All right, I think we'll get started with our next session. On stage with me, we have Rob, Rob Fauber, CEO of Moody's Corporation. Welcome back to the conference again, Rob. Thank you for taking the time to participate. Thank you for having me. Fantastic. Quick housekeeping: you can ask a question to Rob via the pigeonhole system. There should be a QR code that comes on the blue screen, not the one that's perplexity, but on the blue screen. You can use that to send questions up here, and I'll try to get that to Rob towards the end of the Q&A. Let's dig in. Let's dig in, Rob. Let me just talk about growth, long-term growth of Moody's. You know, if I look over the last five years, top-line growth has been fairly, fairly nice at an 8% CAGR. But so has EPS, been around 8%. What do you see as the primary growth drivers for this company over the next five years? And just as importantly, how do we get a bit more operating leverage on the bottom line? Christian, first of all, thanks for having me. And I've obviously lost the battle of the socks. But, as we all know, in the last five years, the base year that you pick to measure your growth rates really matters. The last five years have been an interesting period. Over the last two years, actually, revenue has grown at 14%, and, excuse me, EPS has grown at 21%. So you can see the operating leverage in the business the last two years. First of all, I'd say around the growth drivers, there are what I would say are several deep currents that are driving demand for our solutions and what we do. The first of that is, you know, secular de-banking and private credit, and I imagine we'll get into that today. Second is the ongoing digital evolution of financial institutions, banks, and insurers. Banks have been at this for a long time. Insurers are farther behind. A-and now we have a whole wave of AI-enabled transformation, so that is going on. Third, almost every customer I talk to wants to better understand who they are doing business with. Some people call that third-party risk management. A subset of that is KYC. That idea of needing to know more about who you are doing business with, I would also say that understanding the physical risk of natural events and the insurability of physical assets has become front and center for financial markets and financial institutions. Lastly, just the unlock of, you know, from AI for owners of proprietary data. You know, that, that I think is a big growth driver. In terms of the operating leverage, Christian, I would say two things. On the rating side of the business, we think about trying to manage our resources within a band of, of become increasingly volume agnostic, right, within a band of issuance. What that means is technology enabling our people to do a lot of what gets done in the rating agency. When we have surges of issuance, we do not just have to add more people. You are seeing that. You know, you saw that in 2024, and you saw the operating leverage come into the business. In MA, I would say, you know, that is a business that we have built acquisitions over time, moving to a common technology platform. We are really leaning up and platforming that business, and you are seeing that come into the margin as well. Okay. Let's double-click on what you talked about in terms of the competitive landscape and disruption. The financial services landscape is evolving. Fintechs are beginning to use or leverage AI and alternative data in things like credit risk, credit risk assessment. How is Moody's defending its market position both against traditional players, but I would say against some of the newer emerging fintechs? Yeah. I still think at the heart of all this, yes, there's a lot of technology disruption. But as I said, you know, just a minute ago, the owners of proprietary data and analytics, I think, are actually gonna be the beneficiaries of all of this, right? And, and for just a moment, you know, think about how we compete. I'm gonna take the insurance space for just a moment in terms of how do we compete in that space. We have the best science, right? We own a company that invented catastrophe modeling. We are the Cadillac of catastrophe models. In fact, many of our customers market the fact that they use our models as their currency of risk. That's a big deal. Second of all, we have really, really extensive and deep customer relationships across the entire industry. That gives us tremendous insight into where the industry is headed and what our customers need from us. They are actually bringing forward ideas in terms of where they want to see us invest on behalf of the industry. When our customers are bringing us the ideas of where they want us to invest, that gives us the opportunity to, again, stay ahead of the game in terms of innovating and delivering for our customers. Okay. Let's talk about Moody's as a global, fairly global business, both across your ratings business and analytics. Clearly, there's a lot of global tensions. Talk, talk about de-globalization. How do you think about that from a business risk perspective and how Moody's operates globally? We have a very global business. Roughly half of our revenues come from outside of the United States today. That's generally been true for quite a while. I would say it's interesting that in the rating business, there are really two rating businesses. There's the global cross-border business, typically U.S. dollar issuance. These are the largest issuers in the world. Then we have the domestic issuance markets. These are local currency markets. The biggest of those are places like China, Korea, India, LATAM. Latin America has a very vibrant set of domestic local currency markets all across the continent. We have a very strong presence in those domestic markets. You see an ebb and flow from time to time between the global markets and the domestic markets. We do see issuers issue in both. We have invested pretty significantly in building out that global footprint in these domestic markets. In fact, last year, we acquired close to 100% of the largest domestic rating agency across the continent of Africa. That is like a generational investment for us. We have been building out our presence across all of the domestic markets in Latin America through a platform called Moody's Local. That collectively, Christian, is about 7,000 issuer relationships in the domestic, local, part of our business. I think of those, again, as many of those are the issuers of the future and gives us great exposure. On the MA side of the business, we are typically serving the largest financial institutions in any given country because they want global standards, right? They want to be using the standard for credit risk or for asset and liability management or for whatever kind of regulatory reporting. We tend not to see a fractionalization of that market because the banks, the biggest institutions, want to use global standards. Okay. You've talked about this a lot, the integrated risk solution. So looking at risk across credits, markets, climate, etc. Could you just talk through your product strategy, how that's evolving to sort of meet these, the need? Yeah. Let me provide a little context, kind of the evolution of the MA business, 'cause I think this is gonna help with the answer. You think about how MA started. It was basically the monetization of content coming from the rating agency. Over time, we realized we had an opportunity to sell more content to those customers, things like economics and structured finance models and other things. We continued to build out that business over the years, both organically and inorganically, right? In fact, we've done a number of acquisitions to build out our capabilities, both in terms of serving new customer segments like insurance, but also adding a variety of content sets. You know, you're talking about this idea of integrated risk or bringing it all together. I'll give you an example. We're one of the top players in lending software for banks. This is commercial banks and relationship managers who are underwriting loans. Think about that, really, the software for us is just a delivery chassis. Think about the content that we deliver through that. We have data on 580 million companies. Every company that is being underwritten, we have the opportunity to pre-populate a lot of that data for our banking customers. We have the premier credit scoring models in the world, and many banks use those credit scoring models in our lending software. We are now bringing forward KYC checks because what we're hearing from banks is they're saying, "Gosh, I wanna understand right up front when I'm originating a loan whether this thing's gonna get through compliance in six weeks," right? I need to understand that. And most recently, and back to one of my deep currents, we have banks who are saying, "Gosh, I'm underwriting a 10-year loan secured by a piece of commercial real estate, and now I wanna understand the physical risk of that asset because I understand that the insurance policy is a one-year policy, and I've got a 10-year loan. And so I wanna understand much more about the physical risk of that asset that I'm taking as collateral." All of that content is flowing through, in this case, our lending solution and providing us the opportunity to cross-sell and monetize much more of that, much more of that content. Let's double-click into the ratings business. Obviously, the macro backdrop is, it's volatile. We've gone from bullions to Liberation Day, and it feels like we're back up again here. Maybe just some context as to how you're thinking about a set of the global debt markets, trends evolving any better or worse than, you know, you thought, on your earnings call. Yeah. So I would say, since April 2nd, we have seen volatility start to subside, right? Right after April 2nd, certainly, we saw kind of a move to a risk-off environment. If you look at spreads, both investment grade and spec grade, spreads have come in, you know, essentially to pre-April 2nd levels. We have seen issuance. Our RAS pipeline, which is our pipeline of rating assessments. If you're thinking about an M&A deal, you might come to us in advance to understand what the impact would be to your credit profile. We have good visibility into M&A. That pipeline has started to improve again. We have seen fund flows back into, you know, fixed income funds. I would say there's still a cautious tone. You know, we still obviously have some headwinds from elevated treasuries and still uncertainty around trade policy and other things. There are some green shoots in terms of, you know, the market, the issuance markets getting their footing again. Would you describe it as a little bit better than you thought, in terms of the recovery since the earnings call or bottom line? I think we had anticipated some improvement. You know, if you look at our guidance, we basically said, you know, there was a kind of a band of outcomes within the guidance, and I think we are within that band of outcomes. Okay. All right. Let's talk about the competitive landscape on ratings. I mean, typically, for most products and ratings, it's somewhat of a duopoly, between yourselves and S&P. There are some products, sort of like structured products, where there are other players that have made the market a bit more competitive, and we have seen some, let's call it, lagging of revenues relative to peers. I'll be curious how you're thinking about the competitive landscape, particularly in structured products for Moody's, going forward. Yeah. Let me start by just talking about generally how we think about our competitive positioning. We have a phrase that we use at the firm, which is, "Our goal is to be the agency of choice," right? I do not think about issuers having to use us. We think about issuers and investors wanting to use us, wanting to use us because we have the best analysts, the most experienced analysts. Our ratings are predictive and predictable. We have thought-leading and timely research, and we have very active engagement with the market, right? That is how we position the agency. As a result, and I know sometimes people are skeptical of these awards and all that stuff, but we were named best rating agency by Institutional Investor 13 years in a row. I think institutional investors understand that Moody's is the gold standard in ratings. Now, Christian, as a result, we've maintained very, very strong and comprehensive coverage around the world. You mentioned structured finance. Structured finance post-financial crisis is a different competitive landscape really than the rest of, I'd say, kind of the ratings market. I'd say it's kind of an active six-agency market. There's more agency rotation. Why is that? It's because it's much more transactional. You know, when we have a relationship with an issuer, a fundamental issuer, a corporate, we might've had a relationship with them for 30 years. Structured finance lends itself to a more transactional model. I would say in structured finance, you see ebbs and flows, right? We have methodological changes, the way we think about different assets over time. Sometimes you will see issuance move to or away from you based on, based on kind of your approach to the market. In this case, you know, more recently, in the last couple of years, we've had a view around CLOs where issuance has moved away from us. I think there's something very important here, which is you have to think about long term. We have conviction around our methodological approaches, and sometimes that's gonna cost us business. That's the cost of having an opinion. We've gotta run the business for the long term. I think our long-term shareholders really understand and can appreciate there are times where we take a stand on what we believe, and that's gonna cost us some business. I think in structured finance, you see some of that. Okay. Maybe let's talk about just the cyclicality of the business. Obviously, a great business, the ratings business, from a growth and margin perspective. You know, revenue growth can be volatile. You know, one year up 30, another year down 30. Any change? And Moody's has a bit more transactional bent to its business than your main peer. Any thoughts around trying to make the business less cyclical, more recurring in nature going forward? Whenever we have a period where people think there is a slowdown in issuance, I get these questions. When there is a pickup in issuance, it is the exact opposite. I would say a couple of things. First of all, we have an experienced team at Moody's, right? You know that, Christian. We have managed through all sorts of air pockets, market issues and turbulence, pandemics, wars, risk-off environments, you name it, whether it is weeks, months, quarters. We have managed through that. We know what the levers are that we can pull to manage expenses. I talked about how we are working on becoming increasingly volume agnostic, right? That is by technology enabling our people. Our incentive compensation programs are well aligned to preserve margin in periods of downturn. As I said, we know the levers that we can pull. When it comes to thinking about the mix of transactional exposure versus recurring, right? Because we charge basis points on issuance, and then we charge monitoring fees. I would say that generally, we feel that this approach has worked well for us, in a growing market. I understand when we hit a downdraft, that can work against us. This is the operator in me speaking here for a moment. It's a big lift to go out to thousands and thousands of customers and start to change that commercial model with them. By the time you do that and we have a pickup in issuance, you're thinking, "Gosh, I wish I had more transactional exposure." Unless, Christian, we think that this is really a multi-year shift, we're gonna stick with the approach that we've got. Okay. Let's talk about private credit. I think at this point, we can safely say it's a tailwind for the rating agencies. My messaging is working to Christian. feels like it's accelerating for you guys, though. You're talking about, seeing incremental private credit deals. Maybe help us or remind us, what is the overall size of private credit today in ratings? What exact products are resonating? What are the most meaningful growth opportunities going forward? The size of the market, the way people typically define it today, is roughly $2 trillion. Just to put that in perspective, we rate about $75 trillion of mostly public debt, right? You can get a sense of the scale. Obviously, you know, when you listen to the big players in the market, they talk about that market going from $2 trillion to potentially numbers like $10 trillion or higher. Maybe let me just zoom out for a second and think about what's going on and then how we're monetizing that and what the opportunity is. A lot of this is assets that are sitting on bank balance sheets or are being originated by banks, right? We know that post-financial crisis, bank regulation led banks to start to exit leveraged lending, right? You have got assets coming off of bank balance sheets and into capital markets and investor markets. The way we monetize assets that are on bank balance sheets typically, right, is they are using our lending software and our credit scoring tools and other tools, with a subscription model. When those assets, those loans are coming off the balance sheet, whether in pools or individually, what we are finding is they are starting to get rated, scored, assessed. That is a big opportunity for us, right? I know there is a lot of focus from investors who say, "Oh gosh, the direct lending market, a lot of that is not rated. This is a net negative for rating agencies." I really challenge that idea. Why? Because think of what is going on. We talked about it in our first quarter earnings call. You can already see the growth in asset-backed finance from private credit sponsors coming into our structured finance ratings business. 20% of growth in our first quarter structured finance business was from private credit. 30% of our first-time mandates in our financial institutions rating line were related to private credit. That is all the fund finance, the sublines, nav loans, rated feeders, BDCs, fund ratings, all of that. We are monetizing a lot of that through the rating agency. By the way, the economics on that is very similar or identical to what we get on the public side of the business. However, we have also got more of these assets that there is demand to score. I may be providing other forms of credit assessment. It may not be a credit rating. I may not have the same economics, but now I'm earning a fee opportunity on assets that I otherwise wouldn't be touching. Net-net, I see that as a real positive for us. Okay. Let's talk about MSCI and the partnership around private assets. Maybe talk through that partnership, why MSCI, and then any sort of revenue model you can give us a sense of there. And more importantly, just longer term, how does that partnership evolve into other products, benchmark indices, etc.? All right. It's been very interesting once we announced this partnership. MSCI are great partners. They have a great content set with their Burgiss platform. You have to understand, you know, what we're bringing to the table here. Moody's has really the world's best credit models that are being used by hundreds or thousands of banks around the world. That started with, for many of you probably remember when we acquired KMV back in the early 2000s, and those were the public company EDFs and probabilities of default for public companies. We then built out, a lot of people do not know this, we built out a contributory data consortium with banks, and they provide default data to us. We used that to calibrate a set of private company credit models. We have a full stack of public and private company credit models that are used by banks to manage their credit portfolios, like the gold standard at banks. We start to have conversations with both investors who are saying, "Gosh, we'd like to have an understanding of a kind of a third-party view of the credit risk across the fund we're invested in," because today we're only getting that view from the GP themselves, right? We needed a data set, and we connected with MSCI, who has the data from the fund reporting on their platform that allows us to calibrate our private credit models using this private credit cohort, and be able to do it at the loan level, which is very important. That's one thing we heard from the investors. Now we have the ability with MSCI, and this is like a great example of co-development. Their data, our models produce something that otherwise we could not do, and to be able to distribute across their platforms and our platforms. Now, here is the very interesting thing about it. Yes, there is a revenue sharing agreement, and we will monetize. It will be a, you know, an à la carte offering, and we will make money from that. What I think is particularly interesting is that we are now at a moment where the market realizes that private credit loans can and will be scored and mapped to an implied rating. Remember how the ratings business started. We started with an investor pay model. We provided ratings to investors who found them valuable. Over the years, we switched to an issuer pay model because there was a very strong investor demand pull for ratings that allowed us to go to issuers and say, "How would you like to pay for a rating?" The investors were essentially demanding a Moody's rating. Here we have an opportunity to start to seed investor demand pull for ratings on private credit because now the investors, the LPs, will be able to see what the credit profile is of the loans within the fund that they're invested in. You could imagine eventually creating fund-level scores and data consortiums and benchmarks and all sorts of other things around this that may also ultimately lead to the GPs saying, "We'd like to come to you and go ahead and get these loans or companies scored or rated," right? Because they're already being done. I think this is a very important moment for the private credit market. The last thing I would say, Christian, is, you know, I've gotten some questions about, "Well, what's the reaction of the GPs to this that you're now providing transparency?" Because frequently I hear this, I hear this idea that one of the benefits of private credit is being unrated. I don't think that's true. I think the biggest players in the market have realized if you're gonna go from $2 trillion- $10 trillion, you're gonna need more transparency and benchmarks and data to allow insurers and pension funds and ultimately retirement and, and, and individual retail. You're going to need to have third-party independent credit assessment if you're gonna be able to scale this market. Very, very interesting. On credit quality, that is a big critic or criticism of the private markets that we have not gone through a credit cycle yet, and that will be an issue for that market. How do you think about a credit cycle impacting Moody's business? Is that a catalyst to your point? People need more information. Is it the opposite? I just love your thoughts on what you think a credit cycle in private credit will mean for Moody's. I think a credit cycle in private credit is going to drive a lot more demand for independent credit assessment. In fact, it's really interesting. I think there's an analog in the public markets, Christian. When markets are really, really frothy, sometimes we see issuers think, "Maybe I can go to market without a rating," right? When there are times of credit stress, you never see that, right? Never see that. In a way, when we see credit stress in the market, it actually reinforces the demand for our solutions and insights to really understand credit risk. It's in those frothy periods where people think, "There's no credit risk in the market." I think if we go through a credit cycle, we're gonna see a lot more demand. We may see an acceleration of demand for third-party risk assessment in private credit. Good stuff. I think that's, it's enough on ratings. Let's, let's switch over to, Always happy to talk about ratings. The analytics business, you know, really nice growth, at least in, if you look at things like ARR, which has been, you know, growing in the 9%-10% range for, for the last few years. It, it has decelerated somewhat, I would say, in the last few quarters. Maybe unpack kind of what you're hearing from different end markets, where you're seeing strength, where you're seeing weakness. I'd say still pretty strong demand drivers in general. We're probably talking about decimal points here. And, you know, in general, I talked about some of the deep currents, but, you know, I'll go to, you know, kind of what we see from our biggest customer bases, which are banks and insurers. Two areas in banks where we see real growth opportunity. First is in lending. And I talked about how we're bringing together our content sets and building out more of an end-to-end workflow platform for lending. Christian, what we hear from banks more and more is it's about growth. It's about growing the balance sheet and building the loan book and enhancing the customer experience and being able to turn around loans faster. All of that is leading many of our banking customers to want to digitize the end-to-end lending experience. That is a big opportunity for us. That is why we invested in Numerated at the end of last year. Second is KYC. It is amazing what a big issue that is, what a pain point that is for banks. Now with the advent of our AI KYC screening agent, you know, there is a real value prop there around changing the labor model for all of the manual in-house KYC screening and stuff that is costing banks billions and billions of dollars a year. Two great growth drivers in banking where you are going to see us continue to invest and try to drive scale in our business. And then with insurers, you know, this idea of physical risk and insurability is leading insurers to wanna get more and more sophisticated around how they're assessing risk. What we did with KAPE was we brought together, if you think about our CAP models, the data we were lacking was the current condition of any given building. Guess what? Now we have that. We plugged that into the CAP models to create an even more sophisticated view of the physical risk of any given property. Another area where our insurers have told us they really want help is around casualty and mass tort, you know, mass liability, you know, liability risk. We made an investment in a company called Predacat to be able to bring that to our customers. A couple places, I think in both of those big customer segments where we see some very strong demand drivers. Okay. Let's double KYC, to your point, very strong growth there, high teens ARR growth. I think you've launched a bunch of recent initiatives around AI to help expand that business. Maybe talk about how you think about the addressable opportunity there, versus what you're doing today. Yeah. I'd say there's a few things. One, there's still more of an opportunity to serve our existing banking customers and do more of the KYC process for them. I just mentioned, if you think about, in many cases, the biggest spend at the banks is actually the labor that's doing all of the diligence and screening. There's a big opportunity for us to go after that with our banking customers. Beyond banking, we're using a lot of the same data sets to go after the corporate market, right? The corporate market now is doing its own form of know your customer and sanctions checks and customer monitoring. We've built out a platform for corporates that brings together multiple use cases and interconnected data sets, leveraging this massive company database that we have to help companies around sales and marketing optimization, trade credit extension, customer onboarding, AKA KYC, and supplier risk management, all drawing on a common, this massive company database and other data sets that we have. That's another area of growth for us, leveraging a lot of the same data sets and analytic tools, but going after a whole new customer segment. That's really a land strategy, a new logo strategy. Those are two places I'd say more opportunity within the banks and new opportunity now with corporates. Okay. Maybe just broadly on your analytics business. Broadly speaking, analytics is a competitive industry. Obviously, Moody's does have some unique products, but I'd be curious if you've seen any areas where there are enhanced pricing pressures or any things that might cause sort of demand reduction from the end markets. I would say, you know, many of our customers are very price sensitive, right? I mean, I think we all understand that. Banks, insurance companies, asset managers, very, very price sensitive. It is really critical to make sure that we are delivering increased value to be able to support pricing. You know, we have been pretty consistent over a number of years in talking about, on average, a 3%-4% pricing opportunity across our portfolio of products and businesses. That is both ratings and MA. That is still true. You know, you have heard us talk about on, you know, some of the earnings calls that, you know, asset management in particular has been a little bit softer for us. Right. In general, that pricing opportunity, as long as we continue to deliver the value in our products, we feel that that pricing opportunity is still there. Okay. No way we can talk about, we can be here and not talk about AI, particularly for Moody's 'cause you've been very vocal around leveraging, leveraging AI, I think most famously around Research Assistant. Just remind us again, what is the financial contribution today of AI products? However you wanna cut that, where do you see opportunities, particularly as we move into more of an agentic AI, AI world? Yeah. So it's really interesting because the adoption curves of AI are very different across different customer segments and tiers of customers within those segments. If I look at banks, which is our biggest customer base, you know, at the big end of town, all of the banks are focused on internal AI workflow orchestration, thinking about moving to agentic models and taking third-party content like ours and bringing that into the bank's own environment. You move to kind of tier two, three banks, regional and community banks, you know, those are banks that have just moved onto software platforms, you know, cloud-based software platforms. Agentic is, I think, a ways out for them. I guess where we wanna position ourselves is a really interesting time. You know, we wanna over time be agnostic to how our data and content is delivered, whether it's through software or it's through AI prompting or whether it's through agents. I think we're also gonna have to think about what the revenue model looks like over time as we move from software subscriptions to the consumption of our content through AI and through agents. There are some real questions for us to think about in terms of adoption. Like I said, you know, if we look at it on the overall revenues, I'd say it's very, very modest. You know, the adoption curves have been slow with the big banks, particularly for our first product, which is our Research Assistant. When you start to look at growth and where we're getting new sales and those new sales also including the Research Assistant, that's where it starts to become more meaningful that, you know, our customers are saying, yes, we wanna have AI-enabled research. What you're gonna see is across the entire product suite, there will be AI enablement of our solutions and applications just like everybody else is doing. That is gonna be table stakes. There will be some opportunities to have incremental AI modules that you can charge extra for. In this case, Research Assistant would be one of those. I think that's the way we're gonna see this. You're gonna see AI table stakes, part of retention and overall pricing, and then you'll see à la carte opportunities as well. Okay. Good stuff. MA has really been built in some ways by a lot of acquisitions, you know, Bureau van Dijk, RMS, KAPE, you mentioned recently. How successful have you been so far in terms of integrating all these acquisitions into a single unified platform? Does that, would that improve the ability to drive incremental revenue synergies across those platforms? Just curious, curious on that. I hearken back to the investor call we had after we bought RMS back in 2021. That business was growing at very low single digits. On that call, a lot of people were asking basically, why did you do this? This is a low-growth business, heavily penetrated. Why are you getting into CAP modeling? My answer was two things at the time. One, we believe that having world-class industrial strength capabilities around weather and extreme events is going to be critical for financial markets in the decades to come. That was a thesis. Two, that we thought we had a great cross-selling opportunity into the global insurance market. Three years later, and we talked about this on one of our earnings calls, that business is growing, that business is growing in line with the broader insurance business at, call it, lowish teens growth rate. What we have done since then, Christian, is we took their Intelligent Risk Platform that is now, their cloud-based platform is now our platform for all of our insurance solutions. We have migrated all of our applications onto the Intelligent Risk Platform. Underpinning that is a risk data lake. We have grown the number of customers on the IRP fivefold since we made that acquisition. We have accelerated growth and the cross-selling story is real. What I think the most interesting thing is now about where we found ourselves is those two, the two theses that we had are true. There is a lot of demand for understanding physical risk with our banking customers, our asset management customers, even the public sector. The cross-sell story has been fantastic. Most recently, you know, I kind of mentioned this, the acquisitions that we did recently with Predacat and KAPE, these are customers bringing us the ideas. They're saying, you are an industry platform. We want you to own these assets and integrate these applications and create capabilities for us in the industry. That just, in a way, it's like a virtuous cycle and just kind of reinforces our competitive positioning. I feel very good about, you know, how we've performed with the shareholders' $2 billion in that case. Stuff. Okay. We've got a bunch of audience questions. A reminder, you can use the pigeonhole system to ask questions. First one is about MA margins. So you've outlined getting to mid-thirties, medium-term target for MA. What's your longer-term margin target for MA and what levers do you have to achieve them? I'd say in the nearer term, we have opened a restructuring program. Frankly, if you go back to, you know, I talked about the evolution of the business and we've done a number of acquisitions and we've been building a common technology platform underpinning all of our MA applications. There's just some real efficiencies to be gained out of all that. The platforming and the idea of just, you know, a leaning up of the organization, you see that in both this year's margin target as well as our medium-term target. You know, over time, there'll continue to be upside to that as we scale in the places where we believe we have the best competitive position, right to win and growth market dynamics. You know, the benefits of scale will provide some further operating leverage just given the subscription nature of the business. We're also, as I mentioned, starting to experiment with some other revenue models around, you know, an element of consumption-based pricing for certain of our content sets for certain kinds of use cases, which I hope will provide some further operating leverage as well. Okay. Question on M&A and AI. So you mentioned conviction around the value of proprietary data vis-à-vis AI. Do any of the technology, the changes affect your appetite or direction as it relates to M&A or analytics businesses? That's a fantastic question. Absolutely. This is at the very heart of our, every year we get together with our board once a year and we do a strategy session for a full day. This is at the very heart of that discussion because I think of, we now have two time horizons that we need to think about investing in. There's the business of today, and today I have SaaS businesses, right, in banking and insurance, primarily, where I wanna continue to build scale and add customers. Thinking about how do we invest in our market position in those businesses, but at the same time thinking hard about what's the future of B2B software. You start to hear this term, linear software, right? This idea that, 'cause if you think about B2B software, it's basically trying to understand your workflow and then replicating that workflow in a series of, you know, in a set of software options in a piece of software. I think we all understand that the agentic future presents an opportunity to not have to operate in these software platforms. We are starting to think hard about what are the adoption curves for our different customer segments that I talked about. Where do we want to make investments in the businesses of today to continue to drive scale? 'Cause there are some real position, real benefits of that. What are the no-regret investments to set us up for winning in an agentic future? That may be around data, that may be around businesses that have valuable data sets that may have different, slightly different revenue models. We're still working on that, but thinking about the balance of investing in those two time horizons is really important. I don't wanna be way out in front of our customers and have over-invested in a technology that customers aren't ready for. I don't wanna over-invest in the B2B software as we move to an agentic world. Okay. Fascinating. Another set of questions around private credit. So private credit's increasingly pushing into making itself more liquid via things like ETFs. Does Moody's see any incremental opportunity for doing higher levels of business as that, as that may force ratings? Yeah. This is on the demand side, and you hear the biggest players in private credit talking about moving into retirement markets, into retail. You know, the retirement market is $10 trillion plus, and you take a X% share of that and the numbers start to get very big very quickly. You know, the regulator's gonna be very focused on how that gets done and what kind of disclosure and transparency there is for individual investors. I think we'll have an important role to play. you know, when I'm with the biggest players in private credit, one of them said to me and my team that they understand that investors want sign, they, they use the word signposts and that companies like Moody's, whether it's ratings or scores, right, these scores are very important because they, they are signposts that investors are familiar with and allow for comparability across public and private. At the end of the day, I don't really care whether something is public or private, right? Our job is to express an opinion on credit risk. We've done that for public markets for over a century, and we have an opportunity to do the same thing for private markets as they scale. Good stuff. Maybe a couple of questions on culture and your vision. You know, obviously Moody's has a very long track record in the financial markets. But increasingly you're talking about things like, you know, agentic AI transforming your B2B SaaS software sales and things like that. How do you attract and retain, you know, top talent in areas like data science and AI, software engineering, as well as traditional credit analysis in a world where demand for those talent types are just increasing? Yeah. I'm biased because I've been the CEO for five years, but this is not your grandparents' Moody's anymore. I hope those that are watching us understand that. I'm gonna go back to the pandemic because as hard as the pandemic was for everybody, there were a lot of silver linings for us because we realized that in five days we could play a systemically important role in the world and continue doing what we're doing with a massive, massive surge in volume. We became much more nimble as an organization. When we first started in early 2023 to really start to think that AI was gonna be either a threat or opportunity, but it was real, you know, I kind of called in the firm and said, look, we've developed this, this nimbleness. We now need to use it to jump headfirst into this opportunity. You know, you learn every single day as a leader. I had a really valuable learning about the way that I communicated in 2023 as we moved into really going headfirst after AI because I think most people at the firm expected us to have a risk-first approach, right? We'll study this to death, but this was too important to do that. We had three simple principles. We're gonna have a yes-and mentality. That's pretty important. We're gonna have 14,000 innovators at the firm. Everybody is gonna be involved in this, and we're gonna deliver impact. It's not gonna be just a bunch of hobbies. That was an incredibly powerful, motivating force for us. We announced the Microsoft partnership, and then we said, you know what, we're gonna launch the first product on research, and we're gonna do it in December. And we did it. I think that has served us well, Christian, because I think it's starting to change the brand with both customers and with people who either work at Moody's or wanna work at Moody's. Great. We're out of time. Thank you very much, Rob. Thanks for. Thanks for having me.