fed moves than there were at the beginning of the year. So I think people have started to kind of reset their expectations. And I think people are just looking at the not only the U. S. Election, but there we've talked about this before. Speaker 200:34:46Many countries are going to the polls and particularly in the back half of the year. So I think we're seeing issuers who say, I want to be able to get ahead of that and any furthering of geopolitical tensions. You can imagine a widening of a regional conflict in the Middle East that kind of thing. And so we're hearing issuers get in front of that. So at this point, Tony, that has led us to, I'd say probably be a little bit measured in terms of how we think about issuance. Speaker 200:35:15Still early, but some things to watch and in particular would be the, I think the M and A environment. Speaker 700:35:23Super. Thank you. Operator00:35:26We'll go next to Ashish Sabadra at RBC Capital Markets. Speaker 800:35:32Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to follow-up on the pull forward comment. As we understand the second half pull forward in the first half, but I also wanted to better understand the pull forward from 2025, 2026. How does the refi wall look now for 2025 and 2026 even with the pull forward? Is there still a much bigger refi wall in 2025, 2026 compared to what we are seeing in 2024? Speaker 800:35:55And then as we think about the M and A, where are we trending or what's the assumption for M and A as a percentage of overall issuance in this year and how does that compare to an average year? Thanks. Speaker 200:36:08Yes, Ashish. We'll have a little bit better insight later in the year when we publish our updated maturity refinancing study as we always do. But I would say that certainly you've seen issuers who are addressing upcoming maturities, particularly in loans. And there's still some maturities for 2024 that have got to get done, not a lot as you'd expect. It's possible that we start to see some additional pull forward from 2025 perhaps and beyond in the second half of this year if markets remain supportive. Speaker 200:36:49So we're going to be looking out for that. But it's interesting. I think if you think about I'm going to take leverage loans for just a moment. Let me maybe just 0 in on that for a second. There was a massive amount of pandemic era issuance in leveraged loans and that really does provide a very solid underpinning for future issuance. Speaker 200:37:12And when you kind of 0 in on leverage loans, there was something like $1,150,000,000,000 of 2020 2021 maturities and almost 70% of that matures in 20 27 beyond. And what that's telling me is that that money that financing was done at very tight spreads and low rates. So I think that those are not great candidates to be pulled forward, right. Where you may see the pull forward is there was something like $1,000,000,000,000 that was issued in 2022 2023. So some of that may be candidates depending on what happens again a little bit later in the year. Speaker 200:37:57So we're keeping an eye on that. But in general, I would say that I see that just given the absolute amount of debt that's been issued over the last several years as a net positive. So I'm not concerned that all of this all of future years are being pulled into this year, because when we think about debt velocity, which is issuance and I'm looking at the corporate markets issuance over total debt outstanding, debt velocity as a percent versus kind of the 15 year average is quite is still well under that 15 year average. So I think there's still a good bit of issuance. On M and A, we have not changed our outlook. Speaker 200:38:34But as I said, there are some green shoots. We've seen some strategic deals. We've seen some sponsor back deals. So all of that is encouraging. I talked about why sponsor backed M and A is so important. Speaker 200:38:48So we're expecting, I would say, a modest recovery in 2024. That's what's built in. But this really is, I think, a wildcard. The one other thing I would say is that our rating assessment service, which gives us some visibility into the M and A pipeline because that then comes into issuance. We have seen a pickup, a very nice pickup in our rating assessment service. Speaker 200:39:16So that does give us some confidence that the M and A market will continue to improve for the balance of the year. Speaker 800:39:25That's great color. Thank you. Thanks, Operator00:39:29Rob. We'll move next to Andrew Nicholas at William Blair. Speaker 900:39:35Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the AI frameworks that you outlined in the presentation and the webcast deck. And I think, Rob, you made mention of there being kind of different monetization strategies across each one of those buckets. So I was hoping you could expand on that comment and maybe on progress in terms of monetization or even a better understanding of the type of impact that could have, whether it's in 2024 or in the out years? Speaker 900:40:07Thank you. Speaker 200:40:10Yes. So the first thing we wanted to do is make sure we had a framework. We have a lot of innovation going on and we wanted to make sure that we're able to be thoughtful about how we go to market with that innovation for our customers. And I think you're going to see us deploy across a spectrum with our customers because our customers, we're either going to deliver GenAI enabled workflow software, right? So those are our customers who are using our software and that's where we'll have Gen AI enablement and our skills and our assistance on that. Speaker 200:40:48We will have our navigators to help our customers get the most out of those offerings. Some of our customers are going to want to integrate either our Gen AI APIs or our RAG APIs into their own internal workflow or just raw data feeds and other content with additional rights to be able to use in their own AI platform. So there will be different ways that we are going to be delivering our AI enabled solutions. And of course, there's also 3rd party platforms. We're working to build out an even larger ecosystem of partners so that our customers can also access our content in systems where they're making decisions. Speaker 200:41:29So I think as I talk about kind of navigators and skills and assistance, maybe one a high level way to think about this. The navigators again, I talked about that as probably being table stakes. This is making our solutions much easier to use. And, I think that will be that will support the value proposition and ultimately the pricing, but also the retention. Exactly. Speaker 200:41:53I think that's where that's going to and again, I think we're going to see that'll be table stakes. Everybody's going to have, use chatbots and other things to make their solutions easier to use. It's the skills where we're taking the proprietary Moody's content and then delivering that into workflow for our customers and then aggregating those skills and prompt engineering into an assistant for people in banking, for people in insurance, for people in compliance. And I think you'll see us we're thinking about how we're going to price for that, whether it's going to be I think we'll have different models, but you can imagine in some cases it will be an increase to the overall subscription. In some cases, you can imagine an element of a consumption model based on how much you are consuming across these skills and our various data and content sets. Speaker 200:42:50So it's still a little early. And I know everybody wants to get some visibility on that, but hopefully that gives you a little insight. Noemi, anything to add there? Speaker 300:42:59Yes. The other thing I would add, reflecting on the conversations we're having with customers, they want to partner with firms that can be trusted when it comes to data integrity that have a strong reputation for robust analytics and modeling skills. They're still assessing their own framework when it comes to dealing with vendors on GNAI enabled solutions. And that's why I think we differentiate ourselves given our reputation, our history and all the work we've done to build that framework. So I just want to add that. Speaker 900:43:37That's helpful and welcome, Noemi. Speaker 300:43:40Thank you. Operator00:43:44Our next question comes from Scott Wertzel at Wolfe Research. Speaker 1000:43:49Hey, good morning and thanks for taking my question here. I just wanted to go on some margins and just given the outperformance in the Q1 and in the context of you sort of reiterating and holding the total company operating margins for the year. I was just wondering if there was any element of reinvestment plans from the upside that you saw in the Q1 that's sort of keeping that operating margin stable? Or is it really just more about kind of the implied deceleration in MIS revenue as we move throughout the year? Thanks. Speaker 300:44:18Thanks. So I can Megha take that. We've increased the MIS adjusted operating margin by 50 bps for the full year. We've maintained our MA adjusted operating margin unchanged despite a bit of revenue headwind. That's because we are very mindful in our spend. Speaker 300:44:36We're investing strategically, but we're also building efficiencies into the system. So all in all, the outlook in terms of the consolidated level hasn't really changed. We've moved a little bit up in our range, but we remain within the 44% to 46% range that we've communicated before. Speaker 200:44:54Yes. And I guess the only the double click on that is, given what we've seen in the Q1, we have not upsized our investment program. Speaker 1000:45:04Got it. Thank you. Operator00:45:09We'll go next to Fazah Alwy at Deutsche Bank. Speaker 500:45:14Yes. Hi. Thank you. I wanted to go back to MA and the change in the revenue guide. Just want to clarify, like is the change entirely FX or is there something else to keep in mind as it relates to to just converting ARR to revenues? Speaker 500:45:32And I'm curious if you can talk about how much FX impacted MA this quarter? Speaker 300:45:40Yes, I'll take that. On the Q1, we didn't see any material impact on FX. It's really for the remainder of the year as we saw some strengthening of the U. S. Dollar. Speaker 300:45:51The update in the outlook for MA revenue, it's primarily FX driven. There's also a little bit of sales linearity that's more geared towards the back half of the year than what we initially thought in February. But what as Rob talked about, our pipeline is very strong. We have can you hear me? Yes. Speaker 300:46:15We have a strong pipeline. Our meetings sales meetings are very going very well. So it's primarily FX with a little bit of sales seasonality as well. Speaker 500:46:28Okay. So just to be clear, sorry, just to it, there's no change, you're not sort of lowering, the within the low double digit range per ARR. ARR is still pretty much in line with all you Speaker 300:46:39Yes, that's correct. We the ARR is a forward looking measure of the health of our recurring revenue business and the underlying health of that business hasn't changed from what we said before. Speaker 500:46:50Thank you. Operator00:46:55Our next question comes from Jeff Silber at BMO Capital Markets. Speaker 1100:47:00Thanks so much. Wanted to continue the discussion on MA, focus a little bit more on research and insights. You talked a little bit about the slowness in the quarter. I think you said there was some timing and there were some other things. But if I can just clarify that? Speaker 1100:47:13And then also, why do you expect growth to accelerate specifically in research and insights in the back half of the year? Thanks. Speaker 200:47:22Yes. So over the past year or so, we have seen a little bit of deceleration in ARR growth in research and insights. And obviously, fixed income research is a pretty mature market. And that's really one reason that we focused on these 2 new enhancements to CreditView that we have talked about over the last quarter or 2. That's the research assistant and the unrated coverage expansion. Speaker 200:47:52It is going to take a little time for us to see the benefits of that in ARR growth. We have seen some modest retention pressures with CreditView. Some of that has come from the recent banking consolidation. We had expected that frankly. And we expect ARR to pick back up in the second half of the year and accelerate towards high single digits. Speaker 200:48:18Again, for a couple of reasons. 1, the CreditView coverage expansion, and we have a good sales pipeline there and have actually seen some particular interest in Europe and also from those in the private credit market. And then second, research assistant. So we've seen sales really start to pick up in the quarter. We're now at 37 sales. Speaker 200:48:45We expect that to we have a very nice pipeline. And what I mentioned earlier, the earlier adopters of research assistant tend to be smaller companies where there's less of a kind of a regulatory risk and control environment that they have to contend with. So, we're having some really encouraging discussions with some very large institutions, but those take a little bit more time. And so, we've also seen a very nice uptick in user requests and also engagement. And those are really very good leading indicators for us in terms of the market's interest. Speaker 200:49:31And so when we've got people that we're turning on to research assistant and we see very strong upticks in usage, that gives us a lot of confidence. And so I think together these things we think are going to help us pull that ARR growth back up in the back end of the year. Speaker 400:49:50Okay. Thank you. Operator00:49:55Next, we'll go to George Tong at Goldman Sachs. Speaker 400:49:59Hi, thanks. Good morning. You mentioned seeing some pull forward in refinancing issuance, some from the second half of twenty twenty four and some from beyond 2024. Can you talk about how much opportunistic issuance may have been pulled forward into the quarter and what that could mean for non refinancing related issuance in the back half of this year and beyond? Speaker 200:50:22I guess, George, maybe the best way I could quantify it is still the meaningful majority of issuance in the quarter was refinancing. So the new money, there was a combination of I do think there was some pull forward of new money transactions, but a lot of what was getting done was refinancing activity. Does that give you some does that help? Speaker 400:50:54Yes, yes, that helps. And I guess, what's the view on new money over the next several quarters in the back half of the year? Speaker 200:51:02Yes, George. So that's where I come back to. If for us to really have confidence that the Q1 is not a kind of a one trick pony of pull forward of issuance either in new opportunistic issuance from the second half of the year or pull forward of maturity wells. What we really want to see is the mix of refi to new money start to pick up and that's why I go back to that M and A. I think that's going to be an important driver because there is a mountain of money at these private equity firms that has got to get deployed. Speaker 200:51:38So there's actually 2 things going on. The private equity players have got to exit and the last couple of years have been very difficult for sponsor exits because of a very soft IPO market and obviously a quiet M and A environment. So the sponsors are looking to exit and you've also got sponsors with a huge amount of dry powder that has got to get deployed. And so we have started to see some of that in towards the end of the Q1. We started to see some of these multi $1,000,000,000 sponsor back transactions in the public markets. Speaker 200:52:16That's the kind of thing we're going to look for. If that continues into the second half of the year, that's going to give upside I think to our current issuance outlook. Speaker 400:52:28That's great. Thank you. Operator00:52:32We'll go next to Craig Huber at Huber Research. Speaker 1200:52:37Thank you. Naomi, I'm curious, your new CFO here, you're following roughly 20 years, very strong, the prior 2 CFOs, your company there and stuff. What are you thinking you can improve upon at the company they're willing to talk about publicly here? Speaker 300:52:55Thanks for the question. I think if I think about stepping back a bit about the company's priorities and where we are headed, I think my priorities are very much aligned with where the company is going and what we're focused on to accomplish our medium term targets and beyond. The first thing I'd say is continuing to focus on a very thoughtful capital allocation, balancing the investment spend to drive future growth and really move from a legacy one time revenue into full recurring, which will then in turn expand the margin. I think that's very important. I have worked with companies before who evolved their business model from on premise lower margin into SaaS recurring and scaled businesses. Speaker 300:53:48And I think that's an area that really excites me. What I've seen so far really resonates with me and that's really what I want to focus on. And then continuing to drive efficiencies both internally as well as for our customers and talking to a lot of our customers. The other thing I want to do as well, spend some time with you all to understand what are the things you're looking at, what things you think we're doing well, things where you'd like us to see do differently and I'm really much looking forward to that as well. Speaker 1200:54:20Thank you. Speaker 200:54:22Yes. And Craig, I will add, I think Noemi is also going to bring a wonderful perspective and I think help communicate to the market the real value of this business and using the perspective that she's had from software and SaaS businesses in the past. So we're really excited about it. Speaker 900:54:41Great. Thanks. Operator00:54:45We'll take our next question from Jeff Meuler at Baird. Speaker 1300:54:49Yes. Thank you. So great to hear the progress on RMS. On the revenue acceleration, does the revenue lift come as the upgraded as they do the platform upgrade or is it that the platform upgrade enables follow on sales just trying to understand the sequencing? And then, on the synergies bit, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but mostly two way cross sell synergies between RMS and Moody's products. Speaker 1300:55:21Where are you on, I guess, net new product synergies that combine the capabilities from each of the firms? Thanks. Speaker 200:55:29Yes, Jeff, great question. RMS is really turning into a nice story for us. And I guess I would maybe I'll call it core RMS, ARR that is now growing in line with MA ARR and that is a far cry from the quite low single digit percent growth when we acquired the business. And there's a couple of things going on there just with the core business excluding the synergies. One is in fact an acceleration of the migration of customers from on prem to the intelligent risk platform. Speaker 200:56:16And those of you who know the history of RMS know that we RMS struggled with a prior SaaS rollout. The intelligent risk platform is the real deal. It's industrial strength and we're really seeing some very nice migration. And to your question, there are there's 2 things. So one, there are commercial benefits as we move customers over and 2, exactly as you said, Jeff, once you're there, it's much easier to adopt additional solutions because now you've got all the data in one spot, you can integrate your own models, 3rd party models. Speaker 200:56:50So there are a lot of benefits driving customers to migrate to the SaaS platform and to continue to grow their relationship with RMS. The second thing is just good old fashioned sales blocking and tackling. We moved our one of our most experienced sales managers in to be the Head of Sales and really have even more discipline around the RMS sales program and that has also paid dividends. And then the nature of the synergies, I mean, you're exactly right. So I'll give you one very exciting example of what I would call kind of outbound synergy. Speaker 200:57:31So this is RMS IP to other Moody's customers. We just signed one of the world's largest banks as a customer of the cat models. So this isn't even kind of our climate on demand for banks. This is literally the full cat models. So this is a bank who wanted to have a very sophisticated view of the impact on climate and extreme weather events on their portfolio and to be able to do stress testing and all sorts of things. Speaker 200:58:02So that's really exciting. And we're seeing more and more demand from banks and asset managers and corporates around supply chain who want to do exactly that, the physical risk relating to climate and extreme weather. And then the other is the inbound cross sell, again, a very nice story. And a lot of that is around the KYC, know your 3rd party, leveraging our master data in our data solutions team. So we have a very nice momentum there. Speaker 200:58:34So all in all, I feel quite good about what's going on at RMS. Speaker 1200:58:41Thank you. Operator00:58:45We'll go next to Andrew Steinerman at JPMorgan. Speaker 1400:58:49Hi, Rob. I just wanted to get with the current guide for credit issuance. Are you assuming that issuance on a transactional basis will be down in the Q4 this year? And also I just wanted to check your pulse on if you thought we were in the midst of a multi year issuance recovery following So Speaker 200:59:12thinking about, I guess, year to go, So thinking about, I guess, year to go, obviously, we've held the issuance forecast range. And mentioned that we expect to be in the higher end of that range. And so obviously that invites questions about, okay, given the strong Q1, what does that imply then about the second half? And it does, in fact imply a I'd say for year to go, so that's 3 quarters, a call it mid single digit decline in issuance for the balance of the year. And to your point, Andrew, I would say more focused on the 4th quarter, where we would think the issuance would be down more in the mid teens range. Speaker 201:00:03And part of that again is because of some of the uncertainties I talk about and one of those being elections. And so we just assume that people are going to pull out of the Q4 where they can. So for the most part, I'd say our forecast represents really just a change in the calendarization of issuance. But I talked earlier about some of the drivers that we're going to be looking for. And then maybe Andrew to your second point about are we in the midst of a multiyear, I can't remember the term you used issuance. Speaker 1401:00:41Issuance recovery, given the pullback in 2022. Speaker 201:00:46Yes. Yes. I do think we are and I think that's consistent with we obviously updated our medium term targets for MIS and I think that's part of that. And I will go back to that point Andrew around what one of the things that leads me to that conclusion is, and while we may have again, we may have a little volatility in the quarters here in the year, but I think the trend line is up. And again, I go back to that debt velocity just to give you a number, at least the numbers we work with. Speaker 201:01:23When you go back to like, okay, let's say, 2,009, so just post global financial crisis, corporate issuance over total corporate outstanding was all the way back to then it's something like 14%. And we're well below that still. So that tells me we've got some room just again given the huge amount of issuance over the last few years. The one other thing I would say Andrew is, I get asked we've gotten asked a lot on these calls about private credit and is this disintermediating the public markets. I actually have started to think of it almost as another form of maturity wall because look what went on in the quarter. Speaker 201:02:11We had 45 deals that got flipped from private markets to public markets. So I had mentioned that I thought of this as a deferral of issuance, not a cannibalization of issuance. In some cases, of course, there could be some cannibalization, but we're seeing there's a lot of just deferral because the private credit players are rational financial actors and if they can get cheaper financing in public markets, they're going to do it and they are doing it. So that I actually think is supported. I actually starting to think private credit is actually a tailwind for us, that will be supportive of this, as you say, recovery in issuance. Speaker 1401:02:54Excellent. Thanks for taking the time. Operator01:02:59We'll go next to Russell Quelch at Redburn. Speaker 1501:03:03Yes. Hi. Thanks for having me on. Wanted to ask a balance sheet related question. I see that your gross leverage is now down at around 2.2, which is the lowest level we've seen from you guys in years. Speaker 1501:03:16You also slowed the pace of the buyback in Q1, touched that cash on the balance sheet went up by about $300,000,000 in the quarter. That actually was quite stable through 2023. So that's a break in trend there. Is there a change in how you're thinking about capital allocation or the cash you need to hold on the balance sheet? And are you perhaps making room for acquisitions here? Speaker 1501:03:37Can you just give us Speaker 301:03:38a bit of color there? Thanks. Yes. On capital allocation, we are maintaining our approach and it's my intent to continue that. We on the share buyback, which I think is where you're going, we it's just been 1 quarter of execution. Speaker 301:03:54The pace isn't out of line with our planned cadence. We expect to catch up in the Q2 and the second half to hit our target. So I wouldn't read anything into that. And then last year, we focused on deleveraging we had picked up in 2022. Speaker 401:04:12Good. Thank you. Operator01:04:17We'll move next to Owen Lau at Oppenheimer. Speaker 201:04:20Good afternoon and Speaker 1601:04:21thank you for taking my questions. So I have 2 housekeeping questions for modeling purpose. The first one is, I want to go back to the margin. Would you be able to provide more color on the seasonality for the margins of MIS and MA for the rest of this year? And then the second one is on the migration to cloud revenue. Speaker 1601:04:43My understanding is it will impact your upfront revenue growth, but you'll be better off longer term. Should we expect your MA revenue growth to run below the ARR growth until you completed your migration in like RMS and also research? Thanks. Speaker 201:05:01Hey, Owen, this is Rob. I'm going to take the first one. No, I don't think so. I don't think you're going to see us kind of have what I would call kind of a big valley as we're moving from customers from on prem to SaaS. So that's not something I would anticipate. Speaker 201:05:28And your first question was around the calendarization of MIS margins, I believe. Yes. Speaker 301:05:35MIS margin, we saw a the top line, we expect this to be growing a high single low single digit in the remainder of the year. For the margin for MIS, we're forecasting the expenses to be decline slightly in the 2nd quarter in the low single digit sequentially from the Q1. Our Q1 MIS adjusted operating margin of 64.6 percent and expanded full year expectation implies an adjusted operating margin in the range of 53% to 56% on average for the remainder of the year, Especially for the Q2, if you want to use that for modeling purposes, we expect that to be slightly higher than the upper end of our fiscal year guidance before then decreasing sequentially each quarter through the end of the year, which is pretty much in line with the MIS revenue cadence as well, which is expected to decline throughout the year. For MA, we again, we expect the margin to evolve in the same pattern as the revenue with an uptick in the 30% to 31% in the back half of the year. Speaker 1601:06:43Got it. Thanks a lot. Operator01:06:48And we'll take a follow-up from Craig Huber at Huber Research. Speaker 1201:06:52Thank you. You sort of touched on this, but can you just talk a little further about your expectations for the whole company for your cost ramp for the remaining three quarters in light of your guidance for cost here? That's my first housekeeping question. The other thing I wanted to ask you, in the past you guys have given us your incentive compensation that you booked in the quarter and what's your outlook for the year there? Speaker 301:07:14Yes. On incentive comp, Perceval, we recorded $105,000,000 for the Q1. We expect on average $100,000,000 for the 2nd and third quarter and slightly up in the 4th quarter. So that's for the incentives comp. And on the expense cadence, we expect the Q2 expense to be flat sequentially in the Q2 versus Q1 and then gradually increasing by about $20,000,000 to $30,000,000 between Q2 and Q3 and then by $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 in the 4th quarter. Speaker 301:07:50That reflects our strategic investments, some merit increase as well as some other variable costs which are in line with the business growth. Speaker 1201:07:59One more quick thing. Your private credit as a percentage of revenues in ratings right now, Robert and Naomi, where is that sitting at right now? How small is that? Speaker 201:08:10Craig, it's that's an interesting question because I think we could get into a bit of a battle of definitions here. As I kind of step back and think about serving the alternative asset managers, these are the Blackstones, the Apollos. They're both in the public markets and the private markets. And we have, as you'd expect, very significant relationships with a broad range of players in that market. In fact, when you going back to the FIG revenues for the quarter, part of that opportunistic issuance was coming from our Funds and Asset Management segment, sub segment and FIG and part of that was actually coming from BDCs and other folks who you would think of as being in the private credit market. Speaker 201:09:08So I guess, Craig, it's a little bit of a tough question for me to answer because I think of serving the Apollos and the Blackstones and I think of that as public and private and that's quite significant. We as you know, we did roll out a dedicated private credit team. We do have an expanded offering for specifically for things that you would think of as private credit. So we've got credit estimates for BDCs. We've got a number of different kinds of offerings to support fund finance. Speaker 201:09:48In fact, we just rolled out a subscription line methodology and we have a very nice pipeline and that I would think of is primarily private credit related. All of that stuff is growing quite significantly. So I would say maybe to cap it off, our relationship with the big with the alternative asset management community in and I'm just in MIS for the moment is quite significant. As it relates to specifically private credit, yes, for now considerably smaller, but growing quite quickly. I hope that gives you some sense. Speaker 1201:10:27Yes. Thank you. You went a couple of different ways. I didn't pick you in the go, but that's helpful. Thank you. Operator01:10:35And we'll go next to Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Speaker 1701:10:40Hi, thank you for squeezing me in over here. Rob, can you talk a little bit about the KYC growth? It was 18% in 3Q, 20% 4Q, 23% in now this last quarter. You're kind of accelerating on a larger revenue base. If you can give us some idea as to what's driving that? Speaker 1701:10:58And then also at the same time you're seeing the revenue growth, but you're seeing the ARR kind of still around the 17%, 18% and maybe you could talk about that in the context of the revenue growth? Speaker 201:11:11Hey, thanks for the question. Yes, this is a powerful growth engine here and it's there's a number of demand drivers. I think you've probably heard me talk about on the call before that I've gotten to the point where I think KYC is not doing this justice in terms of the name because it talks about know your customer. And you heard me earlier on the call say a theme with literally every customer I talk to is know your who you're doing business with and being able to connect the dots. So that is a big opportunity for us and KYC is right in the middle of it and we are broadening out our solution set, leveraging all of the content that supports KYC. Speaker 201:11:55So that's the massive company database that we call Orbis. It's all of the people and pets information. It's the AI curated news. That supports what you would think of as traditional KYC. And then people want to understand, okay, well, I need to have that information about my suppliers plus other information. Speaker 201:12:14And so the demand for what you would think of as the KYC solutions just continues to broaden out and we're selling into that. And that's one of the areas of investment for us, Shlomo. We talked about really wanting to serve corporates because historically this has been serving financial institutions, but this theme of know who you're doing business with is a big theme with large corporations and we have some fantastic customer wins that really validate our right to win in that space. The other thing I may have mentioned this on some prior calls is especially in the back half of last year, we had a lot of product innovation going on in that space. You may have even seen like some articles about Moody's and the number of shell companies that we had created. Speaker 201:13:11We also have something called an entity verification API that pulls together a bunch of our different data sets and allows our customers to do real time checks. So product innovation, broadening of demand, all of that together, Schlomo is continuing to drive some very strong growth, I think, for the foreseeable future. Speaker 1701:13:40Should we see the ARR kind of ticking up a little bit where we're seeing the revenue ticking up? Should we see ARR ticking up as well? I know it's pretty healthy as it is, but revenues moving ahead of that? Speaker 201:13:52Yes. I mean, we don't guide on that, but I think Speaker 301:13:56I'd really look at the ARR as the best indicator of the underlying trends in that business, as with every other line by the way. I think that's the best way to look at it. Speaker 201:14:07That's it. Shlomo, we've got some positive momentum there in the ARR, I believe. Thank you. Operator01:14:19And that does conclude the Q and A session. I'll turn the conference back over to Rob for any closing remarks. Speaker 201:14:25All right. Well, thank you everybody for your questions and I appreciate you joining the call and we'll talk to you next quarter. Have a great day. Speaker 301:14:33Thank you. Operator01:14:34And this concludes Moody's Corporation Q1 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, immediately following this call, the company will post the MIS revenue breakdown under the Investors Resources section of the Moody's IR homepage. Additionally, a replay will be made available after the call on the Moody's IR website. Thank you.Read morePowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallMoody's Q1 202400:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2x Earnings DocumentsSlide DeckPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) Moody's Earnings Headlines$100 Invested In Moodys 20 Years Ago Would Be Worth This Much TodayApril 26 at 9:44 AM | benzinga.comIs Moody's Stock a Buy Now?April 26 at 8:30 AM | fool.comThe Trump Dump is starting; Get out of stocks now?The first 365 days of the Trump presidency… Will be the best time to get rich in American history.April 28, 2025 | Paradigm Press (Ad)Moody's Co. (NYSE:MCO) Receives $524.33 Average Target Price from AnalystsApril 26 at 3:19 AM | americanbankingnews.comMoody’s price target lowered to $491 from $504 at MizuhoApril 24, 2025 | markets.businessinsider.comMoody’s (MCO) Receives a Hold from Mizuho SecuritiesApril 24, 2025 | markets.businessinsider.comSee More Moody's Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like Moody's? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on Moody's and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About Moody'sMoody's (NYSE:MCO) operates as an integrated risk assessment firm worldwide. It operates in two segments, Moody's Analytics and Moody's Investors Services. The Moody's Analytics segment develops a range of products and services that support the risk management activities of institutional participants in financial markets. It also offers credit research, credit models and analytics, economics data and models, and structured finance solutions; data sets on companies and securities; and SaaS solutions supporting banking, insurance, and know your customer workflows. The Moody's Investors Service segment publishes credit ratings and provides assessment services on various debt obligations, programs and facilities, and entities that issue such obligations, such as various corporate, financial institution, and governmental obligations, as well as structured finance securities. The company was formerly known as Dun and Bradstreet Company and changed its name to Moody's Corporation in September 2000. 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There are 18 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:00Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Moody's Corporation First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded and that all participants are in a listen only mode. At the request of the company, we will open the conference up I will now turn the call over to Shivani Kok, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Speaker 100:00:24Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I'm Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. This morning Moody's released its results for the Q1 2024 as well as our revised outlook for select metrics for full year 2024. The earnings press release and the presentation to accompany this teleconference are both available on our website at ir. Speaker 100:00:45Moodies.com. During this call, we will also be presenting non GAAP or adjusted figures. Please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings press release filed this morning for a reconciliation between all adjusted measures referenced during this call in U. S. GAAP. Speaker 100:01:01I call your attention to the Safe Harbor language, which can be found towards the end of our earnings release. Today's remarks may contain forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In accordance with the Act, I also direct your attention to the management's Discussion and Analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10 ks for the year ended December 31, 2023, and in other SEC filings made by the company, which are available on our website and on the SEC's website. These, together with the Safe Harbor statement, set forth important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such forward looking statements. I'd also like to point out that members of the media may be on the call this morning in a listen only mode. Speaker 100:01:50I'll now turn the call over to Rob. Speaker 200:01:53Thanks, Shivani. Good morning and thanks everybody for joining today's call. Before I touch on a few key takeaways from our Q1 results, I'm going to start by saying how excited I am to be joined today by Noemi Alon, who officially joined Moody's on April 1. And as I mentioned on our last earnings call, Noemi brings almost 25 years of global financial and accounting leadership experience at some very large public companies with a real depth of experience in technology and software as a service. And we're really fortunate to have her as our Chief Financial Officer and I look forward to all of you getting to know her in the coming weeks months. Speaker 200:02:35So with that, let me turn to our Q1 results. We delivered an impressive 21% revenue growth, capitalizing on a strong issuance environment and continued demand for our leading risk assessment solutions. We delivered strong top line performance and margin expansion in both businesses and that translated to adjusted diluted EPS of $3.37 for the quarter. Now starting with MIS, obviously a great quarter. And over the last several years, you all have heard me talk about the investments that we've been making in analytical talent and technology enablement to ensure that we are the agency of choice for investors and issuers and in turn position us to capitalize on more robust issuance periods. Speaker 200:03:25And in the Q1, we did exactly that and we showed the tremendous operating leverage in our business, with the 2nd highest quarterly revenue on record, up 35% year over year and an adjusted operating margin of 64.6%. Meanwhile, MA reported another quarter of 10% ARR growth, growing across all lines of business, including double digit ARR growth in both decision solutions and data and information. And during the quarter, we executed on our strategic investment roadmap across platforming, product innovation and Gen AI enablement. And this quarter highlights the unique strength of our business model. We're tracking to our medium term EPS target of low double digit growth while we are funding this investment program that will drive future growth, all while we expect to return over $1,600,000,000 to stockholders this year through share repurchases and dividends. Speaker 200:04:26That is the power of the Moody's compounding machine. We're also updating a few of our guidance metrics and Noemi will give some details on that a little bit later in the call. So we've got our eye on the ball. We're looking ahead and we are focused on our mission to be the leading source of insights on exponential risk. So with that, let's dive in a little bit more on the financial performance of our businesses this quarter and our latest expectations for the full year. Speaker 200:04:53And as I've said before, MIS really is one of the world's great business franchises. It's widely recognized as best in the industry with strong global coverage in cross border and domestic debt markets and it has a growing range of offerings to support growth areas like private credit and transition finance. And maintaining that leadership position really is critical in order to capitalize on the resurgence and opportunistic issuance that we experienced during the Q1. And that's what played out during the quarter. MIS delivered, as I said, growth of 35% in the quarter, including 57% growth in transactional revenue. Speaker 200:05:33And a key driver of this growth in the quarter was the leverage finance markets, real strength for MIS where revenue was up 144% versus the prior year quarter. That's quite a growth number. And as I explained a few quarters ago, we established a dedicated private credit team in MIS and that's starting to pay dividends as we're better positioned to service the continued growth of the private credit markets as well as a wave of deals refinancing from the private credit markets into public markets. And while it's early, we're encouraged by interest in our transition finance offerings and that includes our second party opinions and our new net zero assessment and we already have several major issuers like Electricity De France that have published our net zero assessment. And with discipline around expenses, MIS delivered an adjusted operating margin of almost 65%, again demonstrating the tremendous operating leverage in this business. Speaker 200:06:36Now while the Q1 issuance was very robust, it is still early in the year and there are some uncertainties. So we're a bit cautious in regards to changes to our full year outlook at this point in the year. Issuance in the Q1 benefited from pull forward given the favorable market environment and questions about the back end of the year in regards to upcoming U. S. Elections, ongoing tensions in the Middle East and uncertainty around U. Speaker 200:07:05S. Inflation and central bank rate cuts. So consequently, we have not changed our full year issuance and revenue growth guidance targets. However, our updated outlook now centers on the upper end of both ranges and there are some things that we're watching to determine if we've got some upside to our current outlook. The global economy has certainly demonstrated resilience and that's also going to be reflected in declining high yield default rates, which are now projected to range between 3% to 3.5% by year end. Speaker 200:07:38And we see some strong investor demand for riskier assets that's kept spreads tight. Notably, we're starting to see M and A activity pick up. Private equity funds are actively seeking exits and looking to deploy huge pools of capital. So again, there's some things that we're keeping a close eye on and I'm sure we're going to discuss that a little bit further in the Q and A. So now turning to Moody's Analytics. Speaker 200:08:04As we've seen over the years, MA continues to be a very consistent growth engine for us, achieving 65 consecutive quarters of revenue growth and now 6 consecutive quarters of double digit ARR growth. Our retention rate has held steady at 94% for the last 2 years and yet again for the Q1 of 2024. And that's a real testament to the stickiness of our solutions. As we look across our reported lines of business in MA, we can see our land and expand strategy in action. So starting with KYC, which I think you can see on the bottom far left of the webcast slide, about a quarter of our 18% ARR growth in the Q1 is from new customer acquisitions. Speaker 200:08:49So a lot of new logos adopting our solutions in this space. On the other end of the spectrum, about 90% of our insurance ARR growth of 10% is from really strong execution of our cross sell strategy across our existing customer base. And clearly, RMS is an important contributor to that and it continues to deliver against the targets that we set back in 2021. And I think a number of you will remember that at the time of the acquisition, RMS was growing at a low single digit pace and it's moved up very nicely as we've made progress on migrating customers to our SaaS platform and really activating our cross selling strategies. And that includes things like climate models to banks and conversely selling data and analytics and other Moody's solutions to the RMS customer base. Speaker 200:09:41So when we take all of this into account, in 2024, the ARR for RMS including synergies is expected to grow at a low double digit pace. Now switching gears a little bit. Last year at this time, we were just starting to mobilize around GenAI. In fact, we hadn't even deployed our internal co pilot or announced our partnership with Microsoft at that point. And it is interesting to look back because what a difference a year makes. Speaker 200:10:14And we now have a framework for our suite of GenAI enabled solutions that we're rolling out during 2024. It's no longer going to be just about research assistance. So we've categorized our capabilities into 3 primary buckets that we call navigators, skills and assistance. And really each of these capabilities deliver increasing levels of value to our customers and are going to have some distinct economics. So navigators leverage an AI powered natural language user interface to help our customers really get the most out of our products. Speaker 200:10:51And I would expect that almost all of our solutions will have some form of AI navigator or chat, what you might think of as a chatbot. And these will be table stakes, I think for both our offerings as well as competitor offerings, I would assume in the relatively near future. Then we've got skills. Those are specialized Gen AI capabilities that connect to Moody's data and content and analytics. And we're designing these skills to deliver automation and provide the tools to drive productivity and insight for our customers. Speaker 200:11:23And that includes things like the planned release of our, what we call our quick memo, which is our automated credit memo and our quick alert, which is our surveillance and early warning system. And then we're going to have a set of assistance for a number of our major customer personas, which are going to be a combination of skills and prompt engineering that are most relevant to their jobs to be done. So this go to market framework I think is going to address the needs of our customers as they move up the spectrum of Gen AI adoption in their daily work processes. And while it is still too early to quantify, we now have a pipeline that is coming to market in the coming weeks months and we expect that to help drive our value proposition and retention rates and open up opportunities to serve new users. So on that note, I am very happy to hand it over to Noemi to provide a little more color on our results. Speaker 300:12:21Thank you, Rob. Let me start by saying that in my previous role as a CFO of a public company, which was also an issuer, I've been in the building a few times over the years, but being here as Moody's CFO is both an honor and a thrill. As we get to know each other, I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you my Moody thesis that drove my decision to join. Throughout the process, everyone I met has consistently told me what an exciting time it is to join the firm. Moody's has been a trusted source of financial insights through various economic cycles and every actor in the global capital markets benefits from the value of Moody's products and services. Speaker 300:13:06Coming from the enterprise software ecosystem, I can tell you that this network effect, if you will, is one of the hardest competitive advantages to disrupt. Also in my previous CFO role, I got the chance to interact with Moody's analysts and research teams frequently, and each time I left more impressed by the depth and rigor of their thinking. Moody's ratings is a powerful franchise with sustainable growth prospects, unparalleled reputation and an impressive industry knowledge and expertise. Now in addition to that, Moody's built a great set of assets based on proprietary data that goes back over 100 years. The value of that historical data is unmatched. Speaker 300:13:52And it is my strong belief that Moody's is well positioned to leverage GNAI capabilities as a result. Whether it's credit, KYC, climate or many other use cases, Moody's has integrated and innovated with our customers' needs at the core. In truth, I've spent the last 15 plus years talking to my peers about having the right data and analytics tools to make smart decisions in support of the business. And so I can attest the many use cases for Moody's Analytics solution set. As you can tell, I'm really passionate about that. Speaker 300:14:29Also, as you would expect of a CFO, I spent some time studying Moody's financial profile before joining. Some obvious attributes, this is and over 100% of free cash flow to net income conversion expected this year. This is an outstanding set of fundamentals. But they are also unique in that they provide flexibility for investing and innovating to fuel growth. Another CFO priority is execution on a disciplined capital allocation plan. Speaker 300:15:07I am very impressed with our focus and results. You saw us generate savings from resource redeployment and automation and then redirect investment spending on areas that will enable us to deliver on our medium term targets. And we are doing that while aiming to return about 80% of free cash flow to our shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks this fiscal year. In my experience, the operating leverage of this business and track record of long term sustainable growth are simply remarkable. I conclude before I get to the Q1 results and outlook that as a CFO of a company that must abide by a large number of regulations and help its customers deal with an increased number of larger, more interconnected risks, I'm very proud to have joined a team that puts risk management at the center of what we do with resilient operations and a fantastic culture. Speaker 300:16:06I've spent some time with Rob, his leadership team, the Board and many folks in finance and beyond. The culture, warmth and sharp intellect of the people at Moody's and the sense of belonging is very special. And for all these reasons, I could not think of a better place to be. Now turning to the Q1 results. As you heard from Rob, we started the year strong with reported revenue growth of 21% and adjusted EPS growth of 13% over the Q1 last year when as you may recall we saw a significant non recurring tax benefit. Speaker 300:16:47Strong growth and inherent operating leverage, while making selected investments in strategic areas, led to an adjusted operating margin expansion of 6 10 basis points at about 51%, which translated into a free cash flow conversion to GAAP net income of over 120%. Our quarterly free cash flows of close to $700,000,000 was the highest on record. Now let me touch on segment results. As Rob said, the issuance rebound led to MIS delivering its 2nd highest quarter on record. We saw a strong start across all lines of business as tightening spreads and investor demand propelled opportunistic issuance. Speaker 300:17:32Corporate Finance grew 49%, predominantly from issuance by leveraged loan issuers and pull forward activity. Financial institution issuance was the strongest since the financial crisis, with an elevated level infrequent issuer activity, which then led to revenue growth of 37%. On the margin front, the operating leverage of our Ratings business, coupled with our initiatives to drive operating efficiencies has allowed us to capture the significant rebound in issuance and flow the upside through the bottom with a 7 80 basis points expansion of adjusted operating margin year on year. Turning to Moody's Analytics. 1st quarter revenue was up 8%. Speaker 300:18:20Growth was driven by strong demand in our data and information line of business with revenue growing 13% year on year and continued demand for our KYC and compliance solutions with revenue growing 24%. As for Research and Insights, where revenue grew 3%, timing of revenue recognition of our on premise software subscription and transaction revenue, even though these are a small share of the business of this segment, affected the growth rate a bit this quarter, as well as a modest and but expected uptick in credit view attrition from banks and asset managers. If you look at the revenue from hosted software solutions though, the growth is trending closer to ARR growth. And overall, we expect Research and Insights ARR growth to tick up to the high single digit range by year end, particularly with pipeline momentum picking up around research assistant and unrated coverage expansion in recent months. Speaking of ARR, MA ended the Q1 with annualized recurring revenue of $3,100,000,000 up 10% from the prior year. Speaker 300:19:28Of note, we saw a sequential acceleration of growth within 2 of our three lines of businesses. Decision Solutions AR grew 12%, up from 11% in Q4 2023 and Data and Information grew 11%, up from 10%, supported by higher retention amongst banks and public sector customers. These two lines of business represent about 71% of total ARR, so we're really pleased to see the growth there accelerating. You heard earlier that our retention rate remains best in class at 94%, demonstrating the stickiness of our solutions. As communicated in February, we are actively balancing strategic investments that we believe will drive future growth, including in our cloud platform and product roadmap with operating efficiency initiatives. Speaker 300:20:21That said, I'm pleased to report we delivered 29.7 percent adjusted operating margin in Moody's Analytics segment, an increase of 80 bps year over year. Let me now turn to our assumptions around issuance that underpin our fiscal year outlook. As we said in February, our full year issuance outlook of mid to high single digit growth accounted for a stronger first half of the year. Indeed, 1st quarter issuance was strong across all business lines, but mainly from corporate finance and financial institutions, driven by refinancing activities with a significant proportion of that activity being pulled forward. That said, we are making modest revisions to select asset classes to account for what we saw in the Q1. Speaker 300:21:10Specifically, we now expect big issuance to increase in the low single digit percent range, up from approximately flat, driven by the elevated infrequent issuer activity in the Q1 that I mentioned earlier. And SFG to grow now in the high single digit percent range as a combination of jumbo transactions and increased CLO refinancing activity fuel growth. Our guidance for 1st time mandates in the range of $500,000,000 to $600,000,000 remains unchanged. I will conclude on issuance by saying it is early in the year and although we like what we saw in the Q1, our broader issuance outlook for full year 2024 remains largely unchanged. As such, we're maintaining our MIS revenue guidance of high single digit to low double digit growth for the full year. Speaker 300:22:03Our updated outlook incorporates various specific macroeconomic assumptions, which are detailed in our presentation. We are also adjusting our FX assumptions to reflect the appreciation of the U. S. Dollar against the euro and the British pound. We now expect the euro to U. Speaker 300:22:21S. Dollar exchange rate and the euro to GBP exchange rate to be 1.08 and 1.26 respectively for the remainder of the year. With that background, we're making the following updates to our full year outlook. Moody's Analytics revenue is now expected to increase in the high single digit percent range, primarily reflecting the strengthening of the U. S. Speaker 300:22:44Dollar I just mentioned. That said, our ARR growth expectation in the low double digit range for fiscal year 2024 is unchanged from our prior guidance. Of note, we are maintaining our full year operating margin outlook for Moody's Analytics in the range of 30% to 31%, as there is a partial FX natural hedge on our expense pool, coupled with ongoing disciplined expense management. For MIS, we just went through the issuance assumptions and we're maintaining our full year revenue outlook of high single digit to low double digit percent range. And we demonstrated in Q1 that we can capture the increased volume of issuance in MIS and at the same time expand our margins, which gives us confidence to raise MIS adjusted operating margin to a range of 56% to 58%. Speaker 300:23:39Last, we told you in February that we would narrow the EPS guidance range with increased visibility and that is precisely what we're doing. We are narrowing the adjusted diluted EPS range for the year to $10.40 to $11 And that ends our prepared remarks. I'm happy to open the call to questions. Operator? Speaker 400:24:04Thank Operator00:24:27We'll take our first question from Heather Balsky at Bank of America. Speaker 500:24:33Hi. Thank you very much for taking my question. I really appreciate it. I was hoping you could dig in a little bit more on what you saw in MA during the quarter, particularly in terms of some of your customers where you said you felt pressure. And how you're thinking about that and how you think that trends for the rest of the year? Speaker 500:24:54Is it 1Q specific? Is it assuming that it continues part of the reason you reduced the guide there? Appreciate it. Thanks. Speaker 300:25:05Yes. Heather, maybe let me start with the Q1 revenue performance and what we're seeing for the rest of the year and I'll pass it to Rob to provide some color on pipeline and sales. In the Q1, we delivered revenue growth of 8% and ARR growth of 10%. We had strong demand for our data solutions and KYC, those are the 2 that grew respectively 13% 24%. As I said in my prepared remarks, research and insight was a little unusual this quarter. Speaker 300:25:38We had revenue growth of 3% that was affected by some of the mix between a low share of on premise transaction and a shift into more SaaS subscription. But if you look at the ARR growth, we haven't changed our outlook for the full year. We still expect ARR growth to be in the high single digit growth and then low level digit growth, sorry. And then we have just adjusted the revenue outlook to account for a lower euro and GBP against the dollar. That's primarily what we're doing. Speaker 300:26:12There's a little bit of seasonality in sales as well, more towards the back half of the year, which drives a bit of the revenue upside updated outlook as well. But our retention rate remains very strong at 94% And our ARR again, which is an indicator of the strength of our underlying business, remains strong as well. Rob, anything you want to add? Speaker 200:26:35Hey, Heather. Just to double click a little bit, I mean, you asked about retention. I'd say we're seeing, obviously at the MA portfolio level, very strong overall retention. I'd say we do see a little bit of pressure from banks and asset managers. We saw a little bit of an uptick, Noemi just mentioned it, in the research business, but some improved retention in other areas. Speaker 200:27:01I would say kind of more broadly, you asked about the kind of sales pipeline. I'd say the sales pipeline is quite healthy at this point. We haven't seen any elongation of sales cycles. We continue to see some strong underlying drivers for our products around digitization and automation. And certainly, Gen AI has opened a whole new front in that regulation, 3 60 degree view of risk. Speaker 200:27:32So, the sales pipeline again, healthy and supports our comfort with the overall ARR guide for the year. Speaker 500:27:46Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Operator00:27:51We'll move next to Manav Patnaik at Barclays. Speaker 600:27:55Thank you. I just wanted to follow-up a little bit on that in terms of if you could help us with some of your end market exposures maybe in ME in terms of the client pressures we're seeing a lot of the other financial information services companies obviously call out pressure from both the buy side and the sell side. So just if you could help us out there going forward if we should be keeping an eye out on anything? Speaker 200:28:21Yes, Manav, let me take that. I guess I would kind of come back and say, while certainly there are cost pressures at financial institutions, corporates, like the one on the phone at the moment, everybody focused on having discipline around expenses. I'm sure we can all understand that. There are also some really important drivers of demand. And I'm going to double click on what I just talked about there. Speaker 200:28:49So you've got financial institutions in particular that are focused on these on the digitization and automation across the entire enterprise. And institutions have gone from these transformation programs over the last call it decade and now they're looking at GenAI as a way to really accelerate and in some ways de risk those transformation journeys. And so we're having some wonderful conversations around that. And I think the opportunity, look at the value proposition of some of the solutions that we provide Manav, when you start to think about labor substitution and the time and efficiency that can be gained from our solutions, that is a very important tool for our financial institutions customers to really address those cost pressures. So I think while the adoption of GenAI Technologies is going to take a little bit longer at regulated financial institutions. Speaker 200:29:46I think it's a very significant opportunity. And then the other thing I would go to Manav is, because this is a discussion I have with literally every single customer I talk to, which is this desire to have a 3 60 degree view of who they're doing business with. I mean, this is everyone that we talk to and you want to understand it. So to think about optimizing your sales and marketing efforts, you want to understand what customers you want to take on. You want to monitor those customers. Speaker 200:30:17You need to understand much more about your supplier network. So, institutions are really investing in that and there are some regulatory drivers that are forcing them to invest in that. When I talk to the big banks, they all tell me that the regulators are very focused on the resilience of their suppliers. So again, that's a place that with our data and analytics, we can actually help them and help them in a very cost effective way. So again, I feel quite comfortable Manav, despite the fact that we've got to face off with procurement departments from time to time. Speaker 200:30:54The value prop around our solutions, I think pretty compelling given what our customers are focused on. Operator00:31:04We'll go next to Toni Kaplan at Morgan Stanley. Speaker 700:31:08Thanks very much. Very strong 1Q issuance quarter, obviously that was expected. And you raised FIG and structured marginally, but kept corporate sort of the same and you're calling out sort of improved M and A activity and you're seeing the guide being towards the high end of the range. I guess, what gives you sort of reservation not to fully raise the MIS guide? I know you talk about sort of election uncertainty and rate uncertainty later in the year and the comps get harder. Speaker 700:31:45But just talk through the factors because I feel like 1Q would have given a little bit of room for having cushion and doing that? Thanks. Speaker 200:31:57Yes, Tony, thanks for the question. And I think part of this just comes back to it's 1Q. So let me talk to you maybe Tony about kind of what we see in the year in terms of both what I think could be tailwinds for issuance. So where there could be some upside as well as where we maybe have a little bit of uncertainty or caution. And first of all, I would just say that there has been a significant amount of pull forward. Speaker 200:32:30And there's 2 kinds of pull forward, right? There's pull forward of the issuance that issuers were planning to do in a calendar year and we are certainly seeing that. In fact, when we engage with the banks, the banks are telling their clients that they should bring forward the issuance that they were anticipating doing in the second half of the year and they should bring that forward into the first half of the year while the market is open, spreads are tight. So we're seeing that. The second kind of pull forward is really the pull forward of from maturity walls and refinancing. Speaker 200:33:07And we are seeing some of that as well. And in general, as we kind of step back, Tony, I guess as I think about where could there be upside? And you heard that we are kind of centering around the higher end of the guide at this point. So I think there is a bias to the upside, but stronger economic growth without inflation increasing, that's going to be very positive in particular for the leverage finance markets. They're the ones most exposed to fluctuations and changes in economic growth. Speaker 200:33:40But a real place that I think we're looking at is around the M and A environment. And a lot of the financing that's been done in the first quarter was refinancing. And so if we see some, what I think of as new money transactions to support M and A and in particular sponsor backed M and A. I think that that could be an upside for issuance for the year and that would not only would we see that come into leverage loans, but I think you will also see that in terms of new CLO formation. So the commercial benefit of that will be meaningful. Speaker 200:34:20I think just in terms of downside risks, obviously there are more questions now about inflation prints and the timing and trajectory of Fed moves than there were at the beginning of the year. So I think people have started to kind of reset their expectations. And I think people are just looking at the not only the U. S. Election, but there we've talked about this before. Speaker 200:34:46Many countries are going to the polls and particularly in the back half of the year. So I think we're seeing issuers who say, I want to be able to get ahead of that and any furthering of geopolitical tensions. You can imagine a widening of a regional conflict in the Middle East that kind of thing. And so we're hearing issuers get in front of that. So at this point, Tony, that has led us to, I'd say probably be a little bit measured in terms of how we think about issuance. Speaker 200:35:15Still early, but some things to watch and in particular would be the, I think the M and A environment. Speaker 700:35:23Super. Thank you. Operator00:35:26We'll go next to Ashish Sabadra at RBC Capital Markets. Speaker 800:35:32Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to follow-up on the pull forward comment. As we understand the second half pull forward in the first half, but I also wanted to better understand the pull forward from 2025, 2026. How does the refi wall look now for 2025 and 2026 even with the pull forward? Is there still a much bigger refi wall in 2025, 2026 compared to what we are seeing in 2024? Speaker 800:35:55And then as we think about the M and A, where are we trending or what's the assumption for M and A as a percentage of overall issuance in this year and how does that compare to an average year? Thanks. Speaker 200:36:08Yes, Ashish. We'll have a little bit better insight later in the year when we publish our updated maturity refinancing study as we always do. But I would say that certainly you've seen issuers who are addressing upcoming maturities, particularly in loans. And there's still some maturities for 2024 that have got to get done, not a lot as you'd expect. It's possible that we start to see some additional pull forward from 2025 perhaps and beyond in the second half of this year if markets remain supportive. Speaker 200:36:49So we're going to be looking out for that. But it's interesting. I think if you think about I'm going to take leverage loans for just a moment. Let me maybe just 0 in on that for a second. There was a massive amount of pandemic era issuance in leveraged loans and that really does provide a very solid underpinning for future issuance. Speaker 200:37:12And when you kind of 0 in on leverage loans, there was something like $1,150,000,000,000 of 2020 2021 maturities and almost 70% of that matures in 20 27 beyond. And what that's telling me is that that money that financing was done at very tight spreads and low rates. So I think that those are not great candidates to be pulled forward, right. Where you may see the pull forward is there was something like $1,000,000,000,000 that was issued in 2022 2023. So some of that may be candidates depending on what happens again a little bit later in the year. Speaker 200:37:57So we're keeping an eye on that. But in general, I would say that I see that just given the absolute amount of debt that's been issued over the last several years as a net positive. So I'm not concerned that all of this all of future years are being pulled into this year, because when we think about debt velocity, which is issuance and I'm looking at the corporate markets issuance over total debt outstanding, debt velocity as a percent versus kind of the 15 year average is quite is still well under that 15 year average. So I think there's still a good bit of issuance. On M and A, we have not changed our outlook. Speaker 200:38:34But as I said, there are some green shoots. We've seen some strategic deals. We've seen some sponsor back deals. So all of that is encouraging. I talked about why sponsor backed M and A is so important. Speaker 200:38:48So we're expecting, I would say, a modest recovery in 2024. That's what's built in. But this really is, I think, a wildcard. The one other thing I would say is that our rating assessment service, which gives us some visibility into the M and A pipeline because that then comes into issuance. We have seen a pickup, a very nice pickup in our rating assessment service. Speaker 200:39:16So that does give us some confidence that the M and A market will continue to improve for the balance of the year. Speaker 800:39:25That's great color. Thank you. Thanks, Operator00:39:29Rob. We'll move next to Andrew Nicholas at William Blair. Speaker 900:39:35Hi. Thank you for taking my question. I wanted to ask about the AI frameworks that you outlined in the presentation and the webcast deck. And I think, Rob, you made mention of there being kind of different monetization strategies across each one of those buckets. So I was hoping you could expand on that comment and maybe on progress in terms of monetization or even a better understanding of the type of impact that could have, whether it's in 2024 or in the out years? Speaker 900:40:07Thank you. Speaker 200:40:10Yes. So the first thing we wanted to do is make sure we had a framework. We have a lot of innovation going on and we wanted to make sure that we're able to be thoughtful about how we go to market with that innovation for our customers. And I think you're going to see us deploy across a spectrum with our customers because our customers, we're either going to deliver GenAI enabled workflow software, right? So those are our customers who are using our software and that's where we'll have Gen AI enablement and our skills and our assistance on that. Speaker 200:40:48We will have our navigators to help our customers get the most out of those offerings. Some of our customers are going to want to integrate either our Gen AI APIs or our RAG APIs into their own internal workflow or just raw data feeds and other content with additional rights to be able to use in their own AI platform. So there will be different ways that we are going to be delivering our AI enabled solutions. And of course, there's also 3rd party platforms. We're working to build out an even larger ecosystem of partners so that our customers can also access our content in systems where they're making decisions. Speaker 200:41:29So I think as I talk about kind of navigators and skills and assistance, maybe one a high level way to think about this. The navigators again, I talked about that as probably being table stakes. This is making our solutions much easier to use. And, I think that will be that will support the value proposition and ultimately the pricing, but also the retention. Exactly. Speaker 200:41:53I think that's where that's going to and again, I think we're going to see that'll be table stakes. Everybody's going to have, use chatbots and other things to make their solutions easier to use. It's the skills where we're taking the proprietary Moody's content and then delivering that into workflow for our customers and then aggregating those skills and prompt engineering into an assistant for people in banking, for people in insurance, for people in compliance. And I think you'll see us we're thinking about how we're going to price for that, whether it's going to be I think we'll have different models, but you can imagine in some cases it will be an increase to the overall subscription. In some cases, you can imagine an element of a consumption model based on how much you are consuming across these skills and our various data and content sets. Speaker 200:42:50So it's still a little early. And I know everybody wants to get some visibility on that, but hopefully that gives you a little insight. Noemi, anything to add there? Speaker 300:42:59Yes. The other thing I would add, reflecting on the conversations we're having with customers, they want to partner with firms that can be trusted when it comes to data integrity that have a strong reputation for robust analytics and modeling skills. They're still assessing their own framework when it comes to dealing with vendors on GNAI enabled solutions. And that's why I think we differentiate ourselves given our reputation, our history and all the work we've done to build that framework. So I just want to add that. Speaker 900:43:37That's helpful and welcome, Noemi. Speaker 300:43:40Thank you. Operator00:43:44Our next question comes from Scott Wertzel at Wolfe Research. Speaker 1000:43:49Hey, good morning and thanks for taking my question here. I just wanted to go on some margins and just given the outperformance in the Q1 and in the context of you sort of reiterating and holding the total company operating margins for the year. I was just wondering if there was any element of reinvestment plans from the upside that you saw in the Q1 that's sort of keeping that operating margin stable? Or is it really just more about kind of the implied deceleration in MIS revenue as we move throughout the year? Thanks. Speaker 300:44:18Thanks. So I can Megha take that. We've increased the MIS adjusted operating margin by 50 bps for the full year. We've maintained our MA adjusted operating margin unchanged despite a bit of revenue headwind. That's because we are very mindful in our spend. Speaker 300:44:36We're investing strategically, but we're also building efficiencies into the system. So all in all, the outlook in terms of the consolidated level hasn't really changed. We've moved a little bit up in our range, but we remain within the 44% to 46% range that we've communicated before. Speaker 200:44:54Yes. And I guess the only the double click on that is, given what we've seen in the Q1, we have not upsized our investment program. Speaker 1000:45:04Got it. Thank you. Operator00:45:09We'll go next to Fazah Alwy at Deutsche Bank. Speaker 500:45:14Yes. Hi. Thank you. I wanted to go back to MA and the change in the revenue guide. Just want to clarify, like is the change entirely FX or is there something else to keep in mind as it relates to to just converting ARR to revenues? Speaker 500:45:32And I'm curious if you can talk about how much FX impacted MA this quarter? Speaker 300:45:40Yes, I'll take that. On the Q1, we didn't see any material impact on FX. It's really for the remainder of the year as we saw some strengthening of the U. S. Dollar. Speaker 300:45:51The update in the outlook for MA revenue, it's primarily FX driven. There's also a little bit of sales linearity that's more geared towards the back half of the year than what we initially thought in February. But what as Rob talked about, our pipeline is very strong. We have can you hear me? Yes. Speaker 300:46:15We have a strong pipeline. Our meetings sales meetings are very going very well. So it's primarily FX with a little bit of sales seasonality as well. Speaker 500:46:28Okay. So just to be clear, sorry, just to it, there's no change, you're not sort of lowering, the within the low double digit range per ARR. ARR is still pretty much in line with all you Speaker 300:46:39Yes, that's correct. We the ARR is a forward looking measure of the health of our recurring revenue business and the underlying health of that business hasn't changed from what we said before. Speaker 500:46:50Thank you. Operator00:46:55Our next question comes from Jeff Silber at BMO Capital Markets. Speaker 1100:47:00Thanks so much. Wanted to continue the discussion on MA, focus a little bit more on research and insights. You talked a little bit about the slowness in the quarter. I think you said there was some timing and there were some other things. But if I can just clarify that? Speaker 1100:47:13And then also, why do you expect growth to accelerate specifically in research and insights in the back half of the year? Thanks. Speaker 200:47:22Yes. So over the past year or so, we have seen a little bit of deceleration in ARR growth in research and insights. And obviously, fixed income research is a pretty mature market. And that's really one reason that we focused on these 2 new enhancements to CreditView that we have talked about over the last quarter or 2. That's the research assistant and the unrated coverage expansion. Speaker 200:47:52It is going to take a little time for us to see the benefits of that in ARR growth. We have seen some modest retention pressures with CreditView. Some of that has come from the recent banking consolidation. We had expected that frankly. And we expect ARR to pick back up in the second half of the year and accelerate towards high single digits. Speaker 200:48:18Again, for a couple of reasons. 1, the CreditView coverage expansion, and we have a good sales pipeline there and have actually seen some particular interest in Europe and also from those in the private credit market. And then second, research assistant. So we've seen sales really start to pick up in the quarter. We're now at 37 sales. Speaker 200:48:45We expect that to we have a very nice pipeline. And what I mentioned earlier, the earlier adopters of research assistant tend to be smaller companies where there's less of a kind of a regulatory risk and control environment that they have to contend with. So, we're having some really encouraging discussions with some very large institutions, but those take a little bit more time. And so, we've also seen a very nice uptick in user requests and also engagement. And those are really very good leading indicators for us in terms of the market's interest. Speaker 200:49:31And so when we've got people that we're turning on to research assistant and we see very strong upticks in usage, that gives us a lot of confidence. And so I think together these things we think are going to help us pull that ARR growth back up in the back end of the year. Speaker 400:49:50Okay. Thank you. Operator00:49:55Next, we'll go to George Tong at Goldman Sachs. Speaker 400:49:59Hi, thanks. Good morning. You mentioned seeing some pull forward in refinancing issuance, some from the second half of twenty twenty four and some from beyond 2024. Can you talk about how much opportunistic issuance may have been pulled forward into the quarter and what that could mean for non refinancing related issuance in the back half of this year and beyond? Speaker 200:50:22I guess, George, maybe the best way I could quantify it is still the meaningful majority of issuance in the quarter was refinancing. So the new money, there was a combination of I do think there was some pull forward of new money transactions, but a lot of what was getting done was refinancing activity. Does that give you some does that help? Speaker 400:50:54Yes, yes, that helps. And I guess, what's the view on new money over the next several quarters in the back half of the year? Speaker 200:51:02Yes, George. So that's where I come back to. If for us to really have confidence that the Q1 is not a kind of a one trick pony of pull forward of issuance either in new opportunistic issuance from the second half of the year or pull forward of maturity wells. What we really want to see is the mix of refi to new money start to pick up and that's why I go back to that M and A. I think that's going to be an important driver because there is a mountain of money at these private equity firms that has got to get deployed. Speaker 200:51:38So there's actually 2 things going on. The private equity players have got to exit and the last couple of years have been very difficult for sponsor exits because of a very soft IPO market and obviously a quiet M and A environment. So the sponsors are looking to exit and you've also got sponsors with a huge amount of dry powder that has got to get deployed. And so we have started to see some of that in towards the end of the Q1. We started to see some of these multi $1,000,000,000 sponsor back transactions in the public markets. Speaker 200:52:16That's the kind of thing we're going to look for. If that continues into the second half of the year, that's going to give upside I think to our current issuance outlook. Speaker 400:52:28That's great. Thank you. Operator00:52:32We'll go next to Craig Huber at Huber Research. Speaker 1200:52:37Thank you. Naomi, I'm curious, your new CFO here, you're following roughly 20 years, very strong, the prior 2 CFOs, your company there and stuff. What are you thinking you can improve upon at the company they're willing to talk about publicly here? Speaker 300:52:55Thanks for the question. I think if I think about stepping back a bit about the company's priorities and where we are headed, I think my priorities are very much aligned with where the company is going and what we're focused on to accomplish our medium term targets and beyond. The first thing I'd say is continuing to focus on a very thoughtful capital allocation, balancing the investment spend to drive future growth and really move from a legacy one time revenue into full recurring, which will then in turn expand the margin. I think that's very important. I have worked with companies before who evolved their business model from on premise lower margin into SaaS recurring and scaled businesses. Speaker 300:53:48And I think that's an area that really excites me. What I've seen so far really resonates with me and that's really what I want to focus on. And then continuing to drive efficiencies both internally as well as for our customers and talking to a lot of our customers. The other thing I want to do as well, spend some time with you all to understand what are the things you're looking at, what things you think we're doing well, things where you'd like us to see do differently and I'm really much looking forward to that as well. Speaker 1200:54:20Thank you. Speaker 200:54:22Yes. And Craig, I will add, I think Noemi is also going to bring a wonderful perspective and I think help communicate to the market the real value of this business and using the perspective that she's had from software and SaaS businesses in the past. So we're really excited about it. Speaker 900:54:41Great. Thanks. Operator00:54:45We'll take our next question from Jeff Meuler at Baird. Speaker 1300:54:49Yes. Thank you. So great to hear the progress on RMS. On the revenue acceleration, does the revenue lift come as the upgraded as they do the platform upgrade or is it that the platform upgrade enables follow on sales just trying to understand the sequencing? And then, on the synergies bit, it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, but mostly two way cross sell synergies between RMS and Moody's products. Speaker 1300:55:21Where are you on, I guess, net new product synergies that combine the capabilities from each of the firms? Thanks. Speaker 200:55:29Yes, Jeff, great question. RMS is really turning into a nice story for us. And I guess I would maybe I'll call it core RMS, ARR that is now growing in line with MA ARR and that is a far cry from the quite low single digit percent growth when we acquired the business. And there's a couple of things going on there just with the core business excluding the synergies. One is in fact an acceleration of the migration of customers from on prem to the intelligent risk platform. Speaker 200:56:16And those of you who know the history of RMS know that we RMS struggled with a prior SaaS rollout. The intelligent risk platform is the real deal. It's industrial strength and we're really seeing some very nice migration. And to your question, there are there's 2 things. So one, there are commercial benefits as we move customers over and 2, exactly as you said, Jeff, once you're there, it's much easier to adopt additional solutions because now you've got all the data in one spot, you can integrate your own models, 3rd party models. Speaker 200:56:50So there are a lot of benefits driving customers to migrate to the SaaS platform and to continue to grow their relationship with RMS. The second thing is just good old fashioned sales blocking and tackling. We moved our one of our most experienced sales managers in to be the Head of Sales and really have even more discipline around the RMS sales program and that has also paid dividends. And then the nature of the synergies, I mean, you're exactly right. So I'll give you one very exciting example of what I would call kind of outbound synergy. Speaker 200:57:31So this is RMS IP to other Moody's customers. We just signed one of the world's largest banks as a customer of the cat models. So this isn't even kind of our climate on demand for banks. This is literally the full cat models. So this is a bank who wanted to have a very sophisticated view of the impact on climate and extreme weather events on their portfolio and to be able to do stress testing and all sorts of things. Speaker 200:58:02So that's really exciting. And we're seeing more and more demand from banks and asset managers and corporates around supply chain who want to do exactly that, the physical risk relating to climate and extreme weather. And then the other is the inbound cross sell, again, a very nice story. And a lot of that is around the KYC, know your 3rd party, leveraging our master data in our data solutions team. So we have a very nice momentum there. Speaker 200:58:34So all in all, I feel quite good about what's going on at RMS. Speaker 1200:58:41Thank you. Operator00:58:45We'll go next to Andrew Steinerman at JPMorgan. Speaker 1400:58:49Hi, Rob. I just wanted to get with the current guide for credit issuance. Are you assuming that issuance on a transactional basis will be down in the Q4 this year? And also I just wanted to check your pulse on if you thought we were in the midst of a multi year issuance recovery following So Speaker 200:59:12thinking about, I guess, year to go, So thinking about, I guess, year to go, obviously, we've held the issuance forecast range. And mentioned that we expect to be in the higher end of that range. And so obviously that invites questions about, okay, given the strong Q1, what does that imply then about the second half? And it does, in fact imply a I'd say for year to go, so that's 3 quarters, a call it mid single digit decline in issuance for the balance of the year. And to your point, Andrew, I would say more focused on the 4th quarter, where we would think the issuance would be down more in the mid teens range. Speaker 201:00:03And part of that again is because of some of the uncertainties I talk about and one of those being elections. And so we just assume that people are going to pull out of the Q4 where they can. So for the most part, I'd say our forecast represents really just a change in the calendarization of issuance. But I talked earlier about some of the drivers that we're going to be looking for. And then maybe Andrew to your second point about are we in the midst of a multiyear, I can't remember the term you used issuance. Speaker 1401:00:41Issuance recovery, given the pullback in 2022. Speaker 201:00:46Yes. Yes. I do think we are and I think that's consistent with we obviously updated our medium term targets for MIS and I think that's part of that. And I will go back to that point Andrew around what one of the things that leads me to that conclusion is, and while we may have again, we may have a little volatility in the quarters here in the year, but I think the trend line is up. And again, I go back to that debt velocity just to give you a number, at least the numbers we work with. Speaker 201:01:23When you go back to like, okay, let's say, 2,009, so just post global financial crisis, corporate issuance over total corporate outstanding was all the way back to then it's something like 14%. And we're well below that still. So that tells me we've got some room just again given the huge amount of issuance over the last few years. The one other thing I would say Andrew is, I get asked we've gotten asked a lot on these calls about private credit and is this disintermediating the public markets. I actually have started to think of it almost as another form of maturity wall because look what went on in the quarter. Speaker 201:02:11We had 45 deals that got flipped from private markets to public markets. So I had mentioned that I thought of this as a deferral of issuance, not a cannibalization of issuance. In some cases, of course, there could be some cannibalization, but we're seeing there's a lot of just deferral because the private credit players are rational financial actors and if they can get cheaper financing in public markets, they're going to do it and they are doing it. So that I actually think is supported. I actually starting to think private credit is actually a tailwind for us, that will be supportive of this, as you say, recovery in issuance. Speaker 1401:02:54Excellent. Thanks for taking the time. Operator01:02:59We'll go next to Russell Quelch at Redburn. Speaker 1501:03:03Yes. Hi. Thanks for having me on. Wanted to ask a balance sheet related question. I see that your gross leverage is now down at around 2.2, which is the lowest level we've seen from you guys in years. Speaker 1501:03:16You also slowed the pace of the buyback in Q1, touched that cash on the balance sheet went up by about $300,000,000 in the quarter. That actually was quite stable through 2023. So that's a break in trend there. Is there a change in how you're thinking about capital allocation or the cash you need to hold on the balance sheet? And are you perhaps making room for acquisitions here? Speaker 1501:03:37Can you just give us Speaker 301:03:38a bit of color there? Thanks. Yes. On capital allocation, we are maintaining our approach and it's my intent to continue that. We on the share buyback, which I think is where you're going, we it's just been 1 quarter of execution. Speaker 301:03:54The pace isn't out of line with our planned cadence. We expect to catch up in the Q2 and the second half to hit our target. So I wouldn't read anything into that. And then last year, we focused on deleveraging we had picked up in 2022. Speaker 401:04:12Good. Thank you. Operator01:04:17We'll move next to Owen Lau at Oppenheimer. Speaker 201:04:20Good afternoon and Speaker 1601:04:21thank you for taking my questions. So I have 2 housekeeping questions for modeling purpose. The first one is, I want to go back to the margin. Would you be able to provide more color on the seasonality for the margins of MIS and MA for the rest of this year? And then the second one is on the migration to cloud revenue. Speaker 1601:04:43My understanding is it will impact your upfront revenue growth, but you'll be better off longer term. Should we expect your MA revenue growth to run below the ARR growth until you completed your migration in like RMS and also research? Thanks. Speaker 201:05:01Hey, Owen, this is Rob. I'm going to take the first one. No, I don't think so. I don't think you're going to see us kind of have what I would call kind of a big valley as we're moving from customers from on prem to SaaS. So that's not something I would anticipate. Speaker 201:05:28And your first question was around the calendarization of MIS margins, I believe. Yes. Speaker 301:05:35MIS margin, we saw a the top line, we expect this to be growing a high single low single digit in the remainder of the year. For the margin for MIS, we're forecasting the expenses to be decline slightly in the 2nd quarter in the low single digit sequentially from the Q1. Our Q1 MIS adjusted operating margin of 64.6 percent and expanded full year expectation implies an adjusted operating margin in the range of 53% to 56% on average for the remainder of the year, Especially for the Q2, if you want to use that for modeling purposes, we expect that to be slightly higher than the upper end of our fiscal year guidance before then decreasing sequentially each quarter through the end of the year, which is pretty much in line with the MIS revenue cadence as well, which is expected to decline throughout the year. For MA, we again, we expect the margin to evolve in the same pattern as the revenue with an uptick in the 30% to 31% in the back half of the year. Speaker 1601:06:43Got it. Thanks a lot. Operator01:06:48And we'll take a follow-up from Craig Huber at Huber Research. Speaker 1201:06:52Thank you. You sort of touched on this, but can you just talk a little further about your expectations for the whole company for your cost ramp for the remaining three quarters in light of your guidance for cost here? That's my first housekeeping question. The other thing I wanted to ask you, in the past you guys have given us your incentive compensation that you booked in the quarter and what's your outlook for the year there? Speaker 301:07:14Yes. On incentive comp, Perceval, we recorded $105,000,000 for the Q1. We expect on average $100,000,000 for the 2nd and third quarter and slightly up in the 4th quarter. So that's for the incentives comp. And on the expense cadence, we expect the Q2 expense to be flat sequentially in the Q2 versus Q1 and then gradually increasing by about $20,000,000 to $30,000,000 between Q2 and Q3 and then by $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 in the 4th quarter. Speaker 301:07:50That reflects our strategic investments, some merit increase as well as some other variable costs which are in line with the business growth. Speaker 1201:07:59One more quick thing. Your private credit as a percentage of revenues in ratings right now, Robert and Naomi, where is that sitting at right now? How small is that? Speaker 201:08:10Craig, it's that's an interesting question because I think we could get into a bit of a battle of definitions here. As I kind of step back and think about serving the alternative asset managers, these are the Blackstones, the Apollos. They're both in the public markets and the private markets. And we have, as you'd expect, very significant relationships with a broad range of players in that market. In fact, when you going back to the FIG revenues for the quarter, part of that opportunistic issuance was coming from our Funds and Asset Management segment, sub segment and FIG and part of that was actually coming from BDCs and other folks who you would think of as being in the private credit market. Speaker 201:09:08So I guess, Craig, it's a little bit of a tough question for me to answer because I think of serving the Apollos and the Blackstones and I think of that as public and private and that's quite significant. We as you know, we did roll out a dedicated private credit team. We do have an expanded offering for specifically for things that you would think of as private credit. So we've got credit estimates for BDCs. We've got a number of different kinds of offerings to support fund finance. Speaker 201:09:48In fact, we just rolled out a subscription line methodology and we have a very nice pipeline and that I would think of is primarily private credit related. All of that stuff is growing quite significantly. So I would say maybe to cap it off, our relationship with the big with the alternative asset management community in and I'm just in MIS for the moment is quite significant. As it relates to specifically private credit, yes, for now considerably smaller, but growing quite quickly. I hope that gives you some sense. Speaker 1201:10:27Yes. Thank you. You went a couple of different ways. I didn't pick you in the go, but that's helpful. Thank you. Operator01:10:35And we'll go next to Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Speaker 1701:10:40Hi, thank you for squeezing me in over here. Rob, can you talk a little bit about the KYC growth? It was 18% in 3Q, 20% 4Q, 23% in now this last quarter. You're kind of accelerating on a larger revenue base. If you can give us some idea as to what's driving that? Speaker 1701:10:58And then also at the same time you're seeing the revenue growth, but you're seeing the ARR kind of still around the 17%, 18% and maybe you could talk about that in the context of the revenue growth? Speaker 201:11:11Hey, thanks for the question. Yes, this is a powerful growth engine here and it's there's a number of demand drivers. I think you've probably heard me talk about on the call before that I've gotten to the point where I think KYC is not doing this justice in terms of the name because it talks about know your customer. And you heard me earlier on the call say a theme with literally every customer I talk to is know your who you're doing business with and being able to connect the dots. So that is a big opportunity for us and KYC is right in the middle of it and we are broadening out our solution set, leveraging all of the content that supports KYC. Speaker 201:11:55So that's the massive company database that we call Orbis. It's all of the people and pets information. It's the AI curated news. That supports what you would think of as traditional KYC. And then people want to understand, okay, well, I need to have that information about my suppliers plus other information. Speaker 201:12:14And so the demand for what you would think of as the KYC solutions just continues to broaden out and we're selling into that. And that's one of the areas of investment for us, Shlomo. We talked about really wanting to serve corporates because historically this has been serving financial institutions, but this theme of know who you're doing business with is a big theme with large corporations and we have some fantastic customer wins that really validate our right to win in that space. The other thing I may have mentioned this on some prior calls is especially in the back half of last year, we had a lot of product innovation going on in that space. You may have even seen like some articles about Moody's and the number of shell companies that we had created. Speaker 201:13:11We also have something called an entity verification API that pulls together a bunch of our different data sets and allows our customers to do real time checks. So product innovation, broadening of demand, all of that together, Schlomo is continuing to drive some very strong growth, I think, for the foreseeable future. Speaker 1701:13:40Should we see the ARR kind of ticking up a little bit where we're seeing the revenue ticking up? Should we see ARR ticking up as well? I know it's pretty healthy as it is, but revenues moving ahead of that? Speaker 201:13:52Yes. I mean, we don't guide on that, but I think Speaker 301:13:56I'd really look at the ARR as the best indicator of the underlying trends in that business, as with every other line by the way. I think that's the best way to look at it. Speaker 201:14:07That's it. Shlomo, we've got some positive momentum there in the ARR, I believe. Thank you. Operator01:14:19And that does conclude the Q and A session. I'll turn the conference back over to Rob for any closing remarks. Speaker 201:14:25All right. Well, thank you everybody for your questions and I appreciate you joining the call and we'll talk to you next quarter. Have a great day. Speaker 301:14:33Thank you. Operator01:14:34And this concludes Moody's Corporation Q1 2024 earnings call. As a reminder, immediately following this call, the company will post the MIS revenue breakdown under the Investors Resources section of the Moody's IR homepage. Additionally, a replay will be made available after the call on the Moody's IR website. Thank you.Read morePowered by