Good morning, everybody. It's so good to see everybody. Thank you so much for attending. Welcome to the 2023 Annual Shareholder Meeting for Morningstar. I'm Joe Mansueto, Chairman of the Board, I'm delighted to see all of you this morning. If you're dialing in remotely via Zoom or the Broadridge platform, well, welcome to you as well. Before we get started, take a moment to read our Safe Harbor statement. The format for today's meeting is the same as in prior years. We think this works pretty well. I'm gonna kick it off with walking through the business of the annual meeting, which I don't expect will take too long. We'll turn to management presentations. We've got three for you this morning, Kunal Kapoor, our CEO, Jason Dubinsky, our CFO, and Danny Dunn, our Chief Revenue Officer. I think they'll present a good overview of the state of the business at Morningstar, our finances, our strategy, industry trends, and the way forward. We're gonna take a short break. We'll come back, and we'll take your questions. As you may know, this is the one opportunity we provide shareholders each year to ask management questions live in person, so we hope you have your questions ready, and we look forward to a robust, lively discussion. If you have questions you'd like us to address during the Q&A portion of the meeting, you'll have an opportunity to ask them via the Questions text box in the Broadridge platform or via chat or through audio or video participation if you're joining in through the Zoom platform. Anyone here in the room can simply raise your hand when we reach that portion of the meeting, and we'll bring a microphone to you. As I mentioned, we very much look forward to your questions. I will note that if you're not here in person and you'd like to vote during this part of the meeting, you must be logged on to the Broadridge platform using your control number provided with your proxy materials. The meeting is being simulcast on both platforms, participants will be able to hear and watch the meeting in its entirety. Before we get started, I'd like to introduce our directors who are in the front row here. As I call your name, I'd like each of you to stand and face the audience. Robin Diamonte, Cheryl Francis, Steve Joynt, Steven Kaplan, Kunal Kapoor, Gail Landis, William Lyons, Doniel Sutton, and joining us remotely is Carolyn Hsieh. Our board has been just a terrific resource for us during the year. We're very fortunate to have a very candid, strong, independent board who gives us very direct feedback. You've been terrific and thank you for all of your counsel and advice during the year. Now I'd like to introduce our executive officers, Kunal Kapoor, our Chief Executive Officer, Jason Dubinsky, our Chief Financial Officer, and Danny Don, our Chief Revenue Officer. You guys have also been terrific, so thank you. I'd also like to note that our independent auditors for 2023, KPMG, are in attendance and are available for any questions today. Now I'd like to get started with the official business of the meeting. Greg Malatia, a representative of Broadridge Financial Services, is here today to act as the Inspector of Elections. Leah Truszynski, our Corporate Secretary, will now report on the mailing of the notice of the meeting and the number of shares represented at today's meeting. We are holding this meeting pursuant to a notice mailed on March 31st to each shareholder of record on March 13th, 2023. A certified copy of the list of shareholders of record has been available at our offices for the last 10 days. I can report that we have established a quorum for the conduct of business at the meeting. Thank you, Leah. The first item of business today is election of our directors. We will elect 10 directors at today's meeting. The directors elected today will hold office until the 2024 annual shareholders meeting or until their resignation or removal. The nominees for director are Robin Diamonte, Cheryl Francis, Steve Joynt, Steven Kaplan, Kunal Kapoor, Gail Landis, Bill Lyons, Doniel Sutton, Carolyn Hsieh, and myself, Joe Mansueto. The second item of business is the say-on-pay vote. Each year we ask our shareholders to vote on an advisory basis to approve the compensation of our named executive officers as described in our proxy statement. The goals of our executive compensation program are to attract and retain talented executives and motivate and reward them for their contributions to our company. The third item of business is another advisory vote on the frequency of which shareholders will vote to advise on the compensation of our named executive officers at least once every six years. Our shareholders indicate whether a say-on-pay vote on compensation of our named executive officers should be held every one, two, or three years, as described in our proxy statement. The fourth item of business is a ratification of the appointment of KPMG as our independent auditors for 2023. The board recommends a vote for proposals one, two, and four, and for a one-year frequency for proposal three. There's no further business scheduled to come before this meeting. I now declare the polls are open. If you are a shareholder, joining on the Broadridge platform, you may use the Vote Here button on the lower right portion of the screen to vote your shares at this time. If you're here in person, please raise your hand now and our inspector of elections will bring you a paper ballot. Please remember that if you've already sent in your proxy card or voted by internet, you've already voted your shares accordingly. You do not need to vote now unless you wish you're voting for the first time, or you wish to change your previous vote. If anyone has a question or statement related to the proposals, please raise your hand and wait to be recognized. If you're joining virtually, please utilize the Ask a Questions field in the lower left portion of the Broadridge window or via chat in Zoom. As I mentioned, there'll also be a general Q&A session later in the meeting, at this time we'll only take questions that are directly related to our four proposals. Any questions over the Zoom platform or Broadridge? Okay. I now declare that the polls are closed. Leah will report on the voting results. The Inspector of Election has advised me that more than a majority of the shares represented in person or by proxy and entitled to vote at the meeting has been voted in favor of each of the director nominees listed in the proxy statement, in favor of our compensation for our named executive officers for a one-year frequency on say on pay votes and to ratify the appointment of KPMG. We will file an 8-K with more detailed voting results in the next couple of days. Thanks, Leah. Thank you. I promised it would be short and it was. This concludes the formal business portion of the meeting. Before we sign off on this part though, I just a few final comments. First, I want to welcome to Morningstar two new senior leaders, very exciting. First is Kathleen Peacock, our new Chief Legal Officer, who started in September. Kathleen joins us from the London Stock Exchange Group, where she served as the General Counsel for Data and Analytics, and she brings to Morningstar so wealth of global commercial and regulatory experience, and we're very grateful for her guidance on a wide variety of topics since she started. Second is Marie Trzupek Lynch, our new Chief People and Culture Officer, who started in December. Marie joins Morningstar from Skills for Chicagoland's Future, a nonprofit that Marie founded, where she served as President and Chief Executive Officer. Marie has vast leadership experience, and extensive expertise in talent acquisition, workforce management, and strategy. We look forward to the enhancements she'll make regarding our workforce. I'd also like to acknowledge one of our board members, Carolyn Hseih, for recently being named one of the top 30 Asian American and Pacific Islander board members in the United States. Congratulations, Carolyn, on this notable achievement. Then finally, I wanna thank Kunal Kapoor, our CEO, our management team, and really all the staff at Morningstar for all of their hard work and dedication over the past year. I particularly wanna highlight the important investments that we've been making, to grow our capability set, to show our value to investors, and cement the brand strength that we bring through our independence, and investor-first mindset. At the same time, I wanna acknowledge that it's been one of the more challenging years for Morningstar. Our license-based business accounts for about 70% of our business, and that's been rock solid, growing nicely. The other 30% has a more cyclical component. That's our investment management business and our transaction-based business, largely our credit ratings business. That's faced some cyclical headwinds with the downturn in the equity markets and a sharp rise in interest rates. At the same time, we're making meaningful investments into our growth initiatives. Those two factors, the cyclical headwinds on 30% of our business and then the investments in our growth initiative, have weighed on our operating margins. Our message for shareholders is that we're committed to returning to our historical levels of profitability and margins. We have terrific businesses. We know the profitability that they're capable of, and eventually the markets will recover, which will aid in that recovery of profitability and margins. You'll hear more about this from Kunal and Jason in their remarks. Now why don't we turn to management presentations, followed by the Q&A session. We'll hear, as I mentioned, from three presenters. First from Kunal Kapoor, our CEO, then Jason Dubinsky, our CFO, and then Danny Dunn, our Chief Revenue Officer. Thank you again very much for joining us. We really appreciate having all of you as our shareholders. Now I'd like to invite Kunal Kapoor to the stage. There you go. Appreciate it. Okay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us here in Chicago. Even if you're on Zoom or on the brokerage platform, thank you for making the time to be here. You know, we love this event every year because it is our chance to engage with you directly. Even though we don't see you at other times of the year, I just wanna share we do very much take seriously everything you send in, and we try to be very thoughtful and responsive in terms of making sure we get back to you in a timely way. Now, for today's presentation, we've got a number of things we'll be doing, but I wanna echo Joe's comments first of all and acknowledge that when I look at the business and think about where we are, while we've continued to grow at a nice pace, particularly in our licensing businesses, we've certainly had some market headwinds work against us. You've heard us say here before many times that in the cyclical parts of our business, we're okay with lumpy returns as long as our long-term projections still remain on track. However, it's also the case that we do think our business can produce good, strong levels of profitability over time, and as Joe said, we're really focused on making sure we get back to that after a period of heavy investment here at Morningstar. Our presentations today are gonna go over three themes, I think, in particular. First, you're gonna hear from me most heavily about what is going on in each of our key product areas. Where are we investing? What do we think about as our key opportunities in those areas? Why are we excited about each of those areas? Jason will then take the stage, and he will focus more heavily, of course, on our financials. We'll put a particular focus today on margins and how we're thinking about margin improvement and what that looks like going forward. I know it's been on many of your minds, and so we'll do a deeper dive on that sense. Daniel Dunn, our Chief Revenue Officer, will speak more specifically about how we're going to market these days. As our capabilities have expanded, as we've had to think about how do we bring them together, for clients, some of you have wondered, what does that look like? I know some of you work at firms where you've been able to experience that, but many of you obviously have not, and we wanted to give you a bit of a window into what that looks like. Daniel Dunn will also talk a little bit about some of the exciting product launches we have coming up as well and why he's excited about them from a sales perspective. We think that's a good way to kick it off, and then as Joe Mansueto said, we'll do a quick break and then go to the Q&A, which I know many of you like the most. With all of that said, let's dive right in. As I said, I'll start with kind of a quick update on Morningstar today, focus particularly on our product areas. I'm not gonna spend as much time today on the strategic priorities primarily because you're gonna see that the themes are very, very similar to what you've been hearing from us for the past couple of years. Rather than repeat those, I thought I would focus particularly on the product areas to give you a deeper sense of what's going on in that context. Everything at Morningstar starts with our mission of empowering investor success. We feel that if we do this well, it leads to all kinds of good things in our ecosystem, including financial success. Morningstar has a particularly trusted and unique place in the ecosystem, and we get called into meetings, we get called in for advice. Our products are relied on because people know we try to do things the right way and try to get good outcomes for them, and that creates immense power in the ecosystem that we're a part of. Of course, we also know that what we have to deliver needs to work for folks. It needs to really add value. Our strategy is to really deliver those insights and experiences that make us essential to the investor workflow. Often, if you talk to our clients, you'll hear that we're very sticky. We're core to what they're doing, and that's because we feel like we've become essential to the tasks, the activities, the investments that they're trying to make. We package all this together with unique research and IP. Earlier this month, we launched our new Medalist Ratings. For those of you who are unfamiliar, what we did is we took our analyst ratings, and we took our Quant Ratings, and we merged them into one combined rating. The beauty of it is that it covers a wider swath of investments than ever before. I've stood on stage before and predicted that the number of investments is gonna decline over time, and that has been wrong. It's gone the other way. We've really thought hard about how do you cover it, what do you do, and our new rating is a perfect example of how we've taken technology, machine learning, and married it with the insights of our analysts. It's something that really nobody else has the ability to do. Because we're able to do these types of things, we have a unique ecosystem. Those of you who have been coming know we like to talk about our clients, and we like to talk about the fact that Morningstar is unique in that we create a lot of pull demand in our ecosystem. Because individuals use us, because advisors use us, because asset managers use us, others wanna use us as well. It's a very complete cycle in that way, and it allows for folks to have a common language through which to talk about investments, through which to talk about portfolios, and increasingly to talk about things such as planning, retirement, and even the debt markets. We feel really good about how we've continued to grow in this way and expand the relationships, and that'll be a big part of what Danny will talk about later today. From an employee-based perspective, we're at about 12,000 employees and in about 32 countries. I wanna acknowledge that last year when I stood up here, we had not shared at that point that we were in the process of making a decision of exiting our support operations in China. We will have operations in China related to our local business that will continue, but our large center in China will be closing this summer. That was a very difficult, tough decision. We've had more than 1,000 colleagues there who've built their careers and contributed to this firm in a very terrific way. It's the kind of decision we've had to make as we think about our firm, where we're going, and the places that we think we can optimally serve our clients through going forward. I just wanted to acknowledge that because it has taken a lot of work on the part of our team here, and it's been a tough thing to execute, although we're almost at the end of it. We're also excited about our future because we believe, and the data supports the fact, that we are participating in large markets. Last year, this slide also said large and growing markets, you might have remembered, but obviously a couple of markets have shrunk. What's notable is that even in a few instances, such as the credit ratings industry, obviously taking a hit on the chin in the last year, or even the assets under management in managed accounts falling with the broader markets, the size of these markets still remains very large relative to the size of Morningstar. When we think about where we wanna be in the future and how we grow into these markets, our strategy is intended to serve those clients in more meaningful ways as our business grows and as we find more use cases through which we can support them. Every time I look at this, I feel very optimistic that if we execute our strategy, we have a long way, a long runway to go, to be successful, here at Morningstar. I personally also love looking at our data stats. I'm always very interested in what are we adding to our databases. In my view, and you saw this in the video at the start too, this is where it all begins. Honestly, every year when we go through our budgeting process, that's how I like to approach it. What's the data we wanna invest in this year? When we grow our databases, add IP on the databases, add research, add ratings, it really creates a wonderful ecosystem around which we can grow our business and serve investors. To give you a sense of how things have grown over time, I thought I'd actually highlight two databases this year, our ETF database and our private company database. If you just go back to 2018, the ETF database had about 15,000 ETFs at that time, with private companies, we had 900,000. Obviously, that has evolved and grown meaningfully over time to where things stand today. I also wanna point out that it's not just about the absolute number. Perhaps if you look at ETFs and where we started, we were 15,000 in 2018, and we're up now to about 24,000 ETFs. What's also remarkable is the breadth of data we're able to collect on each of those securities. When we look at databases, and sometimes people ask me, like, "Is data a commodity?" The answer I always give is, "It's not a commodity." The interesting thing about data is you can collect a lot of it, so you can go broad. You can go deep. The depth and the data points you have in the ETF universe is a perfect example that we've just kept adding data points. Then there's the quality and the timeliness of the databases. All of that matters, and all of that is central to how we think about adding value before we even start putting all that additional Morningstar IP on top of our databases. Some of you out there were asking me questions about AI and how we think about it. James Rhodes, our Chief Technology Officer and the Head of our enterprise business, and I often talk about the fact that one of our key advantages in the world that we're entering is that our data and research is not commoditized and has these unique features that actually make it perfect for a world where AI and machine learning and other new and interesting tools are coming to the fore. From a financial perspective, as we talked about, growth has certainly, you know, continued to be something we've delivered on. We don't just wanna deliver growth. We wanna deliver profitable long-term growth. Obviously, when I look at the operating income, that is something we're very focused on, and we wanna get back to growing our profitability, even if we're investing in the business along the way. This gives you a sense of maybe what Joe talked about as well, where the license-based parts of our business in particular continue to, you know, hold strongly. Sometimes I'm asked the question of, "Why do you have these mix of businesses?" It's because we think they have great long-term revenue profiles. I've been at Morningstar now long enough, in the industry long enough, to remember times when those models have been more successful, and I've been asked at this meeting why we don't do more of that and less of this. I think what we would always say is we think these are three great models to have for the long term, and if our beliefs changed in any capacity, we would de-emphasize them. We're happy with the mix, and it's allowed us, I think, to grow and add value to our business over time. I'd like to jump more specifically into our product areas and give you a little bit of an idea about what we're doing in our individual product areas and what's on our mind in that context. I'm excited because we have a lot of interesting things coming to market this year that we think will add even more value to what we provide today. Before I go there, though, just a reminder of how we try to think about our business, and we try to look at where we're investing and how we take capital from one area. We like to look at this grid. It's a very simple grid, but it gives you a very quick sense of which of our businesses are growing fastest, which are perhaps more challenged in any environment. Internally, we also use it as a way to ask questions around where do we take money from and fund other parts of the business? Where do we reinvest? It's a really good roadmap, particularly if you go back and look at it over time, which we like to do. PitchBook has continued to go from strength to strength, we continue to feel incredibly optimistic about the opportunity for PitchBook. I'll grant you that we do have some challenges, not least of which is the law of large numbers. When you're growing into bigger and bigger numbers, that does bring some new challenges. We think even so, we have plenty of the market still to get at, and this business is pointed towards growth. There's also just a reality that in the short term, the corporate market, which was a very fast, high-growing part of PitchBook, is challenged. All of you cover companies, you have insights into companies, and you know everyone's paring back spending on that front. Corporate development teams are doing less activity, and so you see a lot less enthusiasm from that part of the market. What should be exciting, though, is that the core VC/PE market is as robust as ever, and we are continuing to see a lot of demand from there, and we're adding even more tools and functionality. This year, we're integrating all the LCD capabilities into PitchBook. What we're finding is, A, that everyone had some type of reliance on LCD, but generally got the information from spreadsheets or some other such means. As we start to put it in one place, surface that data, marry it with all the other data we have in PitchBook, we're starting to get even more incremental demand and interest for that capability. We think given the growth of the private debt markets, it will become an important part of how PitchBook will continue to grow. We're very excited and bullish about our continued prospects at PitchBook. Also very excited about our license-based Morningstar-branded products, which continue to steadily produce growth and profitability. I particularly wanna draw your attention first to the data business because I highlighted that that's where it all starts. What's been interesting to me on the data side, in particular, is that we've had more new types of customers come to us than ever before. Connecting back to the question about technology, at many of your firms, I would imagine you've added teams of data scientists or folks who are starting to run larger databases than ever before for insights because the technology now exists to query and get insights from those databases. Those teams are buying our data, and they're buying it meaningfully, not just here, but also at PitchBook. That is something we are excited about and we continue to believe will provide growth for us. Morningstar Direct has had a whole new bunch of capabilities added to it during the recent period. In fact, as you know, there's been a lot of uncertainty and instability among the banking stocks. We added this new feature called Notebooks that allows our analysts to create these Notebooks, based on the Python language that basically anyone can query. We found a huge surge of usage of Direct during the banking crisis. People were trying to use one of the Notebooks that allowed them to query to find out what specific exposures existed to the regional banks, specifically Silicon Valley Bank when that was going down at that time. Lots of new functionality being added in that sense, lots of new data. Direct continues to be our favorite way of saying one price, you get all of the best of Morningstar in that location. We keep adding global capability to it as well. Advisor Workstation is already on many, many advisor desktops here in the United States in particular. It's very well penetrated. When we think about that, the strategy is less about how do we penetrate further. Instead, the strategy is how do we bring more to the desktops we already exist on. In particular, we've been focused on doing a few things. We've been building out our risk ecosystem, in particular, as we bring planning more centrally to Advisor Workstation. We're also doing a lot with third parties for the first time through the development of what we call an App Hub. It's still in the early days, but the model seems to be promising. What we can offer others is access to all these advisors whose desktops we already exist on. We feel really good and excited about what's happening here. I think, if you talk to users of these products, you'll find that they tend to be very embedded into their workflows. Morningstar Sustainalytics primarily comprises of two parts of the business, and we tried to break that down for you in the recent earnings report. There's a licensing part of the business, and then there's what's called a second-party opinion part of the business, which is more related to the issuance of green bonds. The latter has been challenged, just like anything these days in the credit markets where you've been reliant on issuance. Having said that, the former continues to see good and steady demand. Now, I know many of you wonder about the politicization of ESG and what it means. What I would say to you is we're focused on a couple of things that I think try to get us above that debate. First is we think that there's meaningful information associated with how you manage risk and return increasingly in a lot of the data that we're able to produce, we're finding more and more managers are using it for their own use cases. We, we find a lot of asset managers already are collecting certain data, they wanna buy our data, marry it together, and try to essentially build it into their models. That's a very important part of what we're seeing. We also see the trend towards regulation only accelerating, and that is also driving demand, particularly in Europe. That is a very different environment than what you have here, in the United States. Finally, we think the trend towards personalization is a positive one for ESG. I think what's important here is often when we talk about personalization, it's viewed through one lens, but the way I think about it is this data can be used by people who have any type of view, no matter how different they might be from their neighbor's view. Ultimately, that's what makes markets, and that's how we think about our ESG data, that you can use it in a way to build things. I'll also just acknowledge that this is a part of our business that we invested very heavily in. There were some unique things going on in the past 24 months. We felt a lot of competitive pressure to get our climate database together. We felt it was important to build out some capabilities that would support our index offering. We also were dealing with incredibly high turnover relative to what we're used to in this part of the business because it became so competitive for ESG talent. We were very, very aggressive in terms of hiring here. Some of our most significant investments on the compensation side have been to hire into this group. I will say, all things considered, if I look back on it, I probably would've turned off the spigot a little bit sooner than we did in retrospect. I think we're now at a spot where we have the right-sized business for the most part, and we are really focused on making sure we get the returns out of the climate database that is coming to market. Maybe, Danny, you'll touch on that a little bit as well. As I shift gears away from the licensing businesses into our AUM businesses, the first one I'd highlight is our wealth management business. Many of you have known this largely as our investment management business. As Daniel Needham presented last year, we've really taken steps to start to bring together our capabilities here. This is a multi-year journey that we're on, and one where I'll admit that we have decided to make some countercyclical investments relative to what one might expect. Usually, with an AUM business, we would be pulling back in a market where you're starting to see negative, you know, returns in bonds and stocks. We think the opportunity here is meaningful, and there's a few things that drove that investment decision. First, we think advisors want more comprehensive capabilities on one platform, and we have them, we just never put them together. Our research and our go-to-market strategy essentially is centered around that in the U.S. We are building that out, and we also have a very significant partnership with a firm called SMArtX to bring some of those capabilities to market. The second thing that I'd point out is, historically, when we had built an advisor platform in the U.S., we generally thought it was good to use it outside the U.S. as well. That was not a good strategy. Fundamentally, non-U.S. wealth platforms tend to be a little different for multiple reasons. A very simple one that I'll point out is the tax situation in each market is very different and brings some level of complexity to how you roll out a platform like that. So, we had decided that if an opportunity came about to make an inorganic investment outside the U.S. in a wealth platform, we would do that. So sometimes you can't decide on the timing of when something happens, the Praemium business decided to spin off its non-Australian assets last year. We knew the platform, we liked the platform, and we decided it was the right time to move. This business has received a fair amount of funding for us. I will admit it's countercyclical, but it comes with a belief that we're building something terrific here. We're also really excited about the team that came over and some of the early results that we're seeing on the international wealth platform are incredibly promising. you know, I look forward to what we're able to do here. We're very optimistic about it. There's Workplace Solutions, which is one of our steadiest businesses, but also one of Morningstar's most profitable businesses. It is a business which is focused here on the 401 market here in the U.S. It's not a business that we have taken outside the U.S. because we've really found that the opportunities here continue to be meaningful. In particular, there are some changes taking place in the U.S. market, where there's an increased focus on the small plan market and on the participation of advisors who often work with smaller companies to advise on their plans. Historically, those advisors have been less willing to work with a managed accounts provider. They've wanted to do their own thing. Increasingly, that is changing. One of the big opportunities we see in terms of expanding the scope of what we're doing here is working with advisors to expand their services and make them more competitive in this market, and it's a very, very big market. In particular, if you look at the U.S. small plan market, the types of offerings that are available to smaller plans are not as good as those that I would imagine many in this room are accustomed to. This is a terrific business for us and, you know, one that we think continues to have terrific prospects. Morningstar Indexes has continued to do terrifically despite market headwinds. If you're looking at a lot of our competitors', financials over the last year, this would suggest that something different is going on, and it is the case that this business continues to grow. It has grown manyfold in the last few years. What's interesting and exciting about it is this year, with the full integration of our calculation methodologies that we acquired in the Moorgate acquisition, we will become a full-service index provider. What that means is not only can we calculate our own indexes, but we can start providing services on a bespoke basis for those who wanna take advantage of it as well. Recently, Burton Taylor, just in the past month, published a new report that highlighted some key information about what's happening in the indexes business, and we are the fastest-growing index provider over the one and five years. We've kept that mantle. I know Gail on our board, whenever I share that stat, will say, "Yeah, but you're the smallest." Well, Gail, we're not the smallest. What I would actually note is, there are a number of competitors in that space, small and large, and we are outpacing all of them at this stage, and I believe the momentum here will continue, particularly because we are starting to win in places, such as ESG, as we bring more capabilities to the market there. Very bullish on what Ron and team are doing here. Finally, as we switch to the transactional side, obviously not a terrific story on DBRS Morningstar in the near term. It's been obviously very interesting to watch and be a part of this because I can tell you that all the way up through August of last year, we couldn't do enough business to keep up with what was going on. Just like that, the markets turned, and we've entered a phase where there just hasn't been much issuance. It looked like in March things were gonna start stabilizing, then you had certainly the Silicon Valley Bank episode and the continuing and ongoing instability in the banking sector, which continues to sort of impact what's happening on the issuance side. We think this is a great business for the long run. We think it can continue to grow for Morningstar, and we are focused on doing a few things. One is preserving our franchise in Canada. We have an amazing franchise in Canada. We're the market leader there, and we continue to do terrifically in that market. Outside Canada, we're really focused on the middle market and the private markets as meaningful ways to grow in this business. We have a terrific team. We've also made some strategic hires along the way, even as the markets have been against us, because we know when things turn around, we'll have the right teams in place to do that. Certainly, some near-term pain, but we're trying to manage this business with an eye towards keeping it, you know, relatively profitable and self-sufficient, even in an environment where the top line, you know, might be challenged a little bit. Hopefully that gives you a good sense of what's going on across each of our businesses and why we're excited about them. I tie it back to the fact, ultimately, that we have a lot of good capabilities that we can bring to the market. We are often invited in because people want us to win. Even I can tell you in this space, I'm sure if I did a poll here and said, "How many of you like the legacy three providers?" Very few hands would be going up. Sometimes it's just a question of, like, fighting that inertia and staying with it to prove to people that you have the staying power and the willingness to be a part of this market for them to ultimately come around your way. I'm going to wrap up here and hand it over to Jason in a minute. As a reminder, all of that is guided by our strategic priorities, which fall across 4 areas. Talent is the lifeblood of Morningstar. It's going to be obviously something Marie will be focused on. from the very first day I became CEO to today, when people ask me the question, "What keeps you up at night?" I always say it's the next person we hire at Morningstar, and it's because we wanna make sure that the next person who works in feels as strongly about winning, as strongly about producing and contributing to our culture, and as strongly about supporting our mission. Very competitive, I can't say enough how important our talent is when it comes to creating something special here. Scale, also incredibly important. You're gonna hear from Danny in particular about how we've created scale in sales and how we're doing it in marketing. We have more work to do there to kinda keep up with the size of organization we've become to really fully appreciate the benefits we can realize here. Sustainability is something we think we can make a lot of money at. That's why we're in that part of the business. I will fully acknowledge that different people have different views, but we're happy to sell to all comers with all views, and I think this data in time will just become so heavily integrated into workflows that maybe we won't be talking about it as separately as we do today. It comes back to our long-term thesis that public and private market investors will continue to come closer together over time, and that it's important to us to have the capabilities to be at the forefront of that development. That's what's going on at a high level at Morningstar. We're busy, we're investing, I acknowledge that we definitely need to make it clear to you that we're gonna earn a great return on the investments that we're making. I can tell you that I, Jason, and others, we get up and we are thinking about that all the time. I'll be back during Q&A, but I'm gonna turn it over to Jason now, and I can just tell you that, you know, Jason has been a terrific partner, and we're, we've been doing this together now for many years and I think we've got a good cadence and hopefully you'll see in this presentation in particular how we're starting to think about profitability and the road ahead for Morningstar from a financial perspective. Jason, thank you and over to you. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Kunal, and welcome everyone. It's good to be here with you today and see a lot of familiar faces in the crowd and outside. It's an important day for us. We value the feedback; we appreciate the engagement and look forward to some good interactive dialogue today. I'm gonna spend some time on a few topics today. First, I'll be covering our financial performance. As Kunal mentioned, dig a bit deeper into margin trends in the business and levels of investments. Importantly, we'll close with some thoughts on balance sheet and capital allocation. Maybe to start and reemphasize that myself and Kunal and the management team, we are very focused on making sure the business returns to a path to long-term sustainable growth. That means that revenue growth comes with margin accretion, comes with increased cash flow over time to create value. We've got an incredible set of products here and IP and capabilities at Morningstar. We've got, as Kunal showed, significant and growing client base. We've got large and growing addressable markets, got a great culture and great people. All of that create the ingredients for success, but that alone isn't gonna do it. Gotta make sure that we continue to execute our strategy across our product areas, realize the returns and the significant investments we've made in the business, particularly in the last couple years, and importantly, control cost and drive efficiencies in the business so we can get that operating leverage up, which we know our operating models can deliver over time. I'll be spending some more time on this throughout the presentation. Let me start first with a look back to 2022, and by all measures, last year was a mixed year. We started the year with pretty good performance, markets going in our direction, but quickly that changed in the second quarter into the back half of last year. We saw market headwinds, we saw credit issuance decline, certainly impacted results. Despite the fact that revenue was up 10.1%, it was up close to 11% organically, reached close to $1.9 billion, getting close to that $2 billion milestone we talked about last year. Our adjusted operating income was down and our margins were down last year, largely due to a lot of the investments we've made in the business, increases in headcount across the business, but also because of the headwinds and the cyclical headwinds we faced, particularly in the back half of the year. Also, free cash flow was down pretty significantly. As we noted last year, beginning in the first quarter, we had larger bonus payments in 2022 related to 2021 performance. That depressed cash flow, along with the fact that our adjusted operating income and cash margins were down as well. I talked about the year being mixed, and it was really a tale of two halves if you look about the performance of our across the performance of our areas by revenue type throughout the year. Our license-based areas held up really strong throughout the year at 18% growth. What's interesting in the fourth quarter, it's a bit of an anomaly that we've corrected for going forward in that Sustainalytics historically included both the transactional areas like SPOs as well as the license-based areas. That's combined in Q4. If we eliminated that, performance would have been much more significant given the declines in SPOs. License-based business is again holding up really well. You can see last year, more of the pronounced change that we saw in our asset-based areas as well as transaction-based areas, given the market headwinds we saw, as well as the lack of credit issuance in the back half of the year. Both investment management and Workplace were down significantly back in Q3 and Q4, and DBRS Morningstar was down significantly in Q3 and Q4, again on the back of soft issuance, but record issuance in the fourth quarter of 2021. I think if you've seen our first quarter results, some of the trends that we saw in the back half of last year have largely persisted into 2023. Here we've done a couple things. If you look at the left-hand side of the page, we're looking at organic revenue growth for the second half of last year. That's the third quarter and the fourth quarter combined, compared to what we saw in the first quarter of 2023. Largely, trends have maintained. If you look at our license-based areas, which is probably on the top side of the page, see Morningstar Sustainalytics, and this is the license-based part of the business, up close to 40% in the first quarter. PitchBook at 25%, Direct Data strong, close to double-digit growth, strong growth in Advisor Workstation, as Kunal mentioned, our Indexes business continues to hold up relatively well given strong flows into our investable product and strong license data usage. Importantly, you can see the clear demarcation as we get to the bottom of the page in that areas that are more prone to cyclical headwinds, like Workplace, Investment Management, Sustainalytics, the transaction-based area of Sustainalytics, and DBRS Morningstar, down in the first quarter. In Workplace and Investment Management, despite the fact that markets have risen year to date, we're still looking at year-over-year declines in AUM and assets under advisement in both of these areas. Kunal Kapoor mentioned the second party of business of Sustainalytics is under pressure given the lack of green bond issuance, we know the story with DBRS Morningstar, particularly in the US CMBS markets and some of the volatility that we saw in global markets due to the banking crisis. Overall, that composition led to about 5% top-line growth in the first quarter and about 3% organic growth in the first quarter of 2023. We saw about $22 million increase in revenue, about $12 million increase of organic revenue in the first quarter. If you look at some of the more cyclical areas of the business that I mentioned, those provided about a $30 million revenue headwind altogether in the first quarter of this year. If you look at our adjusted operating income, that was also down by about $30 million in the first quarter. While not a perfect correlation, those areas had a much more outsized impact on the margin decline in the business in the first quarter of 2023. I'd note that free cash flow was relatively consistent year-over-year, although bonus payments were down relative to what we had in the prior year. We did see, again, a decline in adjusted operating income and the cash earnings, which had an impact on that. I'll tell you that cash flow is generally the lowest in the first quarter, just given the outflows that we have in compensation. Let me pivot to a more direct discussion on margins, both where we are and where we think we can head. If you look at the chart over the past five years, it's clear that our adjusted operating margins and our operating margins have been a bit lumpy. Despite the fact that we've had some cyclical highs, we've certainly seen the decline over the past couple years, primarily due to a lot of the investments that we put in the business. In 2020, we saw margins increase coming out of the pandemic as we had really strong top-line performance in the back half of the year and much more significant cost control given the uncertainty that we had in the market environment. In 2021, we accelerated the pace of investment back into the business. We saw north of 18% organic growth in 2021, but investments we made, particularly behind Sustainalytics and ESG, had a negative impact on margin. We know the story with 2022. We've been talking about it here; I won't get into that in as much detail. I would acknowledge that it's the head, you know, compensation costs are the largest component of increases last year as we increased headcount. Also you recall, we mentioned in the first quarter of last year, we put more dollars into our compensation pool given the significant attrition that we were facing in the competitive market environment for talent that we saw. We look at it by business area in 2022, four areas provided the most significant headwinds to our margins. It's Sustainalytics due to market headwinds and the investments that we made. It's in wealth due to the same factors, and then DBRS Morningstar and workplace. While some of our areas were up, those four had the most pronounced impact on margin decline in 2022. If we look into margins further and where we are today, first I would highlight that in the past and what we've done in some of the 8-K questions that we've answered is we provided some directional views on where margins are in the business. As you know, we report in one reportable segment. We consolidate everything and report as a whole. We do have a lot of shared costs across the business, and we do some directional analysis internally and for you to get a sense of where margins are in some of these product areas. It's not a perfect sci-science, so we talk about the directional view of where margins are and where we're headed, and we hope that's been useful to you as we reported in our 8-K and as I'll share some information here today. This is a chart that we've shared in the past. What this does is it takes our revenue by type, and it says, well, if we aggregate those areas, approximately where do those sit related to our corporate average margin? For license-based areas right now, they represent in 2022 about 70% of our overall revenue. If we look at the products that sit within this area and aggregate those with certain cost allocations assumptions, in aggregate, our license-based products sit above our corporate average for Morningstar. Even within this group, there are differences. Sustainalytics is our lowest margin in this area. I would tell you that, as I mentioned before, while some areas have been declining in margin, given some of the market pressures we faced, areas like PitchBook, data, and Direct are on strong progressions relative to where we were in 2021. Our asset-based and transaction-based areas, they both represent about 14%-15% of our business last year. Both of those areas in 2022 in aggregate sat below our corporate average at Morningstar. I'd echo Kunal's sentiments that these areas tend to be a bit more cyclical, but they have very good long-term prospects and serve an important part in our portfolio, given the large addressable markets, the potential growth, and the profit pools that we have to go after. I know we're talking a lot about cyclical declines, but if you've seen in the past when markets are in our favor and when we're executing, these areas often provide a significant top-line lift and profit lift as we progress. I think as we're all aware in various cycles, often the next peak is higher than the last, and we're really confident in our ability to perform in these areas and the purpose of these areas in our portfolio to create value over the long term. That value creation over the long term is gonna come from the realization of the significant investments that we've made in the business over the past couple years. I know we talk a lot about it. What I'm trying to articulate here is give you a sense directionally of where those have been. If you look at our headcount growth over the last 2 years, back in 2021 and 2022, the majority of the headcount growth at Morningstar has come in these 5 areas. It's PitchBook, it's Sustainalytics, it's in Wealth, which is primarily investment management, it's in DBRS Morningstar, and it's in Indexes. That comes along with more of the more prominent and significant organic investment that we've had in the business, which we're defining here primarily salary expense growth and some of the ancillary project and program costs to drive key initiatives. I've also looked at the return horizon and the addressable market size that we had in the prior slide. Let me cover a few of these for you. PitchBook's a good example. Invested north of $40 million organically over the past couple years. That's in terms of building new capabilities and product development in sales, marketing, customer success, but also now investing organically behind the LCD acquisition to drive growth. The return horizon for PitchBook products are pretty short. You know, we're able to commercialize opportunities pretty quickly after we invest in the platform and drive customer acquisition and retention. Morningstar Sustainalytics investing heavily in infrastructure to drive growth and scale, but also in sales and product development and support and in unique data sets and capabilities, primarily in accelerating our data sets in climate and impact, which we're first starting to bring to market here in the second quarter and back half of this year. Morningstar Wealth, building out investment platforms internationally and in the U.S. with expansion of our TAMP and adding direct indexing capabilities. Feel really good about this over the long term, but the return horizons in wealth are a little unique in that takes time to build platforms and drive assets to those platforms and drive AUM up and have the resulting revenue from that. The return horizons in wealth are gonna be a little bit longer term. Doesn't change our view that we can earn a nice return and create value here. It's just a little bit longer-term horizon just given the cycles of wealth management. DBRS Morningstar, we've added capabilities in India to increase our analytical resources to gain leverage and scale globally, and importantly, invest in corporate staff and opportunities to go after the corporate and middle market franchises here in the U.S. as well as in EMEA. Indexes all about driving scale globally, building our calculation engine so we can leverage our internal capabilities to drive growth in the future. Again, heavy investment over the past couple years, incredibly confident that these are the right bets to make and are gonna create value over the long term. I think that confidence comes if we look at decisions that we've made in the past, and this shows you our rate of revenue growth over the past 15 years. If we look at those in chunks of five years from 2007 to 2012, we had roughly a 9% CAGR revenue. About 7% from 2012 to 2017. We're all aware, and you can see the step function change in top-line growth that we saw from 2017 to 2022 because we were in tune to the markets, because we were making the right bets where we saw profit pools and where we saw cyclical trends going. We firmly believe that we're in the right direction, not just because of the revenue growth, but because we have a significant amount of opportunity to realize return from these investments and now grow margin in measurement of in accordance with revenue growth over time. That margin improvement's not just gonna come from the top line. It's gotta come from our ability to manage and control costs in the business. If you look at our cost composition in 2022, roughly two-thirds, not surprising, of the overall cost here at Morningstar are people-related. It's compensation and it's benefits, so 68%. The biggest lever we have going forward to control costs and get leverage are slowing the rate of headcount growth across the organization. We admit we've hired significantly over the past couple years, all for the right reasons, all to develop capabilities to drive growth. We believe we have what we need largely going forward, and that you'll start to see the rate of growth slow down, you know, considerably, not only because of the market environment, but because we wanna get leverage out of the costs that we put into the business to make sure, you know, we can drive margin improvement. You've seen the headcount chart, and year-over-year, the more significant costs that we've had have been in compensation growth. That's because it's averaged north of 20% headcount growth year-over-year. That curve, and that will start to change, and that growth rate will start to change as we head into the back half of the year, particularly as you see the rate of sequential growth is slowing down, and it was 1.5% in the first quarter of last year. Some of that was due to the headcount we've added as a result of leaving China and some of the duplication that we have across the business. Headcount growth slowing alone isn't gonna cover that. We have to make sure that we're continuing to leverage other fixed costs and infrastructure investments that we made in the business, in the data that we've purchased and the systems that we operate, driving efficiencies through AI and automation, the software that we develop, and our cloud spend. We're incredibly focused on that, not just because we're conscious of the current environment, but these are the other areas that we're gonna get leverage in overtime as we grow our business and get to $2 billion and beyond. We've got a lot of confidence in our ability to drive profitability over time, and I talked about that more at a high level over the course of the presentation. Let me get back down to our business areas. We looked at our product and business areas, again, a directional analysis based on where we are today and where we think we can go. If we look at the right-hand side of the page, this is where we see the bigger opportunities in our portfolio. It's in DBRS Morningstar, it's in Wealth, it's in Sustainalytics, and it's in Indexes. Strong opportunities still exist with our Morningstar-branded license-based products in PitchBook, and Workplace a little bit more limited given the significant profit that that business creates today. Overall, we've got a lot of confidence here, and why do we? I think first and foremost, it's because we believe we're making the right strategic decisions. Secondly, myself, Kunal, the management team, we've got plans to execute against this. We know how these business models operate. We have them within Morningstar, so we can compare to where we are against our other businesses and know there's inherent operating leverage in how those businesses operate within Morningstar. We see that operating leverage when we look at peers, and we could always discount that because peer comparisons are not always perfect, but we know in some of these areas that that runway exists because of the comparisons not only we do externally, but what we do externally. Really important, but we've got a lot of confidence, not just from a top-down standpoint, from our bottoms-up build and where we can continue to drive growth and profitability in these businesses over time. The growth and profitability and the growth in revenue is important, but to create value, we need to make sure we're being good stewards of capital and allocating that capital in prudent ways over time. You know, in the past, we've had a pretty balanced approach to capital allocation. Last year, we've had a bit of a step function change, one, in that we accelerated share repurchase. Also in that we invested significantly inorganically behind LCD and our U.K. Praemium acquisition. That's increased our debt balance from roughly $350 million to $1.1 billion. If we look at capital allocation going forward, we wanna continue to take a balanced approach. One, to make sure we're supporting the current business that we have and organic investments. We'll still be opportunistic inorganically, you'll likely not see the size of transactions that we've had historically given the debt balance. Also make sure that we're being responsive in returning cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchase. The other thing that we're focused on is reducing the debt balance with excess cash. As interest rates have gone up and our debt balance is high, even though we still have roughly 2.5 times leverage and have capacity in our balance sheet, we wanna see this debt balance go down over time, and we've got the ability to do that just given the structure of our debt portfolio and our ability to prepay our term loan. Those investments we've made, particularly in acquisitions last year, have certainly depressed our ROIC. This is the lowest level that we've had over the past five years at 9%. Still a bit above our cost of capital, but not where we want it to be. Just to give you some context, the acquisition of LCD alone in the short term has pressured that by about 200 basis points. Some of the declines in operating income and the resulting impact on NOPAT have had the other, you know, the other factors in driving it below 13.5% that we saw last year. Again, we're gonna be measured by the fact that we can drive returns in the business and see this increase over time. Along with the flow-through of those returns into our stock price. We're not happy where the stock price has been. It's certainly been under pressure over the past years. In years past, this has been a better chart to show, not only in how we have performed against our peers, but also against the broader market. Over the past year, we've clearly underperformed. Underperformed our peer group, underperformed the market, and that's impacted short-term returns for many of you, as well as long-term returns for many of you long-term and longstanding shareholders. Not happy with this chart, and our commitment is to continue to do things in our control to improve the financial profile of the business going forward to drive the stock price higher. I'll tell you that a significant component, 75% of my stock-based compensation, Kunal, our management team, is based on TSR performance. I can assure you that there's alignment in our drive to do this, not only to create value for shareholders, but to create value for ourselves in the equity component that drives our financial compensation. Finally, I'll close where we started, in that we've got a great recipe for success here at Morningstar. I think Kunal mentioned when I started, I've been here for six years. I think this is my sixth shareholder meeting, so that's probably light in terms of Morningstar standards. I think Danny beats me by about six months here. If I go back to my initial presentation when I started here about six years ago, I talked about financial success, and that's a core value here at Morningstar. I think the way I defined it then is consistent the way that I would define it now, in that if we hold true to our mission in empowering investor success and bring great products and capabilities to market with that in focus, then that's gonna accrue to the financial benefit of the company, which is gonna accrue to value creation for all of you. I can tell you we're committed to returning to a path toward long-term sustainable growth, we still have significant opportunity to create value in this business over the long term. Appreciate you being here, appreciate your support, I'm gonna introduce Danny Dunn, my partner for the last six years up here, I can tell you that the transformation of our sales team and sales process over the last six years have been extraordinary, Danny and his team deserve a lot of credit for the success that you see up here. I'm excited for what he's gonna share and look forward to Q&A coming up. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thanks. Okay, are we live? Can you hear me okay? Okay, great. Welcome, good morning. Great to see you all here. For those on the live stream, welcome. Really appreciate your time. Daniel Dunn, Chief Revenue Officer for Morningstar. Look, a little bit of a different presentation this morning, it's really in response to questions we've gotten from you, our shareholders, which is Morningstar as you've grown and your portfolio of capabilities has expanded, how does this come together in front of the client? Specific questions around sales motions, marketing, segments we cover. We thought it'd be a good idea to get a presentation in front of you, to share a little bit about what's going on today across our segments, across our product portfolio, and then specifically how we think about organizing marketing and sales and how we're deploying that globally. I can also give you a little bit of a snapshot. Oh, I didn't give you my opening slide. We'll give you a snapshot of how we're thinking about this as we move towards the future. Before we get into this though, I wanted to share a story, and it seems like this, five, six-year theme is consistent here. January, I passed my six-year anniversary, which was really an awesome milestone for me, and it's been a great run here with this awesome firm. I was on this very stage somewhere about a year ago, in my first town hall. I had this group, and as you expect at the end of a town hall, there was a Q&A session. One of the folks raised their hand, and he said, "You know, Danny, why Morningstar? You know, why'd you leave your career at my former employer? Why did you come to Morningstar?" Through the lens of a commercial leader, I said, "Look, there are four things, and I reflect on these four things every quarter, every year. Those four things, in no particular order, were products and IP, a leading capability, a leading portfolio of capabilities, incredible products, long runway. I also used the word IP, and you've heard this again and again, whether it's our data, our research, our calculation engines, our design elements, we have an arsenal of capabilities that we continue to be able to innovate for our clients. That was really interesting to me. Second thing was our brand, a powerful global brand. As I've learned more about this brand, it's just not a commercial brand. This is a brand that is attached to mission, and what that mission and brand together have done is given us the North Star in industry and trust with our clients. It's a very different proposition than other parts of my career. Third was people and culture. Incredibly talented people, I mean, really smart people throughout this organization. What I thought was different was that this too is about mission and how the mission inspires and drives work in the company. We see this as we grow people internally, we see people attach to this mission as we recruit from the outside. Then the fourth aspect is our clients, and this is closest to my heart. From the largest financial services clients globally to two- and three-person RIAs or IFAs, large broker-dealers, individual investors investing on the street, an incredible client base with a long runway. What's more important than that client base for me is the way we work with those clients. It's different than any other part of my career, and it's the title of this session here, which is growing with clients. Just last week, I had multiple clients in the office, and as we sit around the boardroom on the eighth floor, we are partnering and we are co-creating. We are growing together. It is a really important part of our value proposition. It ties back to this promise of our brand and our trust. They want to work with us. They want to partner with us. This is really powerful for me and for our teams. If I reflect on this six years later, I feel completely confident in those four aspects. In fact, each of those has gotten stronger for me and our commercial teams. That is what this is about. I'll tell you, evidence to that too for me is that while we grow our talent internally here, as we recruit for certain specialized skills from the market, from the ecosystem, and even from my competitors, they attach to that mission, right? Products, IP, long runway, and ability to co-create and grow with clients. That's what we're doing. We'll get into it, and we'll talk about segments and audiences, but I wanna kinda start at a macro level. This is where we've been known best, right? Retail investing, a global market leader in retail investing. It's not just that we serve each of these. There's a bigger story here. All of the top asset managers globally are our clients in deep relationships. Intermediaries, as we think about brokers, wirehouses, IFAs, roll-up RIAs, online brokerages, we have a really strong presence there. As we think all the way down to the individual investor that we're able to touch through our products like Morningstar.com and as well as through extensions of these other capabilities. It's not just that we serve each of these segments. It's that Morningstar sits at the center of the value chain and our ability to connect experiences, data, and insights across this value chain. It's a very powerful business model. On top of that, my little dotted line here, I can complicate slides, but the dotted line here is actually that Morningstar is an ecosystem play too, and I think that's important for you to know. That while we drive a sell to motion partnering with our clients, we also have a sell through channels business that is a critical part of our growth. This is Morningstar under the covers, right? This is Morningstar inside, powered by Morningstar. These are fintechs. These are other financial platforms. These are even big tech platforms. If you look at large global, the leading search engines globally, and you get into their financial services areas, their market areas, powered by Morningstar. This tells us that outside of our own branded capabilities, we see and we systematically evaluate opportunities to monetize new channels that might be reaching audiences that Morningstar wouldn't otherwise access. This is a big part of our growth strategy, our ecosystem. You'll be hearing more about that. What I'd say here too is that we differentiate with our IP, we differentiate with our brand and our trust and our ability to deliver, and you see that in our renewal rates. If the left side of this slide for me is established and growing, the right side of this slide for me is a broader macro-opportunity, which is institutional investing. This is an emerging opportunity. Kunal would tell me not every one of our segments in this space is emerging as we look at the private markets where we're quickly becoming a leader. What we see here is that through our own growth, both organically and inorganically, we've made inroads into this space, Morningstar Indexes, PitchBook, Sustainalytics, and other parts of data and research. This is a really important opportunity for us. We've assembled a really capable team to help us think about building this strategy for the future, both accelerating within these product areas and how Morningstar can truly be at the center of this ecosystem as well. We get pretty excited about this. I'm going to unpack it a little bit, and let's just talk about some of the details of the segments. You know them well. They were on Kunal's slides. I won't spend a ton of time. Asset Management, Wealth, our advisors, retirement providers and plans, really an important opportunity for us in the U.S., really as one of the leading robos within a plan, a really impressive capability, and of course, individual investors. As we think about our expansion into other segments, what we've been able to do through PitchBook and private equity and bringing other capabilities there, asset owners, debt issuers, capital markets, corporates and others. What I tell you is that, you know, Kunal shared attractive addressable markets in large categories, financial analytics, sustainable investing, indexing, et cetera. Very true. What we also see here is we're growing the number of segments we can serve. This is really powerful. It's not just about growing segments this way, it's our ability to serve audiences within these segments. If I even took the top left, and I think, Kunal made some comments on this, you know, the question is our asset management opportunity growing? The answer is yes. The answer is yes. We've been strong in this market with marketing and product teams providing analytics and competitive analytics using products like Direct, Data and others. We've been able to grow out of here into other key audiences. Sales and distribution powering our asset management sales forces and business development teams with analytics to make a more personalized impact with their clients. Really strong growth capabilities in reporting in other areas. As I think about portfolio managers and PMs, with our research, with Sustainalytics and other capabilities serving them, ETF PMs working with indexes on product creation. We're accessing new buyers. Chief technology officers, chief digital officers want to engage with us on digital transformations, whether those are internal or those are external-facing projects, Morningstar inside the ability to co-create and help those experiences. Regulatory and compliance continues to be a global opportunity for us. Again, the data scientists that Kunal mentioned, our oceans of data being able to go and co-create with them really interesting use cases. That's our data story. Even within these segments, our ability to serve new audiences with new capabilities has really been exciting. It's from the capabilities that we've built. It's from the capabilities we've acquired and how we've brought them together. You know us so well for our ability to do data, research, ratings and analytics. Really strong capabilities. I think you heard evidence of our investment going into these areas. We continue to grow here. There's categorically important areas of growth here in ESG, bringing together Sustainalytics and Morningstar and how we're able to serve those different segments. Indexes, I love to think of it as the startup within, and what we've been able to do with our team and drive both the investable product and the benchmarking data business, and of course, credit ratings. While we spend a lot of time talking about issuance, Sean O'Connor, our head of business development there, he's excited about the really strong year-over-year growth in the nascent but growing data business. We feel confident in the ability to bring this into our data motion. Really important stuff. Of course, we talk about wealth platform, technology-enabled investment management across wealth platform, our retirement platform, and being able to take our investment management and bring it through those platforms. It's a really important value proposition. Last thing I'd say about the capabilities is there's a really important aspect of reuse within this portfolio that allows us to unlock value for clients. The best examples I would, you know, top of mind, I go, a great public equity dataset. How else can we monetize it? What can we do with it? PitchBook needs it to go compete in their market. Public-private comps, it's been a great driver for PitchBook and competitive displacements and new acquisition. If you look at Sustainalytics, itself is a key product, but its ability to fuel other parts of our products to access new users, whether it's in Direct, fund data feeds, right? In indexes where we can unlock a ton of value. This is exciting. Jason will talk about our revenue types, you know, our revenue models. I look at these through the lens of license-based businesses, insight-as-a-service, decision support, 70% of our business, recurring revenue, strong. Asset-based, those same research and insights, do it for me. Manage the money for me across wealth, retirement and indexes. Of course, our transaction-based, largely our ratings businesses. There's an internal component to this too that I think is timely, which is that from a go-to-market perspective, we see operating efficiencies across these revenue models. We know how to run as-a-service businesses, data, software, research-as-a-service. Examples of how we can scale here is, yes, we're talking about LCD coming into PitchBook and how that will so nicely fit within the product and their ability to innovate. I would say just as impressive will be the degree to which that engine can immediately put that to work from a marketing and sales perspective. I look at Sustainalytics coming on board, at least the licensed part of that business, the ability to sunset, retire CRM, bring them onto our sales motion, into our coverage model, and go get after opportunities. There's really good, important internal efficiencies across these different revenue models as well. A little bit in terms of, like, how do we work with clients. I wanna talk about marketing, and I wanna talk about sales. I would start the marketing chapter. If you haven't met Steve Bent, he's row two, seat six. You should get to know him. He came over from PitchBook in, I think it was May or April of last year, to be Morningstar's chief marketing officer. Now I'm biased. I'd say he's probably one of the strongest fintech marketers in industry. What he's done as the head of marketing in PitchBook, we now have him partnered with an awesome team he's built and grown here to help us really bring this to the next level. What I'd say about Steve and his team, lots of great experience across the board in integrated marketing. Steve is a revenue-focused marketer, right? He is my partner. This is a really exciting time. Let's talk quickly about how we do this. Like anything in a company with multiple capabilities, we do have like really rigorous discussions about centralized versus decentralized capabilities. In marketing, we manage centrally for a couple reasons. Specialized expertise and centers of excellence. We manage for standardization, we manage for scale, and we manage for cost. As would make sense here is brand stretches across the company, a really, really important part of our business, protecting and growing that brand. Portfolio marketing, as I talked about all those segments, Dr. Jill Axline, who's also here in the second row, her job is to make sure those capabilities come together in each of those segments. It's a really important area of our business as we've grown. Then you see on the other side of the chart, this is where we're really managing for scale and efficiencies, driving to single tech stacks, our marketing technology, as well as our web presence and how we're gonna approach that, which we'll talk more about. Then we think about product area marketing, which is decentral. This is about getting marketing closer to the products and closer to the customers. This is a really important discipline we've been building. They focus on segmentation, ideal customer, ideal customer profile. They're thinking about our value proposition, our competitive positioning, and then most important from my perspective, what they are doing is they are activating campaigns to go drive revenue. What we talk about, particularly on the brand and portfolio narratives, as well as the work happening in the product areas, is laddering up and laddering down. What I mean by that is the assets and the messages that we create at the brand level can connect down and soften the beaches for the other capabilities. As I look at, laddering up, as we enter maybe with a specific offering, that needs to connect up to our specific brand promises. Maybe I should bring this to a real example 'cause it's probably more tangible. As we think about extending the Morningstar brand over the ESG category, it starts with corporate brand marketing. There's an example flowing through here of some of the efforts those teams have done. They're building the narratives, they're building the assets, and they're doing broad awareness to drive engagement. It's about going lower in the funnel and thinking about how to partner with the product areas. This is about reuse, and this is where we see that the, you know, the IP, the narratives, and the assets, and there are a couple examples here of how it filters into Morningstar Indexes, data and Direct, and then there's an example on the other side of the screen which speaks to an integrated regulatory solution in ESG in Europe. Again, this is about building that at the top and then bringing it down into the product areas where we can go execute for revenue. This is what the team knows how to do well. On the sales coverage, I'm going to simplify our sales coverage and really talk in 2 primary ways we organize our coverage model. On the left side of this screen, it's what we refer to as integrated coverage, right? These are clients that are taking multiple products from Morningstar in certain segments. In these segments, we lead this with an account executive supported by different specialists. The idea is to grow strategically with integrated coverage, coordinated coverage in key clients. The other side of this slide speaks to what I would call specialized sales coverage. It could be single product, it can be small and mid-size business, SMB, new logo accounts. This isn't to say that a single product client is a small client. In fact, we have certain segments where a client might just do one thing with Morningstar, and it's quite a big relationship. It's also, this is where we think about new logo activation and our small and mid-size clients. This is where we go with specialization-based coverage. There isn't a need to have integrated coverage, and this is true of many big tech companies. This is how they do it. What's really important to us here is that this isn't a static model. We are trying to take clients from the right side of that slide and move them to the left side of the slide. Getting a little backwards there, folks. This is key. We have a set formulaic set of criteria that looks at a client's size, their growth, the number of products they're taking, and as we grow with them, we see opportunities to move them into integrated coverage to unlock further value in the portfolio. One of my favorite examples of this is a bet we placed 3 years ago with a client that is 3 blocks down this street, and it was a single-product client. Through acquisition, now they were a two-product client. We looked at their strategy. They were growing, they were acquiring, they're in investment banking, they're in investment management, they're in wealth management. We took a bet on them in our coverage model analytics. We push them up into integrated coverage to drive more strategic engagement, and we're seeing outpaced growth in that client. That is at a high level how the model works. I wanna bring it to life with a real example. I didn't have permission to give you to get the logo on this, but this is a U.S.-based financial services sector, and this is the actual team covering it. This is in our integrated coverage. You have an AE, Lisa Antonio, 20-year veteran at the company and been with this client for a long time. Her job in this coverage model is to grow strategically with this client. Account planning integrated across the different business areas, right? Driving opportunity identification, driving relationship expansion, and key to cross-selling. This is not a reporting structure. She is actually the source of integration. She carries the number for the entire client. Her job is total client growth, and she should drive and support these teams. These teams can work directly with the client, right? This is not a bottlenecking model. I've worked in this model my entire life in sales, and we've been refining it. Just in time, different specialists can come and engage and unlock very specific value with very specific audiences. What I like to see about this model, this client in particular, I have many examples like this. This is a 2017 to 2022 compare of what we've been able to do in this client. It's 26, it's actually closer to 27% CAGR growth in this client. When I say Morningstar at the center of a value chain, Morningstar can be at the center of our clients. You know, if you look to the right, this isn't just a story about acquired growth. This is not a story about just acquired growth. If you look at indexes, start up within. It's a $0 client in 2017. It's a $2 million client in 2022 and growing nicely. We've just gotten started. Data direct and reporting, core franchises, core branded products, a nice 10% CAGR within this client as we've grown, as they've grown. Really solid work. PitchBook, 5x growth from what was about a $300,000 footprint, about 5x growth five years later. I'll even call out our marketing solutions, audience and advertising. This was a $1.3 million revenue account in 2017. At the end of 2022, this was a $4.3 million account. This is how we can be at the center of a client, unlock capabilities across our portfolio, and drive value. Then on the single product example, I thought would be interesting is, you know, yes, strategic accounts and growing with them is absolutely critical, but bringing new clients into our front door is critical. New logo acquisition. I will tell you, the machine that PitchBook has built is absolutely awesome. I would stand it up against any SaaS-based company on the West Coast, and I'd say it's a top-performing go-to-market model. What's been great is with Steve, Nicolette Konkol, and our demand gen in Morningstar, we've been able to take those capabilities and apply them to appropriate businesses in the rest of the portfolio. This gives you an idea of that motion, right? Demand gen with different tactics in a campaign, engaging with clients based on lead scoring. As they mature into a lead, Claire is going to engage with that lead. First, she's gonna make sure it's not Mickey Mouse. She's gonna make sure it's a actual person. She's gonna have information in terms of what they've interacted with to help her ask the right questions. She's gonna confirm that lead, qualify that lead, and then she's gonna pass it on to her teammate, Leo, who is now going to bring PitchBook alive, right? He's going to demo that product, show the capabilities that are in that product based on that specific user need, and he's going to close business, and then full life cycle, it'll enter into our customer success program. That same motion is what we've been building in other license-based products. We have plans to keep expanding this with the team's help. You know, on this side, we've got same thing, demand gen interacting with the client, lead scoring, comes into Ellie. Ellie has to decide what is this. Let's say it's portfolio accounting or, you know, it could be portfolio analytics. How do I want to bring this, you know, how can I qualify this opportunity, understand the need? She determines it's portfolio analytics for Morningstar Direct. It goes to a direct sales specialist. Daniel is gonna work with that client. He's going to bring Morningstar Direct alive, work with them, transact, and close the business. This is how we're looking at new logo, and we've been able to apply this across different parts of the business. What I'll say is just in these areas, 2022, over 246,000 leads coming through that demand gen and sales funnel, converting to 24,000 opportunities that are active in pipeline. This is our opportunity to both you know, expand with new logos, you know, SMB, and then we talk about strategic accounts. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of the flavor of how we're doing things. You know, if I look to the future, you know, we like to think of it from a funnel perspective. We have brand and portfolio activation. These are the big drivers for Steve and his team. Morningstar has strong aided and unaided awareness in our brand, in our, in our brand studies. There is an opportunity to better extend our brand over the power of our portfolio, and that's what we're gonna be activating this year. You've seen new segments. You've seen new capabilities. We need to make sure the brand is keeping pace with what's underneath the hood while protecting the brand. A really important piece of work. Where does that manifest itself? B2B web, a business site. If you go into Morningstar.com, you will see a really elegant product. It is the Morningstar individual investor site. If you're good at navigation, you will find that there are actually some product pages that represent probably you know, 90%, 95% of the company's revenue. This is a big initiative for me. We're pouring our hearts in this one. We've assembled our team. This summer, you will see a B2B web presence launch, and that will help our customers, existing and new customers, wayfind through Morningstar to get to what they're looking for, so that Steve and the other teams can activate demand gen to drive leads for our global sales teams. Research amplification, what does that mean? I think other firms, even other competitors, would salivate if they knew the amount of research and editorial content that we have inside of our company. We do it well for research, and we use it. We're talking about how can we better use that content. It's about reuse, to repackage that for ongoing customer engagement in our B2B segments. It's right there in front of us. We're gonna go get after that. Then finally, sales enablement platform. This to me is both cost and productivity. You've heard Marc Benioff and others in Wall Street Journal talking about it's not about just more salespeople; it's about more productive salespeople. This is about sunsetting legacy content management systems, finding some efficiencies there, and going with a market-leading enablement platform that gets the sales teams the content they need just in time for the interaction they're having with the clients to demonstrate the value. This is a really big opportunity, and we're excited about that. Look, as I think about the sales opportunity ahead of us in 2023, again, leading products with a really steady release of capabilities coming out this year. I look at Direct and new PortfolioAnalytics capabilities with Lens and other things in Notebooks like Kunal talked about. We also have some needle-moving innovations that are coming to market that ties back to Jason and what he talked about in terms of key investment areas. Climate impact can't say enough of it. We're already seeing pipeline build, key releases coming out through Q2 into Q3 and Q4. PitchBook and LCD, that team is ready to activate the go-to-market and those capabilities. Really excited about that. If I look at our Advisor Workstation business, our ecosystem, our risk ecosystem capability is coming out this year as well. All about personalization and allowing advisors to connect to the new level of risk personalization with their clients. Really big opportunity. Kunal talked about third-party integrations in App Hub. This is about extending the value of AWS to our customers through more integrations upstream and downstream in their workflows. Really excited about what the team's doing there. The work Daniel's team is doing on wealth platform and direct indexing, I know they're the longer-term horizons on return that Jason shared. From a sales perspective, we are activating and connecting with customers on these things today, and we've seen really solid pipeline build coming out of these businesses. Credit ratings, of course, new asset classes, particularly as we think about corporates in mid-markets. Look, I'm gonna conclude with the commercial teams at Morningstar here, we're focused on two things this year. We're focused on our clients, and we're focused on growth. We are focused on clients, and we're focused on growth. I've given you an idea, and Kunal's given you an idea, attractive addressable markets, growing segments that we participate in, growing audiences within those segments. Steady stream of innovations and market-leading products, as well as new capabilities coming online in a really solid go-to-market machine. I'll tell you, the other thing we're focused on is absolute continuous improvement. We're always trying to get better at our game. I've sat next to Kunal for all six of these years, I mean, right next to him, and healthy dose of pressure, regular pressure to get better at our game. That's what we're doing in 2023 and beyond. I'm really excited about it, 2023 is a great year for us to unleash the power of Morningstar. Thanks for your time, with that, I'll hand it back to Kunal. Okay. Thank you, Danny. Thank you, Jason. Hopefully that gave you a good sense of how we're investing, how we wanna convert that to sustainable profitability, and why we think, you know, growth also remains a robust option. We're gonna take a quick break. We've already run ahead of time. We'll plan to come back here at 10:50 A.M., if that's okay, then we'll start the Q&A. The life cycle of every investor. It is a timeline composed of many, many moments, not one of which mirrors the previous or strictly dictates the next. How do we understand these moments? What gives them shape and color? What defines their edges? How do we meet them with the clarity and decisiveness of the right long-term strategy? There are characteristics with which we paint the broad strokes: net worth, risk comfort, time horizon. There are phases which we use to build the models from inception to accumulation to draw down and legacy creation. They give shape to strategies designed for certain types of investors at certain moments in their lives. What about this particular investor at this unique moment in their life, or this moment, or this moment? To empower their success, we need to look more closely at a more nuanced understanding of their tolerance for risk and how we connect it to a strategy designed to meet their goals, at a fuller picture of their existing assets and how we rebalance them to responsibly accommodate their preferences. At a more dynamic sense of how a changing world impacts their array of choices, risks, and opportunities. It's that we meet this moment with this investor. It's there that we connect the dots to realize the precise strategy that works for them. It's how we continuously imbue the path forward with the confidence they need to navigate what's next, because each individual investor evolves, because every generation of investor evolves, and because the allies and advisors that propel them along that journey must evolve alongside them. Thank you, everybody, we'll move on now and head to the Q&A. Just wanna welcome the team back to the stage, and special welcome to Marie, our new Chief People and Culture Officer. This is Marie's first chance here. Thank you. to talk to you. We've also got members of our leadership team available if there are specific topics that we wanna delve into in more detail as it pertains to any of the product areas. Bob Mann, who runs Sustainalytics is also on Zoom as well. Not our chatbot. That's Bob. That's Bob. That's actually Bob. All, there's obviously a number of questions we're gonna answer, and what I'd request is just to get started, if we could keep it to 2 per person, and then we're happy to come back if, questions, you know, dry up. We've got mics here, and then, as well, just raise your hand. They'll come across to you, and you're also free to submit questions, via Zoom. Please just introduce yourself as you're getting started. Hi, thank you. This is Pankaj Nevatia from Fidelity Investments. I have a two-part question on margins. The first one is, if I look over the last 10 years, margins have averaged around 23%-24%. As I look ahead, you know, on one hand you have better scale. On the other hand, there's been mix shift, growth in some lower margin products, Sustainalytics, and even, I think investment management products. To what extent do you think on a net basis are historical margins still achievable as you think about operating leverage in the business going forward? Do you wanna take that, Jason? I think as we said in the standby, I think our path, we have confidence in our ability to return to some of those historical peaks. I know our business mix has shifted. I think what I tried to detail in some of my prepared remarks is that, you know, some of the return cycles, you know, take more time, and investment management is a really good example, as it's gonna take more time to drive assets to platforms and realize return and margin accretion from those investments. You know, I was talking to someone outside. I would equate that similar to maybe where our Workplace Solutions was, you know, many, many years ago in retirement and building managed accounts. That took time to build those capabilities, build those relationships with plan sponsors, see those relationships... or those record keepers, see those relationships generate into plan sponsors, and then see assets flow. We're at a point, let's say with workplace, where that incremental dollar of revenue comes with a very high marginal profit, and there are areas of the business-like investment management where we're comfortable that's gonna happen over time. It may take a little bit longer. Again, returning to historical peaks is our focus, and we believe we can get there. Thank you. Just the second part of the question is, as I understand, you've largely done with the accelerated investment phase at this point. You talked about, you know, you moving on to... How much runway does it give you in terms of years of growth? Like, at what point do you have to go back instead of start investing, having the business to drive further growth? Go ahead. Yeah, I think, you know, I think if you look at some of the unique areas, we've found pretty unique market opportunities to invest behind. I think as we go forward, if we need to make outsized investments that we will, but I think largely, we wanna make sure that, you know, we're investing consistent with the pace of revenue growth over time, so we're able to realize that gradual market and margin improvement. If we look at those heavy areas that I focused on, I don't wanna say that we're done, but the larger cycles, particularly, I would say in areas like Sustainalytics and wealth, are more behind us than ahead of us. Yeah, I'm Terry Brady. I'm a medium-term shareholder in this company. I got a comment and then a question. Talking to some of the employees around here, I was totally impressed in the quality of the people that you're hiring, at least as representative of who I'm rubbing elbows with in this audience. Thank you. My question is related to your abandonment of the Chinese market. Depending on how you define that could be a third of the world's population. I sort of see somewhat of a similarity with this thing going on with TikTok right now in the U.S. and, you know, not invented here type of thing. I see maybe we're seeing the same thing from the other side. You got a government over there that really wants to build a border. They want to replace the U.S. as the economic and cultural center of the world. By abandoning that market, we sort of put a couple more bricks on the wall around that country that they're building. It seems like there's a real advantage of really making the effort and staying in the country, going with the culture. In my mind, I mean, it's just, maybe it's just my opinion, but as the more outside things going on in there from other countries, the really the long-term safer we are. Yeah. I mean, if they're really dependent on us, they're not gonna go to war with us. It seems like there's a real definite advantage to make the effort and stay in the country, whatever you gotta do to do it. I mean, that's basically my question is I'd like to have you flesh that out, getting above the politics and down to the real-. Yeah ... decision making. Yeah. The way I would answer it, and just to clarify, we are continuing our local business in China. It's a very small part of our overall business. What we are closing in China relates to our support operations for our global operations, and those have been moved to other Morningstar locations. Those are two separate things. As it pertains to the attractiveness of the Chinese market, our approach has been to just invest at a very slow pace in China. You know, we too see the big macro attractions potentially over time of being there, but when we look at the relative opportunities we have that are near term, that are more certain from our perspective, those are the ones we've opted to go after. Just generally in Asia, we haven't put a lot of heavy investment in places like China and India, as it pertains to the local operations at least today. Hey, Vinay Prasad from Millennium. First question is about Sustainalytics. A few of your peers have commented about the shift in demand away from ESG scores and ESG ratings towards ESG raw data. There's also been discussion around political pushback to ESG in the U.S. Can you talk about if you've observed either of those trends and how it might impact Sustainalytics? Yeah, Danny, do you wanna take the part on pipeline, and I can just talk about the broader polarization, and then if we need, we'll have Bob, you know, weigh in as well. As I mentioned in my comments, certainly some of the public debate has made it a little bit more challenging in the U.S., in the short term from a pipeline perspective, but in the rest of the world, that has not been the case so far for us. Danny, specifically as to what's in the pipeline. I mean, I would say, first, if we look at the EMEA region, the Sustainalytics and the ESG, I'd say the broader integrated Morningstar and Sustainalytics ESG opportunity, the pipeline is building, it's a good opportunity to execute. I think we'll see more lift from future releases in impact and in climate. That pipeline started in advance of the GA availability of the capabilities that are coming out. I feel pretty good about that. If you look at the U.S. markets, I the teams are reporting from engagement that there is, depending on where they're doing the work across the country, there is some polarization. Increasingly for us, though, I think the value proposition really has to be tied to a couple of things, and I think you might have heard it from Kunal. One part of the value proposition is really around, you know, managing risk in a security or in a portfolio and being able to do that. The other is really about personalization. I think that's gonna be really important for not just Morningstar, but in ESG in general, is as we engage with clients, there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and I think we have to be really smart about that before we go into a client and better understand what they're trying to do. If, if, say, an advisor has a book of business or they're a part of a larger brokerage that they don't see value in it, then they might even find it to not resonate with their audience. I think our point would be like, well, on the, on the personalization side, particularly as we think about the wealth transfer, they probably should be educated on it. Now, they can decide what they wanna do with those, with those different insights and how to create value for their customers. Again, so it's really about a set of personalized data points where you can invest for impact if you want to, and if you don't, that's also okay. I think while it's branded as ESG or sustainable investing, I think Kunal's comment that as we look to the future, it'll be another set of data points for personalized investing, I think that's where it really goes. We have to pay attention to those value propositions, and see how that evolves in the U.S. I think your comment is right, though, that we are selling more of the raw data. That's for sure, because a lot of people wanna input into their own work versus take the rolled-up aspect of things. I cited the example of asset managers who generally try to collect some data themselves and have a view, and then they use the data to, you know, further inform that view or to meld it in different ways. I might add to that with a real example. We had just terrific engagement at our MIC conference, down at the McCormick Center here just a couple weeks back, and I spent a lot of time at the booths with our sales teams and different clients that were coming through. There was actually an advisor who came to the Direct team and very specifically said, like, "I'm not bought into ESG, but I'm now dealing in my book of business where I'm meeting the next generation, and the next generation is asking me questions about what are the holdings like in my portfolio because I care about animal testing, I care about controversial weapons," whatever it might be. As much as he might not have cared or his current client, maybe it wasn't at the top of their list, as he's thinking about the transition of that book into the next generation, he needs to know how to articulate what's going on there. This is an important part of how we're talking to clients. Thanks. Second question was around PitchBook. The growth rates have been really strong there. The license adds have been very strong. I think one of the investor concerns is that the cynic would say the growth's been strong, but it's because you guys are investing heavily in your sales force. Perhaps customer acquisition costs are going up, and that's what's partly what's causing the margin pressure. I guess, what can you tell us or how can you give us comfort that's not what's happening? Yeah, I think to go back to Jason's point, during the presentation a little bit, we keep a very tight, you know, sense of things in terms of what the lifetime value of our customers are and when we're putting marketing dollars behind it. We have a very good sense of the returns we're investing. When you look at Morningstar in aggregate today, PitchBook is not pressuring Morningstar's margins. Yeah, I'd also add to that across all the businesses, there's a pretty formulaic approach, both top-down as well as kinda bottoms-up from the field in terms of how we think about sales force sizing based on territory opportunities. It's a pretty measurable, I mean, not only from the planning perspective, but as we go into market and then see sales achievement, average sales achievement relative to plan, we know where the return is. Should that trajectory change, yeah, we're in all of our businesses, we're always thinking about right-sizing, what that should look like, and we've gotta pay attention to that. Generally speaking, with the runway and growth trajectory of that company, we are focused on an acquisition of customers and growth in existing customers in that business. If John was on stage, that's what he'd tell you. Hi. Julie Toran from Lazard Asset Management. This springs off of those last questions, I guess on margins, you know, you cite a return to historical levels. Curious if that means, you know, the 25% adjusted or unadjusted EBIT margin that, you know, you saw kind of prior to a lot of the acquisitions are more like 20%. Kind of on that point, it is hard to sit, you know, outside of Morningstar and not suspect that you're having to spend more to stand in place and maintain the moats that you have in the various businesses. You know, returns and margins have gone down, it does seem that it's because, you know, there's greater competition everywhere for data and the model has shifted a bit permanently. Why or why not is that the case? I guess a second question, would be. You know, you just said PitchBook isn't bringing down the company margins. Does that mean that PitchBook margins are above company margins? Where does Sustainalytics lie? Maybe you take the margin-specific questions, and I can talk about the strategic aspect. I'd say maybe a couple things, and we're giving some directional views on margin. We're not, we're not publishing them. At least with the PitchBook question, I'm not gonna comment if we're above or below. I think what I would say is that PitchBook's margins have been gradually improving. If we look at the way we do the methodology, if we look at 22 compared to 2021, PitchBook margins were up year-over-year. We're seeing good progression and margin improvement along with the overall growth. Sustainalytics, I think you mentioned too, was going in the opposite direction last year and significant. Some of the market headwinds in the SPOs, but particularly given, you know, some of the investments that we've made. While I won't say specifically what those are, I'd reiterate that the Morningstar Sustainalytics margin is at the low end of our license-based products at Morningstar. I'd say generally, we're not gonna guide to a long-term margin target, but I think the numbers that I showed in our five-year trend are a good place for us to look at over time and where we want to return to. I won't give a specific target, but we believe that if we look at that historical trend, that the leverage ability of our businesses over time, assuming that markets will cooperate, we have paths to get there with the business plans that we have and what we're focused on across our leadership team. I would add to that in terms of the broader question, when I look at some of our longer-term businesses, they are not the sources of a ton of new investment. They are certainly not having to struggle to stay in place at all. If anything, they are sources of cash that we are deploying elsewhere. To be specific again, our key investment areas that have in the shorter term, at least brought down margin, have included areas that we've invested in heavily, such as Sustainalytics, our wealth offering, and clearly, because of what's happened with credit issuance, there has been some pressure there as well. Hi, Isaac Bowman from Langham Partners. Had a question on LCD and then on PitchBook. Firstly, on LCD, it looks like from the press release, there's only 60 or so employees. Is that gonna require a lot of hiring if we compare it to PitchBook with probably around 3,000 employees? Secondly, how many people purchased LCD through a Capital IQ subscription? Does that give more opportunity to take market share from Capital IQ with converting them over to PitchBook? In terms of the first question, it was a fairly small team. Where we are investing is in two primary areas. One is on just content creation, so certainly putting some effort behind it, and the second is the go-to-market engine associated with LCD. Although, I will say that that is largely gonna leverage the PitchBook engine that exists today. We're also hiring in a couple other spots like product and things like that, but this is not gonna be a massive addition of people in the way that, you know, we've kinda grown the core PitchBook team. I think that the core team is more than able to, in aggregate, grow that business. It's a little tricky to answer the second part of your question because one of the things that we have discovered over time is that a lot of LCD contracts were just bundled into things that were available at S&P Global. The way I think about it and the way I'd answer your question is, we think that what we're putting together at PitchBook, whether it's the private equity or private debt data or the public market data, we think we're putting together a pretty compelling opportunity on the buy side, and we will be able to more successfully penetrate it in the years ahead, and that'll be a opportunity for us, not just in against one competitor. Hi. David Shepley with Windancer Holdings. Question on PitchBook specifically as it relates to how you guys think about investment prioritization. You have that one slide that you showed where you spent $40 million versus the others. You showed the quick payback periods. We know PitchBook is potentially your highest valued asset and fastest-growing, highest longer-term margins, maybe best competitive positions as well. Just curious, do you approach the investment decisions over the last two years saying, "We wanna fill up that bucket with PitchBook first as much as we can, pushing ourselves, could we have done 50? Could we do 60? Could we do 70?" You talked about how they're actually expanding margins. It really sticks out as where you'd really wanna lean in. It's a little bit counter to the other question about. Yeah, yeah. ... margins going down, but I'd love to just philosophically hear- Yeah ... how you think about that asset versus some of the others. Yeah. We think it's obviously a great asset, and I'd say that we've really leaned into it since we've owned it and really brought a lot of capital to it over the years. The way I would answer your question specifically is, I think we've done what we can without the team losing its focus. I'll give you a simple example. We often get calls saying, "Why don't you add a China database?" "Why don't you add more in Japan?" Can we do those things? Yes. Can you add more in India? Absolutely. It would come at the cost of taking our eye off the ball elsewhere. What we've chosen to do specifically is to focus on the opportunities that we think we're best positioned to convert on in the nearest term, and we've gotten after those. I think candidly, if we put more behind it at this stage, there's a risk of a loss of focus. John Gabbert, who runs it, you've heard him speak here, and he's very much about executing a clear roadmap, and we would have to make a lot more trade-offs. The one place we have not made that trade-off, in my view, is, if we felt like we can increase sales and marketing and bring back the right results, we've done it. We've increased that as needed. And so, that has not been something we've capped. Okay. Thanks. Second follow-up, Kunal, just on biggest lessons learned over the last 18-24 months. I'm sure there's some things that you've been thinking about. Love to hear what comes to mind. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of lessons, obviously that have been learned, not just in the past 18 months, but just through the whole period post-COVID. Luckily, your question is not about return to office because, boy, I've learned a lot of lessons in terms of how I talk about that aspect of things too. I think the biggest lesson, you know, for me is, we entered a period where we had so many significant opportunities, in all candor, we're turning business away, we also saw some longer term opportunities. I think that coupled with the fact that you had this hot labor market and we were fighting for talent, we probably made a lot of decisions very quickly about how much talent we wanted to bring in and faster than I normally would like to. I think the lesson for me is to fight my instincts a little bit more heavily on that if that situation was to arise again. The other thing that is always a lesson to me too is, you know, just being super disciplined about your process. I think we're very disciplined here about everything that we do, but you gotta be willing to evolve it and challenge it. I think we did a good job at it, but I think there's ways we can keep kinda getting better and looking back on have we done things right? Have we kinda hit our targets? Are we holding people accountable? There's always a need to kinda get better at that aspect of things when it comes to accountability. Hi, Jared Herzikoff-Cornell from PRIMECAP Management. Oh, hey. Question about PitchBook demand. You mentioned potential slowing on the corporate side, biz dev. Can you talk about any other segments where you're seeing slowing? Maybe just comment on the venture ecosystem and with the correction in private market valuations, are you concerned about slowing there? Thank you. Yeah, it's a good question. The short answer is, yes, I'm concerned. Like, I look at the data, and why would you not be, right? Things certainly point in that direction. Having said that, a couple of things. One is there's still a lot of money in that ecosystem, and there's a lot of demand for that money to find a home. That gives me confidence that people need even more use cases, and we're able to expand into use cases. We just launched an Exit Predictor, for example, that has very quickly, you know, gotten very significant adoption. The way I think about it is that even if perhaps if the market were to shrink a little bit, it could come at the cost of other providers because I think our service is just getting better. My past experience in downturns, and this is not just a PitchBook related point, this is a broad point. In downturns, clients wanna tend to consolidate, or they wanna take things that they've built in-house and outsource it. Those can be two very powerful forces through which you can grow your business. It's something Danny and I talk a lot about. I think it applies to PitchBook. I think it applies to Morningstar Direct. We're really trying to think about if people consolidate, where can we win? That is an important part of how we're thinking about our go-to-market right now. Net-net, I am appropriately paranoid about it, but not at the cost of making sure we're taking advantage of the opportunities. Thank you. For my second question, can you talk about managing expenses and your philosophy in a downturn? If the cyclical businesses drop a lot more, how much do you pare back on expenses? Yeah. investments? Thanks. Do you wanna start, and then I'll weigh in? I think maybe two-part. I think the first is we're certainly aware of things that are going on in the market and where you've seen that rate of headcount grow slow is much more dramatically or not at all in the areas that are feeling the most pressure right now. That's, you know, credit ratings and then specific parts of other businesses that are certainly under some pressure. That's been our philosophy over the near term is we're very aware of the market environment, very targeted in certain areas, but also cautious across the rest of the business too, back to the point that we've invested heavily over the past couple years. That rate of slowing has been very deliberate, except for some of the key areas where we still need to build capabilities to finish the job in order to make sure, we're bringing opportunities to market. I think if things persist, Kunal can talk a little bit about it, but we do need to make sure that we're being prudent, and businesses are right sized for the future. We wanna make sure we're not over reactionary in this environment, particularly because we know market cycles change and wanna be prepared for upturns when they happen, whether it's in, you know, the financial markets or the credit markets specifically. Yeah. I think we're always looking at structural changes and specifically in credit ratings. We don't wanna maintain surplus, you know, resources if the activity is not there. What we've been doing is really assessing our theses in the different parts of the market that we operate in. You know, a simple example that I'll give you is we feel like the U.S. commercial real estate market is going to take longer to recover than maybe we thought even six months ago. That has meant we have a sizable CMBS team, and so that has meant in the last few weeks where we've essentially repositioned part of that team into other parts of the credit business, or into other parts of our business where we've needed those resources, or in some cases, we've eliminated roles because we feel that that part of the business is going to take longer to recover. We'll, we'll act if we feel like we have surplus capacity. Hi. Thanks for taking the question. Brian Vollmer from SEG. I wonder on Sustainalytics, Kunal, it was the one area you mentioned that in hindsight, maybe you just slowed the brakes there. What are you doing today to right-size the cost structure, which is clearly upside down given some of the things that have gone against, both cyclically as well as with what's going on in the second party opinion market and sort of how do you know, what actions are being taken to sort of? Yeah ... address that? I'll have a follow-up. Bob, maybe this is a good opportunity for you to come in and share a few of your thoughts in terms of how you look at the business today. Marie, you've been working with Bob as well, so maybe you could weigh in here. Bob, we'll turn over to you first. Sure. Thanks, Kunal. I think it's right that we have sort of, exiting that high investment period and where we're really trying to, I would say, double down as a focus in markets where we think, you know, we have strong strength, so EMEA and North America, and I think lessen our focus in markets where we think the return will take longer to capture. I think really it is doubling down on those products of where we think we'll be really successful and focusing and narrowing our investment in product areas that we think we have a strong advantage, and markets is the same philosophy. I think you'll see us sort of, shed or, put less emphasis on those areas I think were more peripheral or more medium or long term in our return. I would just add, just in terms of support of that we're, you know, working alongside Bob and his team and modeling out, you know, different scenarios and options in this as we move forward to support those changes that he wants to make. Then I guess the follow-up question to this would be, you've made it clear that you're willing to sort of ride through cyclical downturns, et cetera, and the profitability impacts of that for the business as long as you have confidence in where you're heading and the trajectory there. Could you give us some idea for the investment mode businesses today, what you think the opportunity is over time? Obviously, there are some public peers for businesses with similar models, whether it's, you know, MSCI's business within, you know, the competitors, Sustainalytics, or some of the kind of FactSet, CIQ-type business models that you're currently investing in. Give us an idea of what the goal is on, you know, the unit economic profitability that you think you can achieve over time as a result of these investments and the growth. Yeah. Are you looking at maybe comparative margins to peers that you see out in the marketplace? Maybe I wanna make sure I'm clear on what your question is. Yeah. Should investors be thinking of trajectory of margins for your investment mode businesses as sort of having benchmarks that we can recognize that you think are achievable, or are there reasons why we, you know, we shouldn't be thinking about those being? Oh, okay. ... three to five Yeah. I think generally, Maybe part of what I said is we know the operating models and the economic models that we have produced leverage over time. I think it's a little bit dangerous to compare us to a lot of our competitors in the sense that we've got runway, but given size or structural differences in businesses, Moody's and S&P have, you know, 60% EBITDA margins and credit ratings. MSCI has 70% EBITDA margins and indexes. We see those as showing that we've got runway but given the different business model size and scale of those operations, those may not be realistic to achieve over time. They give us confidence that we're headed in the right direction, that we're building sustainable models to get leverage. In where I showed where we have the more opportunity over the time horizon, to expand, clearly those are areas where we believe those economic models or peer comparisons are good benchmarks for us to know that we can expand over time, although it may not be to the levels of certain of our peers just because of the size and scale of their operations. Given that your competitor's offering is probably also in an earlier stage that's. Yeah ... newer market. I mean- Mm-hmm is there a reason structurally why your business, given its mix or unit economics, et cetera, shouldn't be able to achieve comparable margins to that over a, you know, reasonably, you know, line of sight multi-year timeframe? There's not, and that's where I said we look internally. Sustainalytics is a good example. It's a similar license-based model, right? If we look at PitchBook, if we look at our other Morningstar license-based areas, while Sustainalytics is low today, we know how to operate these businesses and know that we need what we can achieve. There's an example where you don't have to look at FactSet or market intelligence of S&P or Moody's Analytics. You know, we operate these models today and are confident that that's a good level to target over time, as we grow the business, as we slow down, invest in, and we realize the returns of what we put in over the last few years. Yeah. Hi. Russell Quelch from Redburn. Hi. I had a couple of questions. Can I start on looking at client churn? You know, a couple of the markets you're targeting for growth, private assets, sustainability, these are areas where others are increasing their presence quite aggressively too. You obviously have incumbent brands there. Can you talk through what you're seeing from a client perspective in terms of churn, both now and historically, what you're looking to do to offset that? Maybe if pricing is one area you might be able to lean on a bit more once the when you see a higher churn or periods of higher churn. Do you want? Yeah. Do you wanna start? Yeah, I can start. I'll just give you an indication that, as we look at, logo level or ACV, annual contract value, churn. If I look at Sustainalytics, that's actually been an area of real actual strength and improvement over the past couple of years. I can't provide the exact numbers, but generally speaking, that's been a good trend for Sustainalytics. Sort of maybe different than your question may have assumed. I think that's an important thing for us. If we look at other high-growth platforms like PitchBook, I think Kunal's comments were pretty much right on. There are a couple segments outside of core VC and PE where there's been a bit of elevated churn. We think that's time-based, and we think that returns to regular levels. You know, in all these teams, it's the customer success motion that's really focused on ongoing client adoption and engagement, which is done through analytics in terms of how those users are using the software relative to how we think they should be using the software. Then deriving, you know, whether it's digital-based or human-based engagement to get them up to speed. In the Morningstar platforms, when we think about our renewal rate, and we think about retention churn, we've generally been on a pretty good trajectory in many of these businesses. Even smaller businesses like Morningstar Office within the wealth platform, we've seen a stabilization in the retention rate. This really comes down to using data to drive engagement with those clients, and then having, you know, playbooks and information for those teams, as well as automated digital touch to engage with those clients. I think we have a pretty good playbook. There's no doubt that in this kind of environment, it's putting pressure. You know, just like I think, you know, any CFO or CIO in any organization sort of looking at their spend in this environment, it's not such an expansionary environment. We too think that will settle; we're trying to do the right things with the right teams to engage with those clients. I don't know. Yeah, no, I was gonna say the same thing. From a retention perspective, we're in, at least as of today, in pretty good shape there. You know, one thing I'd just add, especially, I think this is true of ESG, maybe less so of the private markets. We saw a lot of funded competitors sort of emerge in the last few years. People were raising money because it was perceived as a hot area, and there were a lot of point solutions emerging. We saw this in wealth as well. A lot of that is dissipating now. So, I think to the extent that that was a bit of an issue, it's not anymore, and people are generally congregating around the larger providers who have experience in the space. Thank you. Kunal, maybe I can follow up on a previous question when we talk about lessons learned over the last 12 months. I wonder if you might consider changing your approach to shareholder interaction and increase the style and regularity of communication. That's one area that consistently comes up. Yes ...as an area of concern. Yes when I speak to, many of your shareholders. No, thanks for asking that. It's certainly something we've heard in the past. I know there's many people who would like an alternative model. A number of you like this model as well. We hear that aspect of things. You know, our intent is to maintain the model for a couple of primary reasons, including that we like to provide equal access to information. We also think it's an efficient use of our time. We put a lot of effort. Sarah Bush, who runs our IR, puts a lot of effort into the Q&A that we do. One of you in the audience actually came up to me today, go unnamed, and said the Q&A is actually better than any earnings call that I attend. We put that level of diligence into it. We're always looking for ideas for how we can do better, what our policy is, and how we can do better within that constraint. We're open to that, but we very much do like and think that it adds long-term value when we're focused on the business and providing equal access to information. There it is. There you go. Peter Uddo from Presidium Investment Management. Judging by the questions you're getting here today and also from the submitted questions you've received over the last number of months; shareholders are concerned about how operating expenses have been managed. If you look back in July of 2022, one of your answers to your questions, or one of the answers to a question about expenses was that you were going to be prudent and cautious, and I guess in managing to market conditions. We're hearing that same thing today, May of 2023. So back in July of 2022, you were talking about it, and now we're still talking about it. Investors and shareholders we speak to don't feel don't have a lot of confidence in how you've managed this latest period. I'm not gonna use, well, I'll use the word, but it wasn't, it was someone else who brought it up and said that the management team is somewhat reckless in the pace, the pacing of the investments, not only the level, but the pacing of it. Is growing into expense base that's 40% higher prudent and cautious? Do you have a plan and a playbook, like a lot of your peers have, a downturn playbook where when market conditions are very difficult, you can actually cut expenses and preserve profitability and preserve cash flow? Is it just growing into an astronomical expense base that's been put in place? All right. Yeah, maybe I'll start and appreciate the question, appreciate the concern. I would say we are managing the business prudently and are very conscious of the current environment. I think I go back to the fact that the majority of our cost base is related to people and headcount. These things need to cycle through, but as we take deliberate approaches to slow that down over time, those benefits will accrue in future periods given the rate of sequential growth. We are going after discretionary costs in this environment, whether it be professional fees or travel or advertising and marketing. I think we're doing it in a way that we're trying to strike the right balance to contain costs, to hold margins where we can, but also be ready for rebounds in markets when ultimately, they come. There are some parts of our business where we cannot adjust the cost structure fast enough or if it's prudent enough just given the cyclical headwinds. That's all true as in investment management. That holds true in credit ratings where there's less variability unless we take some specific or targeted actions there. I think we are very cost-conscious. We are being prudent to strike the right balance. I think the biggest leading indicator that you see in our results is the fact that the headcount growth has slowed significantly, and that's been very deliberate. Hi, my name is Salem Abraham. I'm a shareholder. I appreciate the question before the last talking about policy, the importance of policy. My company, Abraham Trading Company, operates a mutual fund, and through our mutual fund, I've dealt with Morningstar employees. Last weekend, I attended the Berkshire Hathaway stockholder meeting in Omaha. It's a little bigger than this one, but not much. I was reminded. This is great still. I'm glad to be here. I reminded of Warren Buffett's opening statement before Congress in 1991 when he dealt with problems at Salomon. The quote was that they showed at the shareholders' meeting. It was interesting. "The past actions of Salomon are presently causing our 8,000 employees and their families to bear a stain. Virtually all of these employees are hardworking, able, and honest. I want to find out exactly what happened in the past so that this stain is borne by the guilty few and removed from the innocent." Credibility and reputation, that is Morningstar's stock and trade. Without credibility and reputation, Morningstar is out of business. I have 2 questions for the board. First, I believe mid-level managers did not follow written policy at Morningstar. I have complained about these mid-level managers to Mr. Kapoor, about them not following policy to Mr. Kapoor and Ms. Peacock and others. Will Mr. Kapoor and the rest of the board pledge to protect my company from retaliation by these mid-level managers within Morningstar because I'm now publicly speaking out about them not following policy? Number two, is the board concerned enough about the reputational risk at Morningstar, like Warren Buffett was, to direct, to get directly involved to fix this problem of employees not following written policy? Thank you for your question. For everyone's benefit, the question in this instance relates to how we translate the performance of your fund after it went from being a private vehicle into an SEC-registered vehicle. Morningstar's policy is to not take the record prior to the fund being an SEC-registered fund and include it in the record going forward. I understand in your case there was an error made for a short period of time that was quickly corrected, but that is in fact the case. Jeff Patak, who is our Chief Ratings Officer, is here to speak with you further. I know you've spoken to Jeff in the past, and I'd sort of encourage you to speak to him on this matter. If it's okay, this is probably not the forum for us to kinda get into a debate about our methodologies, if that's okay. You had a second question about whether the board is concerned enough. Is that right? Joe, would you like to say something? Just repeat the question. The other question is whether the board is concerned enough as it pertains to the following of this methodology and its potential reputation on Morningstar. Yeah, I don't think the board has been aware of this issue. We're happy to take a look at it. But if somebody's not following our procedures, that we would, you know, take great concern over. You know, I appreciate your raising it. We can talk it over with Kunal and discuss it. Heretofore, we've not, it's not been raised to the board level. All right, good. On, on Zoom, yeah, go ahead. Mm-hmm. 2 questions have come in. The first one comes. Wait, Oh yeah, go ahead. ... Jeff Moe from Maurer, who's asking, what is the strategic rationale for Morningstar to own DBRS, since it touches corporates and fixed income asset managers, which are segments we don't really touch in many of the other businesses? What are examples, if there are any, of DBRS synergizing with other parts of Morningstar? Yeah. From a synergy perspective, we have not achieved a lot of go-to-market synergies, if that is specifically the question. This is a very heavily regulated business, as you know. There are very clear rules of conduct and oversight in terms of how we do things there. To kind of go back to the core case here, we think this is an attractive market. When we originally entered it more than 10 years ago with Morningstar Credit Ratings, it was because we thought the legacy three providers were doing a lousy job. Subsequently when DBRS became available, we thought it was possibly the best asset on the market that was not among sort of the stranglehold of the big three. We have been using it and using it to grow into this market. As Daniel said, the one place we are starting to put more focus, and I think where there is more alignment relates to the data business and starting to grow the data business. We know how to do that well, and we're working with the team. The other thing, there's an opportunity longer term is, as you're well aware, a lot of ESG regulations are starting to intersect with credit ratings, and we're doing the work in terms of what that is gonna mean going forward as well. We do run it as a standalone product area, and from a regulatory perspective, that is also how it needs to be run. The only thing is, I think the question too is, you know, we're not in fixed income, but we provide ratings. A lot of the logic here too is that provide equity ratings. We provide ratings on funds. Rating fixed income is, was always a natural extension to what we do. It just happens to be, you know, in a more regulated business. It's really at the core of what we do is provide independent assessments and ratings, and here we're doing it to fixed income securities just how we do it in other parts of the business. Go ahead. Okay. We have another question that came in from John Nesbitt at Millennium, who's asking if you could spend some time speaking on the index business and the five-year vision for growth, and also where do you have a right to win and innovate in that market? Sure. Happy to do that. Danny, do you wanna start a little bit? You get excited about it. Yeah. I do get excited about it. The ability for us to take our underlying IP and put that to work to create new index products is an opportunity that really I think was under-commercialized. With the focus of the existing team as well as bringing in some key leaders from the outside, we've been able to accelerate here. If you look at, if you look at where we can be strongest on the investable product side, our ability to use our research and build thematic indexes, smart beta indexes, as well as leverage our ESG capabilities, there's a real opportunity to differentiate, and we've already started winning some really significant logos and significant mandates. We're pretty excited about the runway there. What I'd say there too, is choosing my words, is that we've never seen such desire for choice. It's a really interesting. It is a challenger brand, and I'd much rather be a challenger brand for clients that are looking for choice as they think about launching new products. We've seen really good success as well, not just in creating new products where we're trying to then partner with those, with those clients to drive new flows. We've seen a pretty healthy dose of conversions where we're immediately seeing those assets come into our capabilities. That's a pretty exciting opportunity. On the benchmarking side, I think what's really neat there too is that, as we look at our stronghold in wealth management and our ability to work with home offices, they are increasingly doing more and more work benchmarking portfolios. That's a really big opportunity for Morningstar to come in with our index IP and help them think about benchmarking at the portfolio level. This is, this is a good opportunity. It's probably one of the strongest teams we have internally in terms of their focus on growth and client innovation. Yeah, no, I'd agree with everything Danny said. I think too, just when I think about the opportunities, clearly this is not a game we're playing to try to replace the S&P 500. Like, that's not what's gonna happen. It's more so that we see also an opportunity to marry our research and build some unique indexes in that context. We're looking at new categories like private markets and ESG, where we're only now starting to get penetration, starting to do things like that. I will say too that, you know, when I look ahead, the services and data parts of this business are pretty exciting as well and will be growth engines for us longer term. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Hey, Rodrigo de Paula from MFS Investment Management. You talked about the headcount growth you've seen in the last few years, 40%+ and some of the product areas you're investing in. Is there a way to parse out how much of that headcount growth is specifically targeted to products, whether it's analysts focused on one area, sales and marketing, et cetera, versus how much of it is shared infrastructure, back-end stuff that is just required as you go from being a $1 billion dollar company to a $2 billion revenue company? Just trying to think about the scalability of some of those latter types of investments over time. Maybe I can comment. I think a fair amount of my presentation last year was probably talking about scale and how we go to $2 billion and beyond. I think back what I shared, the disproportionate amount of headcount growth that we've had have been, let's call it in some of our investment areas to drive product sales, you know, marketing, new capabilities. We have grown our corporate areas, not to the extent that we've seen in other parts of the business, largely because we wanna make sure that we're doing that prudently. It's also just not about people in corporate areas. It's about making sure we're investing behind systems and technology to be able to create consistency in our process, which is really important for folks like me in finance, for folks like Danny in sales operations, and Marie in people and culture. The extent of the growth essentially has not been as large as the other areas, but we have in order to make sure that we can scale the business in the appropriate way. Some of those investments you've seen in those areas too, when we report externally on a lot of the M&A integration and we look at those one-time costs, those are specific and work that we do to bring Sustainalytics, for example, or U.K.'s Praemium business onto our finance platforms, or onto our CRM systems, or into our talent management system in Workday. Some of those investments are real. They're really cash. You see them in some of our one-time costs. That's equally as important, the activity that we do to make sure that we're integrating, M&A to make sure that we can get, scale from some of our corporate or central functions in these as well. Just to add one piece on that, I think just to provide some clarity too. I think, you know, a normal part of business, a normal part of the people business is to constantly analyze and revisit that and review that. In terms of, you know, short answer to your question is we're always looking at that. Hi, Sanjeev Math with Baron Capital. Just a question on share repurchases. The last time you did, I think, significant repurchases was about 12-15 months ago, and I think the implied price per share was about $275 a share. Obviously, you know, sitting where we are today, you're kind of talking about, you know, coming towards the end of a, you know, investment cycle, so to speak. Perhaps we're going to preserve, if not grow margin from here and free cash flow as well. Just given that the, you know, obviously the share price is considerably down versus where you last did repurchases, what is your view on share repurchases as an attractive use of shareholder capital now versus maybe what it was 6 months ago or, you know, 12-15 months ago? Thanks. First, we still believe it was an attractive use of capital throughout our history of share repurchase cycles. We rely heavily on our internal intrinsic analysis and view share repurchase equally as other return options that we have in the portfolio, whether it's organic, inorganic. I'd start there, and we continue to deploy the same methodology and models in looking at the share price today as we did during last year. We'll continue to focus on it and allocate capital to there where we believe it's prudent. The only thing that I would say, similar to what I said before, is that returning cash to shareholders is pretty important. We've consistently increased the dividend over time. We're gonna be opportunistic with share repurchase, you know, when thresholds are met, return thresholds are met. We also have to recognize that we do have a significant debt balance as well, and that's gotta, you know, realize some attention too in our capital allocation priorities. I won't comment on any activity we've been doing where the current share price is, but we deploy very similar methodologies in making sure that we're deploying capital to its highest use and highest return. If share repurchase is one of them, we're gonna do that. The trade-off is with debt right now more than anything else and paying it down. I can jump in here with another question we have from the Zoom. This is a second question from Jeff Moe, who wants to know about Sustainalytics' competitive advantage. He's writing, "Sustainalytics is the number two player behind MSCI and ESG, and it seems like their ESG division pretty consistently grows faster than Sustainalytics. As a distant number two player, will you always be subscale and find it harder to win incremental client in head-to-head situations? Yeah, I'll let Bob Mann weigh in here as well, specifically as it pertains to what Bob Mann would point out as our key competitive advantages. I have a few thoughts on the broader question too, though. One is, I think to the extent that you're looking at our growth rate relative to MSCI's, it's worth keeping in mind that until recently, they did not have a SBO business, so they did not have a second-party opinion. The other thing I'd just sort of point out, and we've always tried to look at their results and parse through them, but we also think that they include some portion of their index ESG revenues in there. It's not entirely clear to us if they are or not, that certainly provides a tailwind to them in a meaningful way that we don't have as substantially. I will say that on the core licensing side, we feel very good about how we are competing against them and how our growth rates stack up against them. We are definitely not a distant second in that context. I think if you look in certain parts of the world, such as Europe, there is, I think a higher customer satisfaction with our scores. Oftentimes, I feel like they're the de facto company that people go with in the ESG space because of existing relationships, not because of a competitive advantage other than exactly, you know, what I just said. I feel pretty good about it. We're gonna compete hard against them, and I think on the licensing side, we're really well positioned to compete against them. Bob, I don't know what you would wanna add. Not much. I think that's a almost complete response. I will say that, in Europe, we certainly compete head-on with them, and I wouldn't view us as a distant second at all. I think we're a comparable player, and that's the largest market. I do think that is right what Kunal said about them being, you know, the default 'cause often they're preexisting relationships. Even within that context, we're able to compete, and I think it's the strength of our products, really. Clients have resonated with our products. I feel pretty comfortable in the license-based business that we'll compete readily and effectively with them going forward. Yeah, I might add to that too that one of the benefits of Sustainalytics and Morningstar coming together is Morningstar, if you go back to my presentation in retail investing, that is a stronghold. While Sustainalytics' heritage, yes, certainly across both retail and in institutional, as we look at the competitive landscape, and I think one of the things Bob's teams get quite excited about, is being able to integrate and access the wealth market, in bringing that through our platforms and through our existing client relationships there. The, let's call it the advice and wealth space, is a place where Morningstar is a market leader, and we should see acceleration in ESG there globally. Hi, Russell Quelch. Just, thanks for the floor again. As I sit here kind of digesting everything you've kind of given today, I wondered what, maybe Kunal or Jason, what metrics would you like us to judge your performance against? Last year, Jason, you told us that speed of top-line growth was a ambition. Now we're hearing a focus on margins and ROIC and a management team that's compensated on total share of the return. When we sit here next year, what numbers should we expect to be up on those slides as the comps that we can all sit here and share in the execution on? Maybe I'll start. I won't give specific targets, but I also wanna say we're not giving up on top-line growth here. If that message is coming through, that's not the case. We've got large addressable markets. We invested heavily behind the business. We still think we could show outsized growth in areas we're investing, where we've been historically and relative to our peers, which we've seen. I wanna emphasize that that continues to be important and that metric of organic growth is still a top priority here. Without guiding, what we're focused on is driving adjusted operating margin improvement over time, driving increased free cash flow over time, and all of that should translate into higher ROIC as we can drive profitability over time, that accrues to shareholders' equity, but importantly, reducing debt will be important for ROIC. TSR ultimately is the governor, and our actions, what we can control in driving financial performance is something that we're focused on. We're susceptible to the market, but I assure you that our eye is on the long-term appreciation of our stock price, and all of us up here are equally incentivized to do that. Yeah. It makes sense. Jason, on your point on the debt, I mean, when I look at your leverage, you're not over-leveraged versus the peer group. Versus some, you're actually under-leveraged. That debt is actually or that leverage number is actually gonna come down organically anyway. If the growth opportunity in some of your end markets is as big as you want us to believe, and I believe as well, why look to reduce the debt? Why not in fact go the other way and look to increase the debt, grow, you know, use that continuously as a, you know, an area where you can drive inorganic growth? Yeah. You know, first, I think if you've seen, we're not opposed to debt in the capital structure. We think it's been an important, you know, vehicle for funding, and putting leverage on the business to acquire acquisitions to help generate levered returns is important. I mean, if you look where we are right now based on what our covenants are, we're about, you know, 2.5 times levered. We have capacity depending on M&A to go up to 4 times. Just by nature of our covenants, we've got capacity. I think we wanna make sure that, you know, we create financial flexibility here and the dry powder to make sure we can do sizable deals when they come across and be opportunistic. De-leveraging is prudent, 1, to increase, you know, that flexibility even though we know the business can withstand leverage, so when future opportunities come, we're prepared. Also, you know, given where interest rates are, the interest rate burden and the cash impact of that is more significant now, particularly in our floating rate debt than it's been where SOFR rates are, despite the fact that our spreads are still, you know, relatively low. We think it's prudent to trim that both to save interest as well as create more flexibility going forward. 1, to withstand market environments, but also, you know, give us powder to act when opportunities come across in the future. I know we're coming up at the top of the hour here, and this might be an appropriate segue for our chief people officer... For what it's worth, we went no longer 'cause we did start a little longer, so that's. Okay. Well, we have one more question that's come in on Zoom. This is specifically for Marie. This is from one of our employees who's watching. You've been at Morningstar a few months now. What are your initial observations of the culture? Where are the strengths, and where are opportunities for improvement? Happy to answer. Yeah, it's been about three and a half months that I've been at the organization, and as I've shared with some employees, it's a really special culture. It really, you know, I've worked with a number of Fortune 500 companies and a number of companies out there, and the thing that really strikes you coming in is, you know, a few things. One is, I think, incredibly collegial environment, incredibly innovative and entrepreneurial, and really transparent. It's a place where folks are working together to get things done, and I think that's been really striking. It's also a place that I keep saying over and over again that people come here not for a job, but they come here for a career, and they have the ability to really grow and really impact, you know, really impact investor success by getting to know the organization and the company better and better. Those, I'd say those are my observations. Imran Halani from Presidium Investment Management. You know, you guys have said that you view the 16% adjusted operating margin as close to an annual low point in your investment cycle. Obviously, since then, you know, the quarterly operating margin has come lower than that. Similarly, you highlighted the ROICs, which have come down over the past five years. Do you still believe that we're at a low point annually in both ROIC and adjusted operating margin, even if market conditions continue to stay where they are? Yeah, I think I gotta go back to that question, whether I called the low or said we're close to it in the sense that, recognizing we've probably faced a bit more cyclical pressure since that came about, which is pressuring margins. That's an annualized rate. The rate in the first quarter isn't necessarily reflective of what we could see in the back half of the year if we see more momentum across the business. I think if you look at that 16% adjusted operating income, adjusted operating margin, I would still reiterate that that's close to where, you know, the annual low should be based on where we see the trajectory of the business. Of course, markets have to cooperate. We're not gonna be able to achieve that if we're seeing, you know, very low single-digit organic growth. We feel, again, confident in the trajectory of the business, and our ability to increase that over time more to historical peaks. Then on LCD, you guys answered a question last night in the 8-K about ROI. Just thinking about that business, right? You paid $650 million for it to generate kind of the cost of capital or the returns you guys look like. You'd have to generate almost $100 million in free cash flow. The business today does $56 million in revenue. Help us understand. I mean, obviously, there's a big cross-opportunity within PitchBook and otherwise, but help us understand the return for that business and how you get there. Thank you. Yeah. Without getting into a debate on the numbers, happy to kinda look at that offline or through a submitted question. The investment thesis for LCD and paying a large price was to make sure that we had the ability to earn a high cash-on-cash return, going forward, and we still believe that that's achievable based on the analysis that we do. What's unique about that, it's not just growing, you know, the current LCD platform as you've heard here, which we still have opportunities to do and take it from where S&P had it to where we can grow it on a standalone basis. We believe that data and research incorporated into PitchBook and the analysis that we can do brings in new users into PitchBook over time that we normally would not have been able to access in the past. That's why you've seen that PitchBook addressable market, you know, continue to grow. Part of that is because of the incremental use cases we think LCD, you know, can generate. Happy to share analysis on our return models, but we're confident that the capital investment there will provide long-term returns well above our cost of capital. I'd just also add that there's an index component- Yeah to it, and it's measurably smaller than the core data component. It's been really important in the initial stages and has led to some really good outcomes. It's also, from a fixed income indexes perspective, put us on the map in a way that we probably had not expected. That's another positive accrual from my perspective. We feel really bullish about it. It's been an underutilized asset, but underutilized within its previous owner. If you look at who uses it and how sticky it is and the additional things we can do with it, I think we're really gonna be able to do a lot of things with it and grow our platforms, because we own it in a much faster way. Hi. Hi. Hey, Sri. Yeah. I wanted to ask about, you know, you mentioned cycling through investments over the past year, given the hiring. I think you mentioned about $100 million in AK in the past year. Incremental to that, we have cost of labor increases. I guess could you quantify the level of expense growth that you're anticipating this year, absent any changes to the market, just given the investments that you've made over the past year, and how you think about the return on that investment? You broke it out by product, over the next two to three years, what you expect margin expansion could be given that level of investment. Thank you. Yeah. I won't comment specifically on future rates of expense growth, but I think what I tried to articulate is an important leading indicator of where it could head, given the fact that compensation costs are the most prominent part of our cost structure, given the slowing of headcount growth. You'll start to see year-over-year increases in headcount start to slow, and that should translate into year-over-year not declines by slowing of compensation growth. I think that's an indication of where we're headed just by the slowing of headcount growth and that can mean for future periods, although I won't give you specific growth numbers. Again, back to the margin discussion, very hard for here to guide to specific numbers. Just to reiterate that, we believe and are confident that based on the plans that we've got internally and what we're executing towards, that we've got a meaningful opportunity over time to increase margins back to our historical levels. If markets cooperate, that can accelerate. Just wanna emphasize that to some extent, you know, we're at, you know, we're at the mercy of how markets behave, but it certainly can accelerate if we see faster recoveries than what our internal plans suggest. I guess with respect to, investments that you've already made, in what areas have you pivoted or changed course, over the past two years, given the market environment today is different from when you made those investments? Just in the past two years? Let me go business by business and try to give you a few examples. If I start with wealth, for example, there've been a couple, I think, key pivots that have informed the strategy, including the fact that we're bringing all the pieces together. That was a pretty key pivot. And then the forking out of the international wealth platform. We've also just fundamentally continued, you know. Going back further than two years, we exited what was the institutional investment management business, and that was a very important decision. As we've really become focused on the advisor in these past two years, we've also made decisions to exit certain markets. For example, we had a small operation in India that we recently exited in that part of the business. We've really focused the business from a client and a country perspective, if you will. In the credit markets, some of the pivots relate to emerging opportunities that we've talked about in the middle market and private market, and more recently starting to move some resources away from the U.S. real estate market. We have not pivoted the strategy in Canada at all. We feel like we're in a good spot there, but the pivots have largely been related to the U.S. and to a lesser degree in Europe. In terms of PitchBook, the most significant pivot was bringing LCD into the roadmap. We spent a lot of time talking about trade-offs and whether they were worth it or not, but that was a very significant pivot and trade-off given that we were primed for growth with what we had, and the only reason we did it is because we thought it was even more likely to be beneficial, you know, than what we had thought about. In the Morningstar licensed products area, if you look at Morningstar Direct, we discontinued Morningstar for wealth management. Sorry, Direct for Wealth Management, sometimes called DWM. That was a decision we made. We had built a separate version of Direct that we thought would work well in the wealth management market, and we had an anchor client there, but over time decided that the distraction was not worth it. We just wound that down. We shut down a product in Canada called CPMS as well, and we've been consolidating some of the financial planning software that we have globally so that we're really speaking with one voice. Those have been some of the pivots, you know, within the software business. I would say that in the data business, probably one of the bigger pivots we've made, we flirted in the past with whether we wanna take data from third parties and basically become a third-party data manager, and we don't wanna be in that business. We had one or two clients outside the U.S., and I have to say it was very sticky business. It led to all kinds of other good things, but we just decided we did not wanna be in that business at all. Others are good at doing it. It's just not a scalable business, and so we exited that and dropped those contracts. I don't know if there's anything else you'd call a pivot, Danny, but those are the key ones. Yeah. That come to mind. The only one I can think about is if you look at the evolution of, in particular, in a certain business of ours that was, that we call APIs today that used to be called enterprise components. I'd say generally, and James Rhodes, the President of this group, has a really good strategy in that I would say we sort of drifted from what should be reusable APIs that bring scale, and there was quite a bit more of bespoke implementations. We do not have an interest in being an IT services implementation firm. We believe in light config and deploying software and capabilities for clients through SaaS-based platforms, through APIs and things like that. We are looking at that portfolio and migrating to more scalable APIs, and that's. I think that's pretty important, an important strategy. It gives us an opportunity, I think, to engage with those clients, 'cause some of those I would define as even sort of some legacy instances that were bespoke for specific clients. The ability to support those when we talk about just costs or even distractions, that is, that's something we've decided to move to more kinda scalable delivery capabilities. All right. If I may just... I mean, what I was trying to get at is why aren't margins substantially higher? You know, if you turned off your investment spending in the near term, you know, what's preventing you from getting to, you know, peer-level margins in specific business lines? Yeah. In most cases, it's because we redeployed those resources. You know, as Jason has alluded to, most of those costs relate to people, and in all those instances, we redeployed people into other parts of the roadmaps that we had. In some cases, as in Wealth and in the case of LCD, we've brought in people from the outside through acquisition. That certainly added to those costs. Wealth is an example where we brought in the Praemium team and, you know, those were additional resources that we brought on. Thanks. Just to follow up, I appreciated the slide in your presentation, Jason, about the timeframes around which you needed, you know, over a multi-year basis to earn a return on the significant investments. I think all but one of them was sort of a 1-3 year, 1-2 year kind of timeframe. There was one that was 3-5, which you were clear about. You know, given that most of those investments started sort of 1-2 years ago, I'm trying to understand what is driving the reluctance to sort of give a little more assurance on the near-term trajectory for margins notwithstanding, you know, it's evident that if there's a cyclical recovery in transaction-related businesses, that'll be margin accretive. Even absent that, just in terms of the ROI component, the things that are in your control, help us understand that a bit, connect the dots to the ROI timeframe and kind of what that should mean for the next 1-2 years from here, 2 years into the investment mode. Yeah. Maybe I wanna make sure I'm answering correctly. Reluctance to maybe give some concrete guidance- Looking ... on where- Yeah. On forward looking where things are going. I guess philosophically today you've outlined we're not gonna give long-term margin targets, and we're not gonna give even near-term guidance on expense growth, which would be in your control. I'm just trying to reconcile that with the ROI framework you outlined on the slide. I just want to make sure the ROI, at least the ROI framework doesn't prevent us from having margin accretion in these areas over time. It's just realistic on when we'll get more full realization of the investment, just given the time horizons to fully realize that. A good area, like in wealth, it's a longer-term time horizon to fully realize a lot of these investments just because of what I said. If we're building platforms and driving assets here, that doesn't mean that we can't get margin improvement over that time period gradually. We're just talking about full realization of a lot of those investments and returns. I don't want to mix the two up, that we wanted to be realistic on when we would expect more fully to realize the returns of the investments. That doesn't preclude us from driving margin improvement over that, over that time period. I guess the follow-up would be, setting aside the things that are not in your control, like the cyclical markets in which you operate, the end markets, of the things that you do have clear line of sight on control over, what are the 2 to 3 businesses within the broader Morningstar portfolio where you have the clearest line of sight on improving margins over the next 1 to 2 years? Yeah, I think, as our business leaders would attest to, I think we've got good line of sight honestly across all of our business areas. We work on 3-year planning. We're very focused in our business performance reviews on near-term and long-term opportunities. Our focus and our business leaders' focus is not just how to try to drive the top line, it's also how to drive margin. The only thing that I would say that some of our plans, you know, have certainly been disrupted on where we thought we might be at this point, just given some of the market headwinds, but that doesn't mean we're resetting longer term expectations. I think we do have line of sight and visibility, and that's why I could say in my remarks and the confidence in our operating plans that we're focused on getting there, we're building plans to get there, and we're incentivized to get there over time. Based on our visibility into the business, we believe we've got good opportunity across the areas that I've mentioned in my presentation. Hi, Kenta Suzuki, Asset Management One. Can you talk about your headcount growth expectation for this year and next year? You talked about historical peak margin a lot. At least can we expect slower hiring activity until you finally get back to your historical peak margin level? Thank you. Yeah, we don't expect that we'll be growing headcount materially from here. I think as Jason said, we feel like we have the people we need. You saw that trend that he put up there, and I think that's instructive of where our heads are. Hey, Vinay Prasad from Millennium again. First question is on DBRS. You guys have been hiring pretty aggressively in that business. Can you give us any sort of metrics to indicate whether you've gained material market share? 'Cause when I look at your revenue numbers versus your scaled peers, Moody's and S&P, it's not obvious that you're gaining market share, but I understand you play in different categories, and so anything you could provide would be helpful. Is Detlef on as well? 'Cause this might be a perfect one. I'm not sure. Is he on? Thumbs up. He's not on. Okay, I wasn't sure. First of all, just to answer your question, I'll do it 2 ways. One is we have been providing some market share information in the Q&As we've done. If there's something specifically that you're not seeing there, just let us know and we can try to do that. As it pertains to the hiring, what I would say is most of the hiring in that group has gone to a couple of things. One is we've grown the analytical staff in India to support the broader organization. That was a newer investment that had not existed in prior periods. Secondly, to the extent we've done hiring, it's largely been to build out teams in the middle market and private market area. They've not been substantially large investments, though. The final point that I'll make is we've invested a little bit in the data business there as well. It's very nascent, but we've been putting some resources behind that and we have a partnership as well with a U.K. firm in that area. It's not been a heavy area of new funding per se in my mind. Okay. The second question was on PitchBook. If I look at your sequential license additions, the fourth quarter was pretty modest. Licenses were close to flat sequentially. First quarter license growth was a lot stronger. If I look at the last six months on average, the trend's been softer than sort of the prior three years. I know you called out headwinds in the corporate segment, but is there anything else you can tell us to give us more confidence that that trend is purely due to cyclicality and not due to saturation of the addressable market? Yeah. Actually, the Q4... Sorry, go ahead. No, no. Well. No, no. Go, go for it. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the most important parts there is that as they look at highly metriced on both new logo acquisition and then existing client growth, as we look at the pipeline numbers in that business, it is at an all-time peak, and it continues to grow. The motion in our engagement there is great. We've seen conversion cycles slow a bit in this environment, and the team has confidence that'll open back up. The leading metrics, if you're to talk to Paul Santarelli or one of the leaders in sales there, the metrics are really positive. And they are eager in driving hard to get the conversions back to what they would call average conversions. That's. There was also just a lot of noise in our Q4 numbers. I think we put some meat behind that answer maybe in a March response, if I'm not mistaken. Was it March or February? That sort of details that we did a lot of cleanup as well. Some of the decline was just related to cleanup of old licenses and people who should not have had a login and things like that. I personally am not reading too much into that, and we feel pretty positive about the trends there. Yeah. Hi, Jared from PRIMECAP Management again. Is there a good analogy in terms of industry for how you expect ESG to play out? Is it gonna be similar to the proxy advisory industry or the ratings agency industry, or just a raw data feed industry? Thank you. This is a very long-term question. Yeah. Thank you. There's how I want it to play out and how it likely is gonna play out. Bob, you should feel free to weigh in as well. I mean, I'd like it to play out as a data-oriented business. I think for sure regulators are very focused on that part of the business and are likely to move it in the direction of a ratings business, although maybe not go as far as they have, at least initially. We are preparing as if, especially in Europe, that will be a highly regulated business. I don't know if you'd add anything else, Bob? Yeah, no, I agree. It's pretty certainly it's moving in that direction, and the regulations are becoming clearer and clearer. There will be some clear comparisons, or let's say, alignment with the credit rating agency's business model. Maybe if there's one or two more questions, we can do those. I know we've run a little long, but wanna make sure we get more questions in. Hey, just one more from me. Just going back to Sustainalytics, the trends you're seeing of the shift in demand away from ESG ratings more towards ESG sort of raw data, given that that's happening, how do you prevent the commoditization of ESG data, given that a lot of that is sorta scraped and put together from publicly available sources? Yeah. Bob, I'm gonna let you answer that question. Yeah. By first saying, though, it's really hard. It's non-standard data. It's not nearly as easy as something that shows up in a filing in a regular cadence that you can kinda pull. Go ahead, Bob. I maybe I'd start with that trend that you speak of. I don't think it's as simple, as clean as maybe presented that way. I think almost every one of our clients takes our ratings and the underlying information together to help contextualize the company. It's not, it's not clean like market data, and I think they need the full contextualization, and everyone still takes the rating, though they may increasingly be interested in leveraging the underlying data. It really Even the underlying data is calls and insights, so it is a complicated mix. I don't think the trend is as easy to say as this is moving towards data like market data. I think it you'll continue to have ratings. I think what will reinforce that is the ratings regulations coming in Europe. I think there is a trend, and clients increasingly want to see the underlying information. I think that's because they're more interested in trying to make more nuanced calls, not because they're dispensing with their rating. Maybe a related question. I guess as you look across all of your datasets across the company, clearly a lot of it is highly proprietary, like the valuation data and PitchBook. As you think about your portfolio of data assets as a whole, where do you see the most risk or the most, the most risk of commoditization, especially given the advent of generative AI, where are you sort of most worried? Yeah, no, it's a fair question. I think the way I think about it is any data that's just a pure commodity and easy to get, and you can kinda grab it, is gonna have some level of risk. We've always maintained that the key to our data is that we try to put our IP on top of it. So when you think about why we invest so heavily in research teams, it is because we think they can add additional context to the data. Whether it's the fact that the mutual fund database has unique IP associated with it, or it's the private equity database or the Sustainalytics database or even what we're starting to do in the credit space, it's always got a research angle on it. So I don't wanna be complacent about it. We think hard about it, but we think we have some unique moats in there. Look, even in areas where we've tried to build databases, like if you look at our efforts over time to build an equity data database, it has taken a long, long time and multi-year, you know, cycles, partly because, among other things, you need to build a history, and you need to have the history, and maybe it's easier to get the history than it was, but it's still more intensive than people make it out to be, and you have to have knowledge of the data. On the Sustainalytics side, one thing I would have added as well is, you actually have to understand what's going on in the data to make it useful to people who need to use it. We're aware of it. On the other side, it's actually something we're spending a lot of time on because we wanna be more efficient in how we gather data, so we can do more of the context setting. That's how I would answer it. It's a risk, but it's a known risk, and it's an opportunity, and we're trying to balance those things, but the investment in research is key to how we try to differentiate the data. Okay. I think we've gone more than an hour and a half, I appreciate everybody being here as always. Thank you so much for taking the time. If we didn't get to anything, you know, please do feel free to send us any questions, and we take your feedback very seriously. I think we've heard your thoughts and comments and, you know, it gives us a lot to reflect on. We want you to be successful 'cause you're obviously investing in our company, and just as we're vested, we know you're vested, and so I take that very, very seriously. You know, look forward to being back here again next year, and for all of you feeling positive that we're delivering on the things that we have said that we're gonna be doing. Thank you for being here, and safe travels home.