Andrew C. Wiechmann
Chief Financial Officer at MSCI
Thanks, Bear, and hi, everyone. In the third quarter, we delivered 11% organic revenue growth, 17% adjusted EBITDA growth and 46% free cash flow growth. Within our Index segment, subscription run rate growth with asset managers and asset owners was 7% and 11%, respectively. These large established client segments represent nearly 70% [Phonetic] of our index subscription run rate.
Index subscription run rate growth with hedge funds and wealth managers was 23% and 13%, respectively in the third quarter. Global cash inflows into equity ETFs linked to MSCI indexes was $18.6 billion in the quarter. We saw robust cash inflows into non-US exposures, particularly in developed markets outside the US. These flows, together with strong market appreciation helped to power another quarter of record balances with ending AUM and equity ETFs linked to MSCI indexes of $1.76 trillion.
Additionally, AUM and non-ETF passive products linked to MSCI indexes reached $3.65 trillion, also a record balance. The combined record AUM balances of $5.4 trillion across ETFs and non-ETF index products linked to MSCI indexes drove nearly 20% year-over-year growth in ABF revenue and reflect momentum in the long-term trend of indexed investing.
In Analytics, subscription run rate growth was 8%, reflecting the traction we see across several key growth areas such as our factor models, our insights offering and our fixed-income analytics offerings. Organic revenue growth was slightly below 12% in the quarter, benefiting from another quarter of strong non-recurring revenue and some large implementations coming online faster than anticipated.
We still expect recurring revenue growth rates to more closely align with run rate growth in the upcoming quarters, especially as we begin to compare to prior year periods that included large implementation-related revenues. As a reminder, the timing of implementations is lumpy and revenue growth will fluctuate for several reasons as it has in the past.
In our ESG and Climate Reportable segment, organic run rate growth was 11%, which excludes the impact of FX and about $5.3 million of run rate from Trove. Regionally, the subscription run rate growth for the segment was 22% in Europe, 18% in Asia and 7% in the Americas. Client engagement remains strong and we continue to see clients looking to grow with us on a number of fronts. We have seen successes from clients looking to consolidate providers, solidifying our position as a leader.
We remain competitively differentiated and we continue to believe our ESG and Climate Solutions are a mission-critical part of the investment process, representing a massive opportunity across ESG integration, regulatory compliance and climate. We also recognize that the recovery of this product line to higher growth rates may take some time and therefore, we continue to evaluate the through-the-cycle growth trajectory of this product and what the ultimate long-term growth targets should be.
In Private Capital Solutions, run rate growth was 17% over the same period last year with new recurring subscription sales of over $6 million. Since the end of 2023, over one-fourth of our incremental Private Capital Solutions run rate growth has originated from new client relationships. The Private Capital Solutions retention rate was almost 94%, and we recorded almost $27 million of revenue for the quarter.
In real assets, run rate growth was roughly 5% in the third quarter with a retention rate slightly above 92%, improving both sequentially and versus the same period last year. During the quarter, we closed a few large ticket deals in the Americas. One of these large deals was for our transaction data offering and was enabled by our open integration, which allows clients to access our large content sets on platforms like Snowflake.
We see very early signs of improving market activity, although the commercial real estate industry continues to see significant pressure. Across the company, we saw the resilience of our financial model and our ability to generate strong free cash flows. In the third quarter, we repurchased over $199 million of MSCI shares at an average price of roughly $522. This brings our year-to-date repurchases to $440 million or 879,000 shares at an average price of about $501.
Our cash balance at quarter end was over $500 million and we continue to be focused on opportunistically repurchasing our shares. I would highlight that we paid down $125 million of our revolver subsequent to quarter end. Moving forward, we may pay down and draw the revolver in modest amounts from time-to-time to support our capital uses and optimize interest expense.
Turning to our 2024 guidance. Consistent with our previous comments, if markets remain at current levels or higher, we expect to be towards the higher end of our expense guidance range for full-year 2024. We have increased our capex guidance range by $10 million, reflecting our plan to purchase a larger amount of hardware for our data center in the fourth quarter. We are enhancing our data center environment to more effectively and efficiently support the growth of several of our new solutions in a hybrid cloud and data center approach to infrastructure.
We have increased our free cash flow guidance range by $80 million, which reflects some strengthening of cash collections and some tax timing benefits. This year, we are seeing a $40 million discrete tax timing benefit and a roughly $30 million deferral on certain cash tax payments. It's worth noting that the $30 million cash tax deferral will be paid in early 2025. The lower interest expense guidance primarily reflects the previously mentioned revolver paydown. We also narrowed the forecasted range for the effective tax rate to 18% to 19.5% based on refined estimates of discrete items we expect to be finalized in Q4.
In summary, we remain encouraged by the dialog with clients and we see very attractive long-term opportunities. While we are beginning to see some gradual signs of improvement in the sales pipeline, we still expect some degree of elevated cancel activity and longer sales cycles to continue in the near-term. We look forward to keeping you posted on our progress.
And with that, operator, please open the line for questions.