All right, we will go ahead and get started. Thank you, everybody, for joining us this afternoon. If you don't know me, I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and I cover capital markets here at Raymond James. Up next, we have S&P Global, and on their behalf, we have CEO Martina Cheung. We're going to have a fireside chat conversation, so welcome. Thanks, Patrick. So, to kick things off, for the benefit of the folks in the room who are a little bit less familiar with S&P Global, can you just spend a few minutes talking about the company as you see it today? Yeah, absolutely. Well, the company, as we have it today, is, I think, at the heart of a lot of the decisions that are being made on a day-to-day basis, whether it's in the financial markets, the commodity markets, and even by a lot of our corporate clients across their supply chains and as they think about the outlook over the next several years. And so, really, the way that I think about the company is five divisions essentially enabling our clients to make the highest quality decisions as they go throughout their, whether it's creating their strategy, managing day-to-day, navigating the markets. And you see that through the benchmarks that we have: credit ratings, indices, price assessments, but also an incredible depth and breadth of data across the portfolio and unparalleled technology products and software products. And I think one of the things that's most exciting about our business is, in the meetings that I've been having with our senior clients in the last six months, we get a lot of feedback around, "Wow, I didn't know you did that also," and a lot of follow-ups in those meetings saying, "I need to know more about that. I didn't know you did it." And so, it's a wonderful time, I think, to be at S&P Global. We're here for our clients in the uncertain times as well as the good times, and we're helping a lot of our clients right now on both of those. Terrific. And then what are some of S&P's key priorities for 2025? We have, I would say, a number of areas that we're focused on. On the growth side, we've laid out our guidance, obviously, a few weeks ago that contemplates us focusing on really strong execution in our core businesses while we look to seize as much opportunity as we can in areas where we see very strong secular tailwinds, whether it's in private markets, generative AI, energy transition, and other areas. A lot for us to do on the growth side. As part of that, you may remember we have set up a Chief Client Office, and that's really helping us to engage at more senior levels with our largest strategic customers around the world. That level of engagement is allowing us to position the company holistically with those clients and often to give us either cross-sell opportunities, but also to better position us to get to where our clients need to be and to create more value for them and ultimately, of course, for our shareholders. I think we're also very focused on execution. There's a lot that we can do around tighter execution within the portfolio. You see that through us launching our Enterprise Data Office, but we've also been running very successful cross-division capabilities around generative AI and technology, and we're doubling up on that as we go through the next several years with the goal of removing as much as we can by way of unnecessary redundancies between divisions or between divisions in our corporate functions and how we do things. We want to be as streamlined as we can be. We want to move as quickly as we can be to meet our customers' needs. And so, I would say those are some of the key areas of focus for us in 2025. So, you kind of foreshadowed this one already, but you met with 85% of your largest strategic customers during the CEO transition period. Did anything surprise you during those meetings? We did have a couple of customers, and I suppose this is, it's a surprise, but it's also a really interesting opportunity. We did have a couple of customers who said, "Oh, I only thought of you as a rating agency, and I didn't realize you did all this stuff." And, you know, while that's a pity, it's also a really fantastic opportunity for us, and we're stepping up on that, as I've mentioned, through the Chief Client Office and our ability to get out and really engage our largest strategic clients. The Chief Client Office itself, they've had hundreds of meetings. So, you know, as we talk about this level of engagement at more senior levels, it's not just me. It's not even just the Executive Leadership Team. It's making sure that we can actually raise the dialogue and the narrative to more senior levels at our clients to allow us to bring the full depth and breadth and, frankly, make interacting with us a little bit easier for our clients also. I think the biggest surprise, then, if you like, coming out of that is just there are such a myriad of opportunities for us to expand and grow, and I think it's just making sure that we're picking the areas where we can deliver more at scale and quicker for our clients across divisions and being thoughtful about that and, you know, finding our way this year to pinpoint three, four, five key areas where we want to make sure we're doubling down with our clients, our largest strategic clients, at scale and working across all divisions as we do that. Since becoming the CEO of S&P Global, you've really filled out your management team. In October, S&P announced a new head of your Market Intelligence segment. What were you trying to achieve with that change? So, Saugata Saha, the new division president for Market Intelligence. You may remember him from having run Commodity Insights at very strong levels of performance over the last several years. So, Saugata and the new leadership team there, working with myself and others across the broader executive leadership team, are focused on three key priorities. The first is greater alignment around go-to-market. The second is making sure that we can remove as many silos as possible within the Market Intelligence business, and the third is really on strengthening execution and improving efficiency. On the first part of it, this really dovetails nicely into what we're doing with the Chief Client Office. And so, when I say aligning go-to-market more, what I mean is that we will have, instead of a, you know, one sales team going in for software, one sales team going in for, you know, risk products, et cetera, that we have a more holistic view by account within our teams. And that's something that the sales team put into place actually pretty quickly. So, greater focus on each customer and greater thinking around how we can actually accelerate some of the dialogue with our customers and make sure we're picking up the opportunities that, if we don't look at them holistically, could fall between the different groups within the division. And so, I think that's key. Removing silos is as much an opportunity in the go-to-market piece of it, whether it's removing some silos, you know, across the product group areas. But it's also making sure that if we're going to do something in a, you know, accelerated way, for example, integrating generative AI in certain ways in our products, that we can actually do that as quickly as possible and that it's not one group doing something differently to another group. And then on the efficiency side of it, there's, I think, just generally great opportunities for us. One, for example, for Market Intelligence, specifically through the creation of the Enterprise Data Office. That's going to allow us the ability to integrate generative AI at scale, reduce redundancies, and I think generally move more quickly to create value for our customers through our data. I think sometimes investors struggle with the complexity of S&P Global and the perception that the company is so diverse that there's always going to be something going wrong somewhere. How do you respond to that perception? I would say that we have a degree of diversity and breadth in the portfolio that actually provides good offsets when things are actually going bad. And so, you know, there's no question, I think, objectively, that Ratings had a bad year in 2022. Anybody can look at the decline in Ratings revenue, which is, you know, an extremely robust decline in Ratings revenue, and compare that to the fact that we were able to contain that decline meaningfully across the enterprise. The business only declined 4%, where Ratings revenues declined more like 30+%. And so, I think that's a key indicator of our ability to say, actually, if something is going bad in one of the businesses, we have an offset in one of the other businesses. And, you know, we operate some of the most important benchmarks in the world. Those benchmarks are jewels for S&P Global. They're also, in some ways, very market-dependent. And so, our ability to balance that with some of our very strong subscription areas within Market Intelligence, within Commodity Insights, within Mobility and Index is a way for us to make sure that we can contain any exposure to those market volumes in a solid way. S&P's preliminary expectations for 2025 call for 5%-7% revenue growth in aggregate and up to 100 basis points of operating margin expansion. What are the key assumptions that underlie this outlook? And do you think that the upside opportunity and the downside risks are pretty evenly balanced? Yeah, so I would say we've positioned ourselves to be able to come out with, particularly in a year where we have, at an enterprise level, a very difficult comparison year-over-year, a year when we can still generate meaningful margin expansion and solid growth rates, and you know, on the margin expansion front, we're now in the top half of the range that we guided to at Investor Day in 2025, and that's something that we're, you know, we're pretty happy about when it comes to how we're achieving margin expansion across the portfolio. On the growth side, maybe just to tick down quickly through, you know, some of the drivers around this for Ratings, I think maybe the best statement I can make is we don't have heroic assumptions across our Ratings guide for 2025. We're assuming basically the refinancing of any in-year 2025 outstanding maturity walls, modest pull forward from 2026 and even less from 2027, 2028, and then a modest amount of M&A. And that's really sort of like underpinning, if you like, the transaction revenues. And on the non-transaction side for Ratings, we see roughly similar growth to the overall picture. And so, that's guiding on Ratings. I think for Market Intelligence, I've talked a little bit about some of the ways in which the team has set themselves up for a good start in 2025. A lot of that comes back to the strong execution in Q4, where we saw ACV come in about one or two points above the Q4 revenue growth rate, and we also saw retention at the best levels in about six quarters. And so, that positions the Market Intelligence business coming into the year as with the guide that we've provided there. I think more broadly for index, obviously that's, you know, hooking into index market valuations, but also some incredible innovation we're seeing from the index team in new products and factors, thematics and others, as well as strong execution in custom and data. And then in other areas of the business, whether it's Commodity Insights, mobility, here we're seeing some really great momentum, continued momentum from both our core products as well as strong investments that those teams have made in new products over the last couple of years and seeing that come back with good margin expansion as well. So, speaking of investments, your 2025 CapEx outlook of $190 million-$200 million compares to an average spend of about $130 million over the last two years. So, what are some of the specific areas that you're ramping up some of these capital expenditures? The CapEx increase is more of a delayed timing impact year-over-year. We had a number of projects in technology and real estate that were essentially pushed from 2024 into 2025. It's really more of a timing question. I think had it not been for that, you'd be seeing something similar. More broadly, we, as you know, we do not amortize in any way noteworthy. And so, you're looking at our investments essentially flowing through the P&L, and we think that's, you know, that's something that is highly disciplined and something that we're going to continue to do going forward. So, S&P's rating franchise, which you led prior to becoming CEO, not only had a very strong 2024, but also seems to be doing a bit better than your closest peer, particularly in structured finance. What do you think has been driving S&P's relative share gains in that business? We don't manage the market share within the business. We did say that our coverage of structured finance, when we spoke in 2022 at our Investor Day, that we really wanted to rethink our coverage of structured finance. You saw us in 2022 not restructure our analytical teams. You saw us essentially preserve that capacity. That was one part of it. The other part of it was hiring in some senior commercial talent as well as having a really robust go-to-market approach around the new issuers and, in some cases, the GPs, for example. All of that has been a multi-year-long project, and we've seen improvement in our coverage in structured finance year-over-year. Very pleased with the momentum. We're going to continue to work that muscle as we go forward. We think that we are an important part of the structured finance universe and very proud of the momentum the teams have. Speaking of structured finance, there was actually an article in the Wall Street Journal, I think either today or yesterday, talking about how structured finance has really taken back off. And there's a recent conference in Las Vegas that was really well attended. What are you seeing in structured finance right now in terms of market demand for some of that content and some of the innovation in that space? I would say there are a number of areas that have contributed to the general uptick. In some cases, obviously, last year we saw a very, very steep growth in some of the issuances across structured. So, structured is made up of multiple different asset classes. Some of the areas that we've pointed out that are particularly noteworthy, I would say, maybe from the last couple of years, CLO issuance has grown quite substantially. Within that, there's also the emergence of sort of like almost like a new sub-asset class, middle market CLOs, which has really generated quite a lot of dialogue with sponsors, for example, in the industry. The sponsors have been one of the sources of additional issuance as they're looking to manage their own portfolios and their own exposures and balance sheets. And that's been, I think, an area which has generated quite a lot of ABS issuance as well. There are some new subsectors that have emerged. So, you know, for us, we will be really thoughtful about a new subsector. It's got to reach a certain level before we'll actually create a new methodology. We did create a new methodology for data center securitizations, for example, in the past year. And so, you know, it tends to sort of come through in sort of different pockets. But I think the areas that we had highlighted over the last several years being, you know, sort of broader structured ABS, as well as the part of structured that is driven and deeply connected with the private sector, those have come to fruition and continue to grow in an interesting way. Despite 2024 being a really strong year for Ratings revenue and some of your investments that you're making in structured finance headcount, I think I saw that your Ratings headcount was actually down 1% at year-end 2024 versus year-end 2023. What does that decline say about your ability to scale that Ratings business going forward? Yeah. Well, one of the points that we've been making is that our ability to integrate generative AI is starting to come through in a couple of different ways. The first is in our ability to expand margins. And in the Ratings business, you'll have seen us commit to additional margin expansion this year, even coming off the incredible year that we had last year. A part of that has been the productivity that we've been able to achieve through a broader program that we call AI+, which is both the inclusion of generative AI as well as enhanced automation across the Ratings division. And that's also one of the factors that's driving our ability to actually exit the year with a lower headcount year-over-year. We have not reduced our analytical headcount. So, within our net down slightly, you'll see us having grown in some areas in analytical, for example, and being able to contain growth or even reduce in other areas. Let's talk about a couple of key trends that are relevant for S&P across multiple segments, maybe starting with the private assets ecosystem, and you touched on this a little bit earlier. How is S&P uniquely positioned to play a role in private assets? We have a really broad and interesting set of capabilities in private space, and I would say last year was an incredible year. We saw Q4 close out with 29% growth in our private markets revenues across the divisions. One of the key growth drivers of that was actually our credit ratings penetration into the private space, measured more by the number of sponsors that we're engaging with and how we're actually engaging with them to rate their portfolios, as well as some of the other areas of opportunity within the private space for S&P Ratings in particular. Outside of that, we have some of the best software and platforms available to serve private markets, so iLevel is a key workflow and reporting tool for many private equity firms around the world. Wall Street Office is an incredible part of the overall infrastructure of the market that captures a tremendous amount of data within the private space, so a part of what we are doing is just, I would say, benefiting from the fundamental growth in the space. One of our opportunities is to also take a fresh look at the assets that we have and see if there are any ways in which we can continue to grow through innovation, new products that supplement those current assets, even in some cases, we may look to see if there are logical partnerships that we can do, such as the UBS Leveraged Loan Partnership that we mentioned in our last quarter earnings. And then Gen AI, obviously another key trend. And you kind of mentioned it in context of efficiencies in your Ratings business. Where else is GenAI playing a role, whether it's Market Intelligence or mobility or other segments? The capability and the power of generative AI is so vast and so broad that, you know, we try to sort of just find a way to frame all the activity that we have happening around this right now. It's pretty expansive, so first is potential. There's incredible potential from a revenue enhancement and growth standpoint, and that can be all the way from there is a core enhancement to an existing product that creates an opportunity come renegotiation for a price increase, all the way to new products, standalone products, and products that can allow us to actually get into new client sets and new personas, and so we're investing in and exploring all opportunities across that spectrum, and that goes for Commodity Insights, Market Intelligence, Mobility, and as well as S&P Dow Jones. Less of an opportunity there, I would say, for S&P Ratings. The efficiency and effective piece I talked about in the context of Ratings, but you can imagine that there are other ways in which we could benefit from the integration of generative AI and generate efficiencies. We've talked about that in the context of the Enterprise Data Office, which is the single largest collection of our employees around the company, and that's a place where we think integrating those capabilities at scale can really generate some efficiency and productivity for us as we go forward, but there are many other areas that we can look at around that, and we're seeing some of those gains already appearing again in some of the margin expansion that we guided to in 2025. We are also thinking extensively around the ways in which this is going to change how people work and potentially even kind of reshape a little bit some of the jobs that are out there. That's a much longer-term question, but we have to start thinking today about, you know, what does the workforce look like five, ten years from now so that we can begin to make sure that we're orienting in the correct way around that. We've started to train pretty extensively. We've made that training mandatory for our employees because we want to make sure, first and foremost, all of our employees are Gen AI literate. And we have about 29,000 people using our Spark product or that have used our Spark product since we launched it. So, that's an area that I think we're really showing some momentum. And the beautiful part of that is, as our teams innovate and you have experts like an economist or a credit rating analyst actually able to design and build their own Sparks, the possibility that you could actually take that Spark out to your customers and create value for your customers is also kind of exciting for us. And then the last area I feel I have to mention is just incredibly important. This is going to change the ways in which we need to think about cyber and the perimeter of our company. And that's something that we're thinking about very, very carefully and engaging all the right resources to do that around the company. How are you and the board currently thinking about M&A? And does a different antitrust philosophy in Washington, D.C., or presumably different antitrust philosophy, broaden the universe of potential acquisitions that you would consider? I would say M&A is a strategic question. So, we have to think really carefully around what are the types of assets, capabilities, and products that we think we should own. Do we have enough of that within the portfolio? And if not, are there areas for us to go and look at it? I can tell you that we don't have an appetite for transformative M&A right now. What we do, what we have been doing is thinking carefully around tuck-ins. We've been thinking around, you know, how we can make sure that, you know, that we're looking at our divisions in the right way and have our capabilities filled out in the right way. We also take a look at it from the opposite side, which is, you know, how we manage divestitures, dispositions, et cetera. You've seen us do some of those in Market Intelligence. We will constantly look at how we do divestitures, you know, across all of the divisions to make sure that we are the right owners, that we're putting the capital to work in the best ways possible. This is definitely something I think the Market Intelligence team has increased, you know, their discipline on in the last year, and I'd expect all of our divisions to be really disciplined around that as we go forward. You touched on index innovation a little bit ago. What are some of the innovations that S&P is currently working on, and how does that take advantage of some of the key secular themes in the index space? Yeah. So, I think innovation in the index area is, I think, has been picking up momentum over the last, call it sort of three to four years. It's an area where to launch a new benchmark, to launch a new index, and actually accumulate the assets under management such that that benchmark begins to really add to the bottom line, not just to the top line, is something that the team it takes some time. And the team, I think, has been really thoughtful and accelerated. And they found a really good flywheel within the product organization to get more innovations out the door as quickly as possible. So, there are some of the areas that we're looking at very closely would be public-private factors, thematics. We continue to see a lot of innovation and interest in energy transition and sustainability more broadly. Obviously, our ETD franchise has, you know, benefited and continues to be an area that we're focused on for growth over the long term. How are you thinking about pricing power right now, and, you know, has it changed at all in recent years, and how does it apply across the different segments? So, we don't guide to price, you know, as we look forward. I would say that we will always align price to value. And this is something that, within the context of our various different divisions, we'll make sure that we have taken into consideration our ability to manage long-term customer relationships as well. And so, you know, we will be very thoughtful about that depending on which division it is. I think if you kind of look across the divisions within Ratings, we would say reasonably modest contribution from price, for example, in 2025. Within Market Intelligence, we will certainly look to price to value. I would say, you know, that team in Market Intelligence, you know, as we look at the book within Market Intelligence, we've, you know, we've said that the first year, first half of the year will be a little bit slower than the second half of the year, taking into consideration not just our ability to create value and improve the economics through price, but also the ways in which we're seeing some of the end markets recover, as well as stronger retention rates. I think in the first half, some of that top line, you know, kind of weakness relative to the second half will also be reflected in the margin, and I think we had pointed this out also during our earnings call a couple of weeks ago. Maybe just to put a finer point on it relative to Market Intelligence margins, we'd expect our Q1 margin to come in looking something similar to our Q3 2024 margin, and that's taking into consideration, you know, our ability to retain, our ability to continue to lap the cancels from last year, as well as our ability to extract some productivity as we go start the year in good shape and go out throughout the rest of the year. All right. Terrific. I think that's a good spot to end, but we'll have a breakout session downstairs, and everybody, thank you for joining us.