S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) Presents at Barclays Americas Select Franchise Conference (Transcript)

S&P Global Inc. (NYSE:SPGI) Barclays Americas Select Franchise Conference May 7, 2024 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Douglas Peterson - President and Chief Executive Officer

Conference Call Participants

Manav Patnaik - Barclays Capital

Manav Patnaik

All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us here after lunch. My name is Manav Patnaik. I'm Barclays' business and information services analyst and we're pleased to kick off the afternoon session here with Doug Peterson, who's the CEO of S&P Global. So, Doug, thank you for being here.

Douglas Peterson

Thank you for having us. Great conference.

Manav Patnaik

Thank you. Appreciate that. So first, Doug, maybe just a broad question. We're about two plus years since the close of the IHS market deal, almost three since you first announced it. So maybe just – we've gone through a lot of cost energies, you've had that much time to look through it. So maybe your assessment today on what your portfolio looks like and your level of happiness with that.

Douglas Peterson

Yes, so going back three or four years ago when we first conceived of the merger with IHS Markit, we had identified some long-term trends, secular trends that we thought at that time were going to be driving the growth of the financial markets in the future, data analytics in particular, things like sustainability. We didn't call it private markets at the time, but it's the same thing as private markets.

We thought that core data and analytics would also go into the benchmark business that might change the rating space, and that we needed a partner who would allow us to get a lot more scale. We figured we couldn't do it through organic growth, and we couldn't do it through bolt-on acquisitions, so we wanted something much bigger and bolder that we