Please stand by. We're about to begin. Good day everyone, and welcome to the Moody's Corporation First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this call 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 for questions and answers following the presentation. I will now turn the call over to Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you and good morning. Thank you all for joining us to discuss Moody's first quarter 2022 results and our revised outlook for full- year 2022. I'm Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. This morning, Moody's released its results for the first quarter of 2022, as well as our revised outlook for full- year 2022. The earnings press release and the presentation to accompany this teleconference are both available on our website at ir.moodys.com. Rob Fauber, Moody's President and Chief Executive Officer, will lead this morning's conference call. Also making prepared remarks on the call this morning is Mark Kaye, Moody's Chief Financial Officer. 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 and GAAP. I call your attention to the safe harbor language, which can be found toward 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 Discussion and Analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, 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 would also like to point out that members of the media may be on the call this morning in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the call over to Rob Fauber. Thanks, Shivani. Good morning, and thanks everybody for joining today's call. I'll begin by providing a general update on the business, including our first quarter 2022 results. Following my commentary, Mark Kaye will provide some further details on our first quarter 2022 performance, as well as our revised 2022 outlook. After our prepared remarks, as always, Mark and I will be happy to take questions. Against a backdrop of geopolitical turbulence and volatile markets, Moody's first quarter revenue was $1.5 billion, and that's down 5% from the prior year period. With the decline in issuance in the first quarter and our expectation for continued subdued levels of opportunistic issuance for the balance of the year, we've updated our full- year 2022 guidance, and we now project Moody's revenue to be approximately flat relative to the prior year. We've also lowered our adjusted diluted EPS guidance to be in a range of $10.75-$11.25. MA continued to be a strong source of consistent growth while market disruptions impacted issuance activity as investments to meet customer demand for our mission-critical suite of tools and solutions drove revenue growth of 23%. Recurring revenue is core to this growth, which is why we're introducing a new reporting metric, annualized recurring revenue or ARR. We expect this new metric to provide greater transparency into the growth trajectory of MA's recurring revenue. The temporary impact of market uncertainty on our financial performance does not change our expectations for the medium term. Time and time again, in periods of uncertainty like these, markets and organizations look to Moody's for expertise and insights, increasing the demand for our integrated risk assessment offerings. We remain confident in the fundamental drivers of our growth. Moody's revenue was down just 5% from a year ago, reflecting the diversity and resilience of our business portfolio. While MIS revenue decreased 20%, MA revenue was up 23% or 9% on an organic basis, driven by strong customer demand for our solutions. Adjusted operating income fell 20% to $734 million. Adjusted diluted EPS was $2.89, a decrease of 29% year-over-year. Mark will provide some additional details on our financials shortly. Now turning to MIS. The issuance factors we highlighted during our fourth quarter earnings call really remain unchanged as elevated inflation and the prospect of additional interest rate increases, combined with the impact of the Ukraine conflict, are contributing to uncertainty and volatility. These factors have adversely affected debt capital markets activity, including opportunistic refinancing and M&A transactions, particularly in the leveraged finance markets. As we've said over the years, periods of market disruption need to be put into historical context, and I would argue that this period is no different. This chart illustrates our rated issuance over the last decade, with the gray bars representing periods of market volatility. It shows that activity typically rebounds after periods of market disruption and has grown steadily over time. Though there's uncertainty as to how long the current disruption will last, we believe that the market will eventually reset amidst higher interest rates and will eventually resume issuance growth supported by economic expansion and substantial financing maturity walls. The medium-term drivers of debt issuance in our business remain strong. As we said in the past, issuance is a function of several macroeconomic factors, the most significant of which is economic expansion. Looking ahead, we do expect global GDP growth for the remainder of the year, albeit at a modest pace. The underpinnings of the economy remain sound, and consumer and corporate balance sheets remain healthy, and U.S. unemployment remains at near historical lows. While several rounds of interest rate increases are expected this year as the Fed addresses inflation, rates will remain low by historical standards. Volatility in the credit markets has been reflected in spread fluctuations, though spreads also remain well below the 10-year average. Taken as a whole, the cost of borrowing remains historically low. In addition to these factors, there's a healthy stock of debt which needs to be refinanced, more than $4 trillion over the next four years. We expect the continued build-up in our first-time mandates will drive growth in our recurring revenue as demonstrated over the last two years. Now, pivoting to Moody's Analytics, we're driving robust growth across the breadth of our products and solutions. In the first quarter, revenue was up 23%, supported by organic revenue growth of 9% and a 96% customer retention rate. We're now including annualized recurring revenue or ARR in our reporting to give an indication of our revenue expectations for the future. Organic ARR was up 9% for the first quarter, demonstrating the strength of our recurring revenue across the business. Again, Mark will provide some additional details on ARR shortly. I'd like to take a moment to share a story that illustrates how offerings across our three reporting lines in MA come together to provide value for our customers. As a result of the acquisition of Bureau van Dijk in 2017, we had a modest relationship with a large multinational insurance underwriter that was using our Orbis database to support sales and marketing activities. Following the acquisition, we had a series of discussions with this and other customers about ways to address a wider range of their needs, which in this case included their process for underwriting trade credit insurance. We were able to package our Orbis data, our credit research, and credit scorecards, combined with our AI-enabled spreading offering to provide a set of integrated solutions that transformed their workflow, helping them to eliminate 70% of their manual tasks in their trade credit underwriting process and increasing their efficiency and enhancing their effectiveness. This upsell results in approximately 300% increase in annual customer revenue. Today we're having discussions with them about further expanding our relationship to serve additional use cases and solutions, including integrating ESG into their underwriting processes. I think it's just a great example of our ability to expand our customer relationships by bringing together the full capabilities across Moody's Analytics. As you know, helping the market make sense of the risks and opportunities posed by ESG and climate change is a priority for us, and we're increasingly delivering solutions that help companies incorporate these critical factors into their decision-making. That's an important reason for our acquisition of RMS last year. In addition to building a business serving the insurance industry, RMS brings scaled world-class weather and climate data and analytics, which we're bringing to a much broader customer audience. Inclusive of revenue from RMS's climate-related offerings, our combined revenue for our ESG and climate solutions was approximately $170 million in 2021. We expect this revenue to grow in the low double-digit% range this year. We also expect our climate revenues, which today are predominantly from RMS, to accelerate as we continue to integrate its best-in-class models to meet our customers' growing needs. Going forward, we'll update you on this revenue number as it provides a, I think, a good sense of our scale and impact in this area. Our growth is supported by a number of key innovations and award-winning product launches. Last month, we launched ESG 360, which is a powerful platform that delivers decision-relevant ESG data and insights to portfolio managers. We're also launching new climate change models in the U.S. and Asia that'll help address the growing need for climate change analytics, including supporting increasing regulatory demands. We're proud to have received recognition from customers for our ESG and climate-related products and services, including being named ESG Opinion Provider of the Year by the International Financing Review. I'm excited about the opportunity ahead as we continue to play a meaningful role in helping companies decode risk and unlock opportunity. Speaking of decoding risk, our customers turn to us even more in times of stress and uncertainty, and we saw that during the throes of the pandemic. As you can see on this slide, the relevance of our offerings has probably never been higher, with significant readership of our research and usage of our solutions. Our research reports have been read over 200,000 times, while KYC screenings are up 70% year-over-year as our customers have a critical need to better understand and monitor their own customers and suppliers amidst geopolitical conflict and sanctions. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mark to provide further details on Moody's first quarter results as well as an update to our outlook for 2022. Thank you, Rob. In the first quarter, MIS revenue declined 20% from last year's record level as geopolitical concerns, rising yields, and elevated economic uncertainty contributed to a 25% decrease in rated issuance. Corporate finance, financial institutions, and public projects and infrastructure revenue declined 31%, 19%, and 14% respectively, with many issuers remaining on the sidelines due to unfavorable market conditions and existing levels of balance sheet liquidity. Structured finance revenue increased 24%, supported by 10% growth in issuance, primarily from commercial and residential mortgage-backed securities, offset by a decline in CLO refinancing activity. MIS's adjusted operating margin was 58.6%. Revenue was adversely impacted by the noted absence of opportunistic issuance in the quarter. While operating expenses, excluding those related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, remained relatively flat. Moving to MA. First quarter revenue grew 23%, delivering the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. Excluding the impact of recent acquisitions, revenue and recurring revenue were up 9% and 11% respectively. In Decision Solutions, revenue increased 48% or 14% on an organic basis. This is driven by robust demand for KYC banking as well as insurance and asset management solutions. Research and insights revenue rose 7%, reflecting strong demand for our credit research, analytics and models, underpinned by 97% customer retention rate. For data and information, revenue grew 6%, driven by new sales of the company's data and ratings feeds. MA's adjusted operating margin expanded by approximately 350 basis points from incremental operating leverage, net of ongoing organic investment. This is offset by approximately 430 basis points of margin contraction due to acquisitions completed within the last 12 months. Over the past few years, we have successfully transitioned the MA business to a predominantly subscription-based model with strong recurring revenue, which now accounts for 94% of total MA revenue. This quarter, we are pleased to introduce a new forward-looking performance metric for our MA business. This new metric, annualized recurring revenue or ARR, is the annualized run rate of recurring revenue for active contracts at a point in time. Renewable contracts include subscription, term licenses, and software maintenance. The ARR metric provides insight into the trajectory of MA's recurring revenue, with visibility specifically into the growth of the subscription business from both our acquisition of new customers and the expansion of existing relationships. As of March 31st, 2020, MA's ARR of $2.6 billion reflected 25% growth from the prior period, or 9% on an organic basis. In addition, we are guiding to low double-digit organic ARR growth for year-end 2022, reflecting our expectation for accelerated renewable sales through the remainder of the year. Turning now to our revised guidance. Moody's updated outlook for full- year 2022 as of May 2nd reflects assumptions about numerous factors. These include, but are not limited to the effect of interest rates, inflation, foreign currency exchange rates, capital market liquidity, and activity in different sectors of the debt markets. The outlook also reflects assumptions about general economic conditions, global GDP growth, the scale and duration of the crisis in Ukraine, and the impact of COVID-19, as well as the company's own operations and personnel. Our updated full- year 2022 guidance incorporates the following specific macroeconomic assumptions. 2022 U.S. and euro area GDP to expand by approximately 3.5%-4.5% and 2.5%-3.5% respectively, and global benchmark rates to increase from historic lows, with U.S. high yield spread moving slightly above the historic average of approximately 500 basis points and inflation rates remaining elevated and above central bank targets in many countries. By year-end, the U.S. unemployment rate is expected to remain low at approximately 3.5%, and the global high yield default rate will initially decline before gradually rising to approximately 2.7%. Our guidance also assumes foreign currency translation, and for the remainder of 2022 reflects exchange rates for the British pound of $1.32 and $1.11 for the euro. We are updating our full-year 2022 guidance across several metrics to reflect both first quarter results and our revised expectation for the remainder of the year. We now forecast Moody's revenue to remain approximately flat to the prior year, and for operating expenses to increase in the high single-digit percent range, down from our prior guidance as we prudently manage and prioritize investment activity through the cycle. Consequently, we now project Moody's adjusted operating margin to be approximately 47% and have lowered the diluted and adjusted diluted EPS guidance ranges to $9.85-$10.35, and $10.75-$11.25, respectively. We decreased our free cash flow forecast to be between $1.8 billion-$2.0 billion, and maintain our expectation for full- year share repurchases of at least $1.5 billion, subject to available cash, market conditions, M&A opportunities and other ongoing capital allocation decisions. Please refer to Table 13 of our earnings release for a full list of our guidance. Turning now to our issuance outlook, which we have updated in light of market disruptions in the first quarter and the expectation that opportunistic activity will likely remain constrained heading into the second quarter of the year. We forecast global rated issuance to decline in the mid-teens percent range and investment grade activity to decrease by approximately 10%. Leveraged finance issuance has been acutely impacted by market uncertainty with over 20 days of no high yield activity during the quarter. We now project full- year 2022 high yield and leveraged loan issuance to decline by approximately 40% and 30% respectively. Similarly, we forecast a 10% decrease in financial institutions activity and a 5% decline in public project and infrastructure finance activity. In structured finance, we expect wider spreads and a weaker future leverage loan supply to impact the financing and creation of new CLOs for the balance of the year. We are therefore revising our outlook for structured finance issuance to decline by approximately 10%. Finally, we are reducing our full- year guidance for new mandates to a range of 850-950, despite a strong new mandate result of almost 240 in the first quarter. Due to our revised rating, rate and issuance outlook, we now forecast MIS revenue to decrease in the low double-digit percent range. We have proportionately lowered MIS' adjusted operating margin guidance to approximately 59%. This outlook remains above the pre-pandemic levels of 2018 and 2019, reflecting prudent spending on strategic investments and employee recognition, carefully balanced with ongoing cost efficiency initiatives. For MA, we are reaffirming our guidance for high- teens revenue growth, supported by tailwinds from recent acquisitions, strong customer retention rates and ARR outlook, as well as robust demand for our subscription-based products as we successfully execute on our integrated risk assessment strategy. We are maintaining MA's adjusted operating margin guidance of approximately 29% as we organically invest in the business to further accelerate top line growth. I would like to provide additional insight into our disciplined approach to expense allocation and management, which we believe is critically important to ensure long-term sustainable growth as we move through the current short-term cyclical volatility impacting the MIS business. In the first quarter, operating expenses rose 16% over the prior year period. Approximately 13 percentage points of this growth were attributable to operational and integration related costs associated with acquisitions completed in the prior 12 months. Operating growth, including organic investments and annual compensation increases, net of ongoing efficiency initiatives, contributed approximately 6 percentage points. Lower incentive compensation accruals and a strengthening U.S. dollar offset expense growth by approximately 1% and 2 percentage points respectively. For the full- year, we expect expense growth to be more than $100 million lower than our previous forecast, an increase now in the high single-digit% range. This includes approximately 9 percentage points of growth attributable to acquisitions completed within the last 12 months. We remain committed to investing incremental $50 million-$150 million in 2022 to attract and retain world-class talent as well as to enhance our product capabilities and expand distribution to capture these new opportunities respectively. We anticipate that these investments will be partially offset through our ongoing cost efficiency programs and lower incentive compensation accruals. Last, we strongly believe that the market volatility in the first half of the year is cyclical in nature and that the business fundamentals for both MIS and MA remain firmly intact. Therefore, it is especially important that we prudently manage our expenses and continue investing through the cycle in order to realize our medium-term growth prospects. Before turning the call back over to Rob, I would like to highlight a few key takeaways. First, despite the challenging market environment, we delivered over $1.5 billion in revenue and an adjusted diluted EPS result of $2.89. Second, while short-term volatility and market cyclicality are affecting issuance levels, our business fundamentals remain strong. Third, MA's robust recurring revenue growth and high customer retention rates reflect the strong demand for integrated risk assessment solutions and provide balance to Moody's overall results. Fourth, our new ARR metric provides further insight into our momentum towards achieving our medium-term targets. Finally, we remain focused on investing through the cycle to build market-leading products and capabilities in key strategic growth areas and balancing disciplined expense management with the return of stockholder capital. With that, let me turn the call back over to Rob. Yeah, thanks, Mark. I want to close by recognizing the efforts of our people, and their continued dedication and hard work remain key to driving growth and resilience and delivering on our strategy as an integrated global risk assessment firm. That's an additional reason, despite the turbulent times in the issuance markets, that I remain confident and optimistic about Moody's growth fundamentals. Our mission is even more critical as our customers rely on us to provide trusted insights and standards that help them make decisions with confidence in this environment. That concludes our prepared remarks, and Mark and I would be pleased to take your questions. Operator? Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, simply press the star key followed by the digit one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We will ask that you please limit yourself to one question with a brief follow-up, allowing others a chance to ask a question. Again, that's star one on your telephone keypad. We'll first hear from Manav Patnaik of Barclays. Thank you. Good morning. I was just hoping, you know, on the issuance forecast, if you could give us some color on kind of the seasonality that you assumed, I guess. You know, is this current quarter gonna be similar to the first quarter and then improve to the back half? Just any color there would be helpful. Yeah, sure, Manav. You know, maybe the way to think about this is, you know, kind of what's going on year- to- date and how do we think about what's gonna happen year to go, what's implied in our outlook. Obviously, we're projecting full year issuance to be down, you know, mid-teens for 2022. Issuance was down 25% in Q1, so that implies a deceleration of issuance decline through the rest of the year. Meaning that our year-to-go issuance will be down in the, you know, call it kinda low teens versus 2021, year to go. I would say, Manav, in arriving at that outlook, most of the downward adjustment relative to our prior outlook is in Q2. Q3 and Q4 represent, I'd say, much more modest decreases versus our original outlook. Manav, if I carry forward those remarks in thinking about adjusted diluted EPS, the lower MIS revenue results in the first three months of 2022 impacted the adjusted diluted EPS by approximately $0.80 versus the prior year period. You know, our latest full- year 2022 outlook guidance of $11 at the midpoint implies an average quarterly diluted EPS result of $2.70 for the remainder of the year. That includes an additional approximately $0.70 assumed adverse impact from FX to the EPS result in the second quarter. Okay, got it. That's totally helpful. I was just hoping you could give us a little bit more color on your new ESG and climate revenue breakout. You know, how much is the climate piece that's coming from RMS? I would've thought low double-digit growth sounds conservative, just curious, maybe it's just a matter of putting the offerings together. Yeah, Manav, it's Rob. I'm gonna start, and then I might see if Mark wants to build on this. You know, if you think about just climate for a moment, there are really two core components, I think, to how we're thinking about commercializing around climate. The first is helping customers understand the physical risk relating to climate change. There we have some very substantial capabilities with RMS. Then second is around understanding carbon transition and understanding how companies are gonna get to net zero. Obviously we've got an ESG component in this as well. Just to touch on just briefly in terms of the growth rate, and then I'll hand it to Mark. You know, with RMS being a big part of this, you know, obviously we just acquired RMS recently, so, you know, we're just in the process of extending the product suite beyond our core insurance customer base. I think you'll see an acceleration of growth over time. Yeah. Manav, you know, we also looked and thought through several considerations in determining what was the appropriate classification of climate source revenue. That includes utilizing the guidance, you know, provided by the SEC in their proposed rules for climate-related disclosures, which really, you know, reflects the impact of severe weather events, direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, and some of the climate-related targets and transition plans. We also did a leveraging of the industry standard publications from the TCFD, et cetera. When we think about the combined ESG and climate, we really only captured the revenues associated with climate-related perils like flood, hurricane, typhoons, wildfires, and agriculture. We mentioned in the prepared remarks, you know, in April, we did launch our new platform, Moody's ESG 360. That will enhance the way investors and asset managers across our ESG and climate portfolios are able to get insight. That's really through a very user-friendly platform that delivers sort of that comprehensive and decision useful data scores and assessments. Yeah. Manav, the last thing I'd say, I mentioned it on the prepared remarks, but you know, we wanna break this out because we want the investor community to have a sense of the scale that we've got across not just ESG, but climate. Climate's a very important part of the E in ESG. As you heard Mark describe, you know, we have a real product suite there that we're gonna continue to build on. We wanted to give some visibility to investors in that regard. Next we'll hear from Alex Kramm of UBS. Yeah. Hey, good morning. Just coming back to the issuance outlook, of course. In your prepared remarks, it sounded like you pretty confident that, you know, all the medium-term indicators are still intact, and it almost sounds like you feel like the second half of the year should almost normalize again. Just wondering what the risk is that you're being a little bit too optimistic here. When you meet with or when your analysts meet with corporates, are you hearing, for example, more appetite for deleveraging? And would that be something where that $4 trillion in refinancing wall at some point becomes irrelevant because we're going into this deleveraging cycle? Any color of what you're hearing that there may be a little bit more of a structural change and out early? Yeah. Alex, good to have you on the call. As I said in the kind of year-ago, you know, we have adjusted the forecast for each of Q2, Q3, and Q4 off of our original outlook. It's just that there's a more significant downward adjustment in Q2. We think that, you know, conditions will therefore improve through the balance of the year. Maybe what will be helpful, Alex, is, you know, there's a question obviously from many on the call, are we being too aggressive or are we being too conservative, right? Maybe to help you answer that, you know, let me give you a little bit of our thinking in terms of what could provide some upside here and what could provide some downside. I think it's you know the quickest resolution to some of this market volatility would be a resolution to what's going on in Ukraine. Obviously that's significantly impacted the European markets and we've seen the high yield market in Europe shut down for a long length of time and just recently opened. That would allow these infrequent issuers who have been sitting on the sidelines to potentially come back to market. Alex you know an interesting stat in the U.S. issuance from infrequent issuers was down almost 50% in the first quarter of 2022 versus the prior year. That you know that's a big number. A lot of companies were sitting out the volatility, and as you said, you know, have their balance sheets are in good shape. They're, you know, the impacts of interest rate hikes. Of course we've got, you know, the maturity wall that you mentioned. Our real question is, are we gonna start to see some pull forward as issuers say, you know, realize that rates are increasing? We really haven't seen that to any material extent in the first quarter because I think the market volatility kind of overwhelmed those that wanted to potentially get into the market and pull forward. Our leveraged loan expectation, you heard, still down pretty significantly off of a record year. We do have a healthy first-time mandate pipeline. Actually the first quarter of this year is our second strongest first quarter for first time mandates that we've had. A lot of those issuers just haven't come to market again because of the volatility. We've got a I would say there's kind of a backlog and of course we also haircut our M&A driven issuance assumptions as well. You know, those are the kinds of things that I think could provide a little bit of upside. In terms of headwinds, one thing that's on everybody's minds is you know, depending on what the Fed does, you know, could we see the economy move into recession? You know, we don't see that you know, from where we sit right now, but that's a question mark. Second, and I've talked about this on the call, is, you know, another risk is just the market understanding the actions of various central banks. Obviously there's been an enormous amount of stimulus put into the markets over the last several years. It's, it's when the market is surprised or doesn't understand that you see the, you know, real volatility in the markets. We saw that with the taper tantrum. You've seen a little bit of that in the first quarter, and that then creates these open and closed windows of issuance. I would also say that, you know, just in thinking about, you know, kind of the bigger picture, you know, of course we, you know, we've talked about a stagflation scenario would be something that would be negative, where we've got an increase in interest rates, but you know, but it's not because of economic growth. Again, we don't see that from where we sit today, but that's something that we're keeping an eye on. Okay. Helpful. Thank you. I'll make my follow-up a quick follow-up then. On the recurring revenues in MIS, any outlook you can be a little bit specific on? I mean, we've had a lot of issuance over the last couple of years. I would expect recurring revenues in that segment still to benefit from that. Just wondering with your new adjusted outlook here, is an implication that recurring revenues may start to come off a little bit in MIS too, or how's with those trends? Thanks. Alex, this is Mark just answering your question with respect to MIS and then I'll give a little bit on MA. I wasn't sure which segment you were referencing. On the MIS side, we are looking for an increase in recurring revenue from obviously 2021's mix to 2022. You could think about it almost as two-thirds, one-third as embedded within our outlook for the full year. On the MA side, you'll see remarkable consistency really from the first quarter of 2022 through to the full year guidance that we're giving in terms of that mix between recurring and transaction-based revenue again, as we develop more SaaS-based solutions which we can discuss later on. Yeah, it was on MIS, but I appreciate it. Thank you. Next, we'll hear from Toni Kaplan of Morgan Stanley. Thank you. You lowered the MIS margin guide and you gave a good bridge of how that compares to 2021. Just in terms of the quarter itself, you know, were there specific areas that we're seeing cost pressure outside of the revenue flow through? Just thinking about the rest of the year, you know, obviously incentive comp will be helpful, you know, to offset, you know, as issuance is a little bit weaker this year. Any other additional areas where you could maybe find some efficiencies to help the margin? Sure, Toni. In the first quarter, the MIS suggested operating margin was 58.6%, and that was in line with what we saw in the pre-pandemic margin levels. If you think about 2018 or 2019 of around 58%. The contraction from the record prior period was primarily driven by decline in revenue attributable to volatility in the capital markets. Which is really resulting from that heightened uncertainty given sort of the quarter's geopolitical events. If we exclude some of the one-time expenses related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the quarter, which reflected personnel related costs and provision for bad debts, MIS expenses have actually been flat year-over-year. That's inclusive of the financial cost of attracting retaining best-in-class analytical talent across the MIS lines of business, as well as, you know, strengthening or taking actions to strengthen our relevance and support future growth. Certainly, the incentive compensation does act as a natural ballast or offset to that. We do continue to look for additional opportunity for operating efficiency in the business such that we can then reinvest that money back into our ratings processes. Great. It looked like you increased the CapEx guidance for the year. You know, obviously, I'm just wondering what kind of initiatives that you're ramping up there. You know, is it related to, you know, just growth opportunities, or is it more related to, you know, acquisition or just anything else? Thanks. Toni, absolutely. The answer is a little bit of both, but maybe let me broaden out your question a little bit, and then I'll get directly onto the CapEx part of the answer. Moody's has a very strong track record of free cash flow generation. Cumulatively between 2019 and 2021, a weighted average free cash flow to U.S. GAAP net income conversion was over 100%. This conversion rate holds based on our revised full- year 2022 free cash flow guidance range, you know, which at the midpoint of $1.9 billion implies approximately a 100% conversion ratio. We have also revised our full- year 2022 CapEx guidance to be within the range of $250 million-$300 million, and that's really to reflect a combination of a number of factors. Those include sort of the ongoing investment, especially around SaaS-based product development for both new and upgraded customer solutions, RMS integration activity, office enhancements related to our Workplace of the Future program, and then really corporate IT asset purchases, you know, as we refresh our PC hardware and some of the associated peripherals. Maybe one last comment here. You know, our guidance for EPS and for cash flow at the midpoint does imply sort of a little bit of a disconnect, and you're able to resolve that by considering really the following two factors. Really, free cash flow is expected to outpace the adjusted diluted EPS when you correct for the tax payments in 2021 associated with the potential U.S. corporate tax rate changes, which ultimately, you know, did not occur, as well as some of the changes associated with the non-U.S. tax settlement in the fourth quarter of last year. Super helpful. Thanks, Mark. Next, we'll hear from George Tong of Goldman Sachs. Hi. Thanks. Good morning. Just wanted to dive into margins a little bit. You're seeing, obviously higher input costs, wage inflation. How do you balance the higher input costs with investments over the next year? Where would you see puts and takes on either side of the equation? George, we continue to carefully evaluate opportunities to invest for sustainable revenue growth while balancing those investments against cost efficiency initiatives that really buttress or further expand our adjusted operating margin. This is especially important in volatile market conditions. Given that we do view today's prevailing market dynamics as cyclical rather than structural in nature, we plan to invest through the cycle to support our medium-term growth ambitions. These investments are going to be focused on customer enhancements, new products, go-to-market activities, and really growth in our sales force. Collectively, they ensure execution of our strategic roadmaps in the high-priority markets like KYC and compliance, ESG and climate, and banking and insurance, for example. Our incentive compensation accrual, as we mentioned months ago, will flex based on the actual performance as compared to the financial targets that we set at the start of the year. They do act as a natural expense lever. We've also learned, you know, since the beginning of the pandemic, that many business activities can be successfully performed remotely. While travel and entertainment costs will rise compared to the prior two years, we will prioritize some of the customer-facing travel when needed. Lastly, I'd like to add, we will look to continue to create incremental cost efficiencies through the utilization of lower cost locations and vendor management strategies, as well as further rationalization of our real estate footprint. Got it. That's helpful. To the extent that you are potentially adjusting your investments to lower them a bit in the context of rising input costs, which areas would you potentially invest less in as you look to adapt to the current changing input cost environment? We remain on track to spend approximately $150 million on our organic strategic investments in 2022, which like 2021, will be weighted towards the second half of the year. Those investments are really going to be focused on, again, increasing our sales force, our go-to-market initiatives, et cetera. We also, as mentioned in the script, maintain our expectation for an additional $50 million of investment in our employees to attract and retain the best talent in order to achieve our growth aspirations. That will not change. Our guidance for expenses over the full- year assumes an increase in spending from the first to the fourth quarter in the range of about $70 million-$90 million. That's because we anticipate steadily increasing organic investment activity through the cycle, and that will be weighted towards the second half of the year. Within that ramp, you should expect the growth from the first to the second quarter to be in the range of $30 million-$40 million, and that's going to be driven in part by the timing of our annual merit and promotional increases, which took place in April. Next, we'll hear from Andrew Steinerman of JP Morgan. Hi, it's Andrew. Two questions. On the current rated issuance forecast of down mid-teens for the year, are you assuming that issuance is down each of the quarters of 2022? That's my first question. My second question is I wanted to know how RMS revenues grew like for like in the first quarter? I assume RMS revenues in the quarter were $77 million. I get that by just looking at the M&A contribution for the Decision Solutions sub-segment for first quarter. Andrew, it's Rob. To answer the first question, yes. Again, in line with, you know, some of the earlier, commentary, we would expect most of that to be in the second quarter, most of that, you know, kind of downward adjustment. Your second question was about, RMS growth. I guess I would say, you know, just at a high level, you know, we have expected RMS growth to accelerate through the balance of the year. In fact, sales are performing, as or even slightly better, than we have expected. From our perspective, RMS is performing kind of exactly, as we have planned. I guess I would point out a couple important things that are going on there. You know, obviously we've got the corporate integration, but we've really been focused on aligning the sales teams. I've mentioned in the past we've had some very good dialogue with some of our mutual customers about things that we can do together. We're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers. We've started now on some of the joint product development. You know, one interesting example maybe to highlight is around commercial mortgage-backed securities. We have mapped every property that's got an outstanding loan in a CMBS security with RMS data. That allows us to help our customers better understand the physical risk associated with their portfolios. Really, we're now leveraging that in both our ratings and research in a way that I think is very differentiated. You know, that's taking that RMS capability and then being able to bring that to both our issuers and our investor customers. Again, we believe that we are on track. We're feeling good about it. The integration and product development and sales execution is going apace. Great. Thanks, Rob. Ashish Sabadra of RBC Capital Markets. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe just drilling down further on the MIS transaction revenues. Historically, the revenues grow faster than issuance because you have the pricing tailwind. Here, given that some of the higher revenue yield, like high yield and lev loans are under pressure, how should we think about the dynamic of transaction revenue growth versus issuance growth for this year? Thanks. Any color. Yeah, Ashish. So, you know, we frequently talk about on this call the impact of mix as it relates to issuance, and this is one of those quarters where mix worked against us from a revenue growth standpoint. In this case, our transaction revenues were a little bit lower. Or the decline was a little higher than the decline in issuance activity. Obviously, in turn, our 20% down benefited from recurring revenue growth. But really what was going on here, Ashish, is you know, the leveraged finance markets were pretty anemic in the first quarter. You heard me talk about the dearth of infrequent issuers. All of that stuff contributes then to an unfavorable mix for us in the first quarter. That's very helpful. Maybe Rob, as we think about the midterm guidance, right? Given that 2022 is gonna be worse compared to what your prior expectations were, how should we think about that as a base for the midterm guidance? Does that help you get a better base for out years? Or, do you think this headwinds and muted growth continues over the midterm? Any color on that low- to mid-single-digit MIS revenue growth guidance over the midterm. Thanks. Yeah. Ashish, you know, it's Mark and I were having a conversation about this, and it's interesting if you step back and compare our revised 2022 guidance to the last pre-pandemic year of 2019. I think we all understand that 2020 and 2021 were pretty unusual years. If you compare our 2022 guidance to 2019, the issuance will be up double digits and MIS revenues will be up in the high- teens percent range over 2019. Now if you annualize that, so I turn that into a CAGR. That's something like low single-digit growth for issuance and mid-single-digit growth for revenues. That's remarkably similar to both, you know, the periods before the pandemic. You know, I looked back at kind of 2012 to 2016. We had a revenue CAGR in the mid-single digit range, but it's also very similar to our medium-term guidance. You know, I talked about the things that we believe are still intact that support the medium-term guidance. On the last call we talked about, hey, look, in the first year or two of this medium-term horizon, you know, we expected the growth to be more muted. In fact, you know, I think we're certainly seeing that. For the reasons I described, we still feel good about the medium-term growth outlook for MIS. That's very helpful, though. Thank you very much. Andrew Nicholas, William Blair. Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. The first one I had was just on some comments you made in the prepared remarks and in the press release about your risk management offerings providing increased value during uncertain times. I was just wondering if you could maybe expand a bit more on that and maybe how you would expect that to kind of flush its way through in terms of financial performance or growth? Is that leading to, you know, more productive pricing conversations? Are new clients coming to you with that in mind in a choppier market to have new product or upsell conversations that you might not have otherwise had? Just trying to figure out, you know, what that could mean in terms of performance for the business. Yeah, great question, and the answer is, you know, absolutely. You know, you think about it from our customer's perspective, and we've talked about this. You know, they're just dealing with a wider range of more interconnected risks and trying to figure out how to deal with all that. Increasingly our customers are wanting to be able to kind of connect the dots. You know, I think that the expansion of our capabilities and thinking about it from this concept of providing integrated perspectives on risk is allowing us to do two things. It's allowing us to add new logos, so new customer segments, customer types, as well as deepen our relationships with existing customers. You know, I'll give you an example. We have been expanding into now serving social media companies that have, you know, e-commerce platforms, who want to better understand who's transacting on the platform. We've been now extending into serving, you know, crypto and digital asset companies. You know, same thing. You know, there's a great example of new customer segments that we're able to serve. Also, we take our core customer base. You know, I'm thinking of, you know, we had an Asian bank that we serve, and we helped them around stress testing. They came to us and said, "Hey, can you help us, you know, measure and manage ESG and climate risk? Because we're gonna have to comply with regulatory stress tests that incorporate these factors. The answer is, you know, "Absolutely, we can help you with that." That's a great example of then being able to broaden and deepen the relationship with that customer. Like I said, I think you're gonna see it two ways, new customer segments and expanding the relationship with existing customers. Got it. Thank you. Then, for my follow-up, just curious, I know you're confident that this is more of a cyclical headwind in the near term to issuance than secular. Does that change your appetite for M&A in the near term, or at least until MIS revenue or issuance trends stabilize? Or is it pretty much business as usual on that front? Thank you. Yeah, I guess I would say, you know, kind of our M&A program is not really kind of dictated by what's going on in the issuance markets. We're very much focused on, you know, the product roadmaps that we've got in terms of, you know, what our customers want and need. In fact, you've actually seen us make an investment in the MIS business in the first quarter with our acquisition of GCR in Africa. You know, that is a very long-term play for us. So we're gonna keep investing in that franchise. It's a great business. On the M&A side, we'll be guided by customer needs and product roadmaps. Craig Huber, Huber Research Partners. Great. Thank you. My first question, Rob or Mark, what sort of macro environment are you expecting here, say, by year-end for the U.S. Treasury rate? Where do you think? I mean, kind of. Also the Fed rate at year-end. What's sort of embedded in your mind when you put out this global debt issuance outlook of down mid-teens? That's my first question. Craig, you know, as we think through to the outlook for the year and then a little bit beyond, our central case, you know, does model continued GDP expansion, in part over the year, but also in part over the medium term, at a slightly higher level than what prevailed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. That's really based on the GDP forecast that we use internally from Moody's Analytics. You could think about between 2021 and 2026, an average annual real GDP growth in the range of around 2.5% as we look out. On your question around interest rates, we have again applied sort of the insights from Moody's Analytics database, and we model out an increase in the ten-year rate, from approximately 2%-3% this year to around 4% by 2027, to answer your question. What about the Fed interest rate by year-end? What's sort of embedded there in your macro outlook here? We are assuming approximately six interest rate increases during the course of the year, and that would be consistent, I think, with consensus in the market. We're not looking to model anything different or distinct from that. Jeff Silber, BMO Capital Markets. Thanks. That's close enough. I know it's late. I'll ask one question. You mentioned some of the spending you're doing, I don't know, with staff retention, staff recruiting. Can we talk about the environment? Has it changed over the past few weeks or months given what's going on, in the overall economy? Thanks. Yeah. I'd say just at a very high level. I mean, it's still a competitive job market. Yes, there's been you know, some form of kinda correction in the equity markets. You know, we're very focused on, I'd say, kind of broadly our employee value proposition. You know, compensation is a very important part of that. Mark talked about, you know, the investments that we're making to make sure we have competitive compensation in the market. There are a number of other things that go into it, as well. You know, we're finding that workplace flexibility is really important, and we have leaned into flexibility. We've done a great job over the last two years, and so we're gonna continue to do that, and we think that that's gonna be a competitive advantage for us in terms of attracting talent. Okay. Appreciate the call. Thanks. Owen Lau of Oppenheimer. Good afternoon, and thank you for taking my question. I wanna go back to MA. Your organic ARR was 9% for the quarter, and I think you introduced a target of low double-digit growth this year. Maybe could you please talk about the driver of this acceleration for the rest of this year? Is it more driven by the KYC and compliance, Rob, if you talk about or ESG and climate or any other products? If you can, you know, quantify for us, that would be great. Thank you. Yeah, Owen. Good to hear from you. You know, we had very strong performance in MA really across the board. Maybe I would highlight you know, just a few things, and this hopefully will give you a sense for you know, the momentum that we have in the business. The growth in Decision Solutions, there we had 20% organic constant dollar recurring revenue growth. That's when you think about organic recurring revenue growth ex the impact of FX. We're just seeing very strong demand for KYC and compliance solutions ongoing. You know, if you think about what's happening with our customers, there's an intense demand right now for tools that help with not only sanctions compliance, but just better understanding the risk of who you're connecting to, who you're doing business with. Customers of course, but also thinking about supply chain. You know, we're really leaning into that. You heard that the usage stats are up significantly. That's a very good kind of leading indicator, Owen, of, you know, when you see heavy usage, you can expect that, you know, your customers are realizing the value proposition of your solutions that ultimately can lead into supporting pricing, can support cross-sell and upsell at customers. Our sales activity is picking up. We had a new program where we were doing actually screening our customers' portfolios for them so that, you know, they could get a sense of what they might be missing in their own screening processes. On top of that, you know, we made several investments last year. As you know, we made several acquisitions, but also we've been investing heavily in internal product development. You know, with the PassFort workflow platform that we acquired, we've now been really working on integrating our content sets into that, working on rolling out some new products where our customers continue to need help in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, and not only around KYC, but also around supplier. You know, it. I could probably go on across the portfolio, but it gives you a sense, Owen, of, you know, very good performance in the quarter, but very good momentum as well. Got it. That's very helpful. Go back to the buyback, $1.5 billion. You maintain that guidance. I know, Rob, you answered the question around M&A criteria, but the valuation of many assets has come down. At this point, how do you think about the pace of share buyback versus M&A, which can also drive long-term value of the company? Thank you. Hey, Owen, just one thing. I ran the M&A department for a bunch of years here, and you're right, the value of public assets has come down. I will say that, you know, a lot of assets in our space, you know, if you've got companies that don't have leverage capital structures, you know, they're in no hurry to sell, right? You know, it doesn't always mean that it's a more conducive M&A market when you see a kind of a downturn in public market valuations. Owen, you know, we do remain focused as a management team on prudent capital planning and allocation, and I've spoken about this several times, so just to reinforce, we do try to identify opportunities for organic and inorganic investments in the high growth markets first. To the extent there are additional investment dollars, we will seek to return that capital to our stockholders through share repurchases and dividends. Our M&A framework, as Rob mentioned earlier, is really structured in a manner such that we pursue the right investments to enhance the services we deliver to our customers and return capital to our stockholders. Our approach incorporates business and strategic plan development among other factors such as market attractiveness, which you mentioned, as well as a competitive review. That only enables us or allows us to pursue new deals where there's a clear set of transaction core elements, among first supporting and advancing our global integrated risk assessment strategy. Second, reinforcement of the development of our standards-based business. Third is sort of leveraging our brand, distribution and analytical capabilities to create more as a whole rather than distinct and separate elements. That's very helpful. Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Simon Clinch of Atlantic Equities. Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to jump back just to the guide for issuance and for MIS revenue. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about the levels of visibility you have in building your guidance for those two outlooks. Just give us a sense of how much is based on just looking historically and seeing how things have trended in the past to actually what you can actually see ahead of you. Hey, Simon, it's Rob Fauber. You know, maybe just to give you a sense of, you know, some of the data points and color that goes into how we thought about the outlook. Maybe that'll be helpful for you. I could also, you know, maybe even touch on a little bit, you know, just kind of the current market conditions. Obviously, we don't have great visibility into the full year, but we do have some visibility, you know, into the current market. First of all, just from investment grade, you know, obviously we've got that, you know, down for the year. We've got it, you know, down 10% for the year versus, you know, down mid-20s% for Q1. You know, there we think we'll see some increased issuance to support opportunistic refi and M&A. You know, some of those issuers were just sitting on the sidelines. When you think about, you know, high yield and leveraged loans, there, the decreases, you know, that we're seeing for the year are substantially greater. Even though we think there'll be a little bit of improvement through the balance of the year, you know, the broader market conditions, including the equity market volatility, you know, wider spreads, continued uncertainty around, you know, resolution of Russia and Ukraine, all that impacts the leveraged finance markets more than investment grade. When you see a lot of equity market volatility, that's typically very challenging for leveraged finance markets. You know, when we look at the kind of public and infrastructure area, where we expect that to be down something like mid-single digits, but year to go roughly flat. Some modest improvement baked in. There again, I think kind of like what we expect with the investment grade issuers. You know, we expect that those infrastructure issuers are going to return from sitting on the sidelines in the first quarter. I think we will see lower supply from sovereigns, who have done a lot of kind of pre-funding over the last couple years and combined with some rising funding costs. Let me just touch on structured for a second too, because there, you know, we had a very strong first quarter, obviously. You know, our revenues were up, you know, 24% in structured finance, but you heard that we're actually looking for issuance to be down for the year. What's going on there? Well, you know, one, you had some spread widening in some of these asset classes and concerns about rate increases. There we do think we saw some pull forward of issuance that supported that really strong first quarter. CMBS, very strong and we expect that to continue for the year. CLOs, you know, you think about what's going on in CLOs, frequently tied to what's going on in the leveraged loan market. With leveraged loans down meaningfully, there's less not only leveraged loan creation for new CLO formation, but with spreads widening, you know, that'll put a little bit of damper on refinancing activity. You know, that's generally how we're thinking about the outlook. In terms of just the best visibility we've got is just kind of what the current market looks like. I would say that, you know, the markets are open for business. We would expect in investment grade, you know, I would expect May to pick up off of April. April was a real mixed bag. There was more financial issuance than there was corporate. You know, we had some blackouts and some of the corporates continued to sit out the volatility. There's a lot of dry powder for M&A, but again, volatility will dictate how much of that comes to the market. High yield is pretty sluggish. As I mentioned earlier, you know, the European high yield market has finally reopened after 11 weeks of no issuance. So we may see some M&A backlog there come to market. Leverage loans are certainly stronger than high yield, but, you know, off of a torrid pace. I mentioned we've got a good FTM backlog, first time mandate backlog. So, you know, hopefully some of that will come to market. The last thing I would say, Simon, is just looking at fund flows, we've seen, you know, five consecutive weeks of fund inflows in leverage loans while we've seen fund outflows for high yield almost through the balance of the year. Hopefully that gives you a sense of, you know, the data points that we're looking at and kind of building to our forecast. Thanks, Rob. That's really helpful, actually. Thank you. Just as a quick follow-up, I was wondering if you could just give us a sense as well. I mean, with all the you know, impressive strong momentum you're getting in in Moody's Analytics, how should we think about the economic sensitivity of those recurring revenues? You know, if we were to contemplate you know, a recessionary scenario, for example. Is this revenue stream actually going to be much more resilient than people think? Or you know, what are the sensitivities we need to consider? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. If you look all the way back to the global financial crisis, MA's revenues, you know, proved to be pretty durable and resilient. I think that, you know, would be the case here if we have an economic downturn. You know, when we talk about this stuff about, you know, it's in times of uncertainty when customers need us most, that really is. You know, that's true. You know, you see that with MA and, you know, you're not going to see banks turning off their, you know, KYC vendors and running risk of regulatory non-compliance because they're trying to cut costs. I don't want to be glib about, you know, about it, but I would just say that the fundamental value proposition, you know, will remain intact during times of stress and uncertainty. I do believe that will be true. Our next question comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum with Stifel. Factors that you have going into the guidance, particularly with the U.S. GDP of 3.5%-4.5%. What are you seeing that has you put that out there as part of the assumption when we had a -1.4% for the first quarter? You know, what are kind of the puts and takes around that? Afterwards, I have one follow-up. Yeah. Shlomo, hey, it's Rob. You know, the first quarter GDP trend was a quarter-over-quarter trend. That was growth relative to the fourth quarter of 2021. Obviously, in the fourth quarter of 2021, you had very strong GDP growth. It was almost 7%. I think, you know, we had expected some pullback in the first quarter, which happened. If you look at it on a year-over-year basis for the quarter, you actually had positive GDP growth. I think in a kind of 3.5% range, which is, you know, kind of still within the range that we're looking at for the balance of the year. There were some technical factors to that. In general, you know, I would say that the key variable for us in terms of GDP growth is, you know, thinking about the geopolitical dynamics policy response to it, and there's still a lot of uncertainty around it. In general, we think our forecasts are in line with a number of other prognosticators. Okay, great. Thank you for that clarification. In terms of what we're seeing in the rate environment, it seems that there's likely to be less of what we've seen a lot in the last few years of pull forwards in terms of opportunistic refi. Can you talk a little bit about how that assumption has changed in the last quarter? In other words, we typically have seen as rates gone down, some more kind of opportunistic refi. Can you maybe give a little bit more color about how that impacted the level of MIS kind of take down that you assume now for this year? Yeah. You know, in a rising rate environment like we've got here, you know, we would expect to see CFOs and treasurers start to look at pulling forward issuance to get ahead of those rate increases. You know, I mentioned earlier that we really didn't see much of that in the first quarter, and that's because I think the market volatility kind of overwhelmed the, you know, the desire to kind of pull forward and be opportunistic in the market. It was just a very difficult market to access if you didn't need to. We have not built in, you know, substantial pull forward into our forecast, which is why I mentioned it earlier as a possible upside. You know, you could imagine if the market volatility calms down a bit, we could see some of this pull forward activity. Part of the drivers there could really be the elevated cash balances that would temporarily constrain issuance. In the first quarter, just to put a couple numbers around that. In terms of investment grade, we saw globally around 11% of eligible investment grade issuers actually come to the market in the first quarter. That's meaningfully below what we've seen over the last two years. Interestingly enough, of that 11% that came to the market, two-thirds of those had issued last year. Not so much opportunistic issuance, but more for regular ongoing financings. Conversely, on the high yield front, just 2% of eligible issuers issued in the first quarter, and that's meaningfully, probably two or three standard deviations below what we've seen in other first quarters. A third of those were repeat issuers from 2021, sort of emphasizing a point around opportunistic issuance that Rob was making. Okay, great. Our next question comes from Kevin McVeigh of Credit Suisse. Great. Thanks so much. Hey, it seems like the margins are behaving a lot better, particularly given you know the meaningful downward revisions. I know a little bit of that is the mix of MA versus MIS. Maybe talk to that a little bit, and if you can give us a sense of where the margins sit within MA, more specifically, if there's a range to think about, Mark. I wanted to kind of start there, if we could. Kevin, thanks for the question. Maybe if I just spend a minute on some of the financial characteristics of some of the new MA LOBs first, and then I'll get onto that specific question sort of about margin by LOB. Data & Information revenue for the first quarter was 100% recurring, and that was up from approximately 99% recurring as of the year-end 2021. That was with a customer retention rate of 95%. Research & Insights in the first quarter, which is 100% organic, had revenues up 7% and a recurring revenue rate of 99%. That was consistent with 2021 and had increased customer retention at a rate of 97%, which is 100% from the year before. Decision Solutions recurring revenue was 87% of the total, with a 96% customer retention rate. Both recurring revenue and retention rates were up from 84% and 93% respectively compared to 2021. A very strong sample set. If you look at the MA LOB now from an operating leverage perspective, given that both data and information and research and insights are businesses with very high recurring revenue, you could naturally expect those two LOBs to have a stronger margin profile than MA overall. Decision Solutions, which includes RMS, intuitively must then have a lower margin profile, and that really results from the higher proportion of existing on-prem solutions and transaction-based services, as well as the relatively outsized expenditure of investment dollars in that LOB as we develop software and workflow tools to meet robust customer demand. Over time, as we execute on our plans to achieve MA's medium-term adjusted operating margin target of mid-30s, you could expect the majority of that margin expansion to really result from improving operating leverage in Decision Solutions, while the margin profiles of Data and Information and Research and Insights should be relatively stable. Very helpful. I guess either Mark or Rob, you know, I know you tweaked the GDP, but it's still pretty strong GDP relative to other cycles. As you think about the issuance, is it more the macro uncertainty in terms of where we are as opposed to the base GDP, and that kind of factors into some of the recovery in the back half of the year? Because it seems like you're coming up against, you know, tougher comps and you're still seeing some inflection. Is there just any more puts and takes? I know folks have spent a lot of time on that, but is that a fair way to think about it? Maybe the way I'll approach this, Kevin, is, you know, we alluded to this a little bit during Investor Day, but given the uncertainty around the duration and the severity of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as well as what we know to be ongoing central bank actions to address inflationary concerns, our central case assumption is really that the shortfall in first quarter revenue, which has resulted from the lower than expected issuance which we've discussed, is unlikely to be recovered as the year progresses. Yes, we think this is a short-term cyclical headwind. As we translate that then to MIS transaction revenue, we expect that to be balanced really between the first half and the second half of 2022, when historically, and I think this is the point that you're getting at, on average, the second half has only contributed, let's call it 46-ish percent of the year's aggregate revenues. That's sort of the big driver, the differential. That's driven by several assumptions, some of which we've spoken about in the call, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, where we think energy prices are going up. We've got to really make sure that we are observing sort of oil prices and where they may stabilize and the implications therefore any recessionary conditions in the second half of the year. Our next question comes from Faiza Alwy of Deutsche Bank. Yes. Hi. Thank you so much. We've covered a lot of topics. I just wanted to ask a quick clarification question around margins on the analytics business. You know, we did see a pretty significant sequential acceleration and you know, your guide assumes some deceleration. I believe it might be all investments, Mark, that you talked about earlier on the call. But if you could give us any more color around you know, dynamics around investments and subscription pricing, maybe any mix as it relates to the new LOBs that you've talked about, that would be really helpful. Hey, Faiza, it's Rob. Welcome to the call. It's great to have you on, but I'm gonna let Mark take this one. For the full- year 2022, we are reaffirming our MA adjusted operating margin guidance of approximately 29%. That includes around 150-200 basis points of margin compression from recent acquisitions, primarily RMS, as well as foreign exchange translation. Our guidance implies that the margin on average for the remainder of the year will be 28%, and that reflects the impact of our annual promotion and merit increase cycle, which commenced in April, as well as continued targeted organic investment to expand our existing class sales force and to focus on cross-selling opportunities across multiple product lines. Similar to 2021 seasonality, we'd expect MA's organic investments to steadily increase throughout the year, and that's gonna be commensurate with our ongoing revenue growth and those investments to be primarily weighted towards the second half of the year. We have demonstrated, I think, our ability to grow MA's organic constant currency recurring revenue over the past year from 9%-10%. We're still projecting sort of that low double-digit growth in 2022. It's these ongoing multi-year investments that we're making that will support the achievement of our targets. Finally, just to sort of close out this one, I'll talk to our medium-term MA margin target of mid-30s. It's not expected to be linear, especially as we continue to make opportunistic investments as time goes on. Great. Thank you so much. Very helpful. Our next question comes from Patrick O'Shaughnessy of Raymond James. Hey, good afternoon. Just one question from me. You guys lowered your operating cash flow projection, you left your share repurchase guidance unchanged, and you boosted your CapEx outlook. Does that imply incremental debt issuance relative to your prior forecast? It does not. If I think about sort of debt outstanding, you've got cash equivalents and short-term investments on the balance sheet as of the end of March of approximately $1.9 billion. The carrying value of debt, as of the same date is around $7.8 billion. If you take the net debt, which is $5.9 billion, divided by sort of the trailing-twelve-month adjusted operating income of about $2.9 billion, you get a net debt to adjusted operating income ratio of about 2.0. We feel very comfortable with that ratio. It's not anywhere near sort of that BBB+ threshold that Fitch or S&P uses to evaluate Moody's Corporation. Hopefully, that sort of helps address your question. Thank you. That does conclude the question-and-answer session for today. At this time, I'd like to turn the call back over to our presenters for any additional or closing comments. I just wanna thank everyone for joining us today, and we look forward to speaking with you next quarter. Thank you very much. This concludes Moody's first quarter 2022 earnings call. As a reminder, immediately following this call, the company will post the MIS revenue breakdown under the Investor Resources section of the Moody's IR homepage. Additionally, a replay of this call will be available after 3:30 P.M. Eastern Time on Moody's IR website. Thank you.