Moody's Corporation (MCO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to Moody's Investor Day. I'm Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations at Moody's Corporation. Before we start the formal part of today's proceedings, I'd like to call your attention to the safe harbor language, which can be found in the deck we published earlier today. Today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In accordance with the act, I also direct your attention to the Management's Discussion and Analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, and in other SEC filings made by the company, which are available on our website and on the SEC's website. These, together with the safe harbor statement, set forth important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such forward-looking statements. And with that, I will hand over to Rob.

Thanks, Shivani. We got the really interesting stuff out of the way right out of the gate. Good morning. I'm Rob Fauber, President and CEO of Moody's, and it's really my pleasure to welcome you here to our 2022 Investor Day, especially those of you who are here in person. It's really wonderful be able to spend some time together. Before we get started, I do want to take a moment to touch on the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine, and it goes without saying that we are deeply saddened by the terrible impact of these events. And our thoughts are with all of our people and all of the people that are affected by this. We recently announced that Moody's is suspending commercial operations in Russia, while maintaining analytical ratings coverage from outside of Russia. And we of course are going to deliver ongoing support for our Moscow-based employees, and we really are profoundly grateful to them for their professionalism. In addition, The Moody's Foundation has made a $250,000 donation to the International Rescue Committee to provide relief to the people of Ukraine. So now turning to our agenda for the day. Our goal is really to discuss our vision of how we will build upon our strong foundation and execute our strategy to drive future growth. And the last time that we held an in-person Investor Day was actually back in 2018. I was thinking back to our last Investor Day is in 2020. And in the middle of that virtual Investor Day, the WHO declared a global pandemic, and I'm not sure anybody heard another word after that. So it's really great to have you all here in person. Since 2018, Moody's has really evolved and expanded, and I really couldn't be more proud of our accomplishments over that period. Our revenue has grown 40% since 2018. And knowing this audience, I know you already know that's a 12% compound annual growth rate over the last 3 years to $6 billion in revenue in 2021. And these impressive results are partly attributed to the investments that we're making back into the business, and that's really allowed us to further penetrate existing markets, but I think, very importantly, also expand our reach into new markets and serve new use cases. It's accelerated the growth of our current addressable market from something like $27 billion to now, we think of that current addressable market, a little over $40 billion. And I think you're going to see that our commitment to investing in high-growth markets to meet our customers clearly evolving needs, that's going to be a recurring theme today. And along the way, we have returned more than $4 billion of capital to our stockholders through share repurchases and dividends. And we really are confident in our ability to continue generating strong results, even amidst what's going on in the world today, and we'll talk about that today. So let me turn for a moment to our most important asset, and that is our people. And without their commitment and their expertise, frankly, none of this would be possible. And I talk with our employees. It's pretty simple. We want Moody's to be a place that people want to come and stay, a place where people can be their authentic selves. And we have created an inclusive workplace where diverse top talent can thrive, and that's important at a time when companies are competing to attract and retain talent. We're really pleased to have been recognized as a leading employer through a number of prestigious awards, recently a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index. This stuff matters right now. We're also very proud that our market-leading products and solutions are being recognized by the customers that we serve. It's a real validation. Our growth and success are really a testament to the value that we bring, and I do believe a result of executing on these strategic priorities that you're going to continue to hear more and more about. And I was reflecting coming into this Investor Day on my first earnings call as CEO. It was a little over a year ago. And I talked about, and I introduced those 3 strategic priorities. It's what I talk about over and over and over at the firm. To help Moody's really realize the full potential as what we think of a global, integrated, risk assessment firm, and we are successfully executing on those priorities. They're going to continue to drive our growth. First, we are focused on our customers in enhancing the quality of experience with us but, very importantly, in better understanding their evolving needs because those needs are changing. I'm sure you can appreciate that. Why are we doing that? So that our customers want to deepen their relationships with us. We're investing with intent to build new capabilities, to better serve those evolving needs and to access new markets. And across the company, we're modernizing and collaborating and innovating, I really think, in new and exciting ways to really accelerate our growth. That includes providing easier access to more of our data and analytics and in integrating it across our offerings, where our customers want and need it, again, with a goal of enhancing and deepening the ways that we serve our customers. So this combination of focus on strategic priorities and commitment to our people, I kind of think of this as a secret sauce for us, but it's never been more important than in this day and age. And we're going to continue to use this recipe, the successful recipe to further accelerate our growth as we help our customers decode risk and unlock opportunity. And I do believe that Moody's has never been more relevant than we are at this very moment. And in times of crisis, and certainly, we are in a very challenging period right now, Moody's brings clarity and transparency to the markets. As we meet today, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is clearly causing significant increase in financial market volatility and uncertainty. And there really is tremendous desire for markets and organizations to understand the immediate and the longer-term impacts of this crisis. I think the parallels to the pandemic are real, and it's why we've made our research freely available on this topic. We're still contending with higher inflation and global supply chain disruptions. Central banks are poised to raise interest rates and unwind their balance sheets. And there's no doubt that geopolitical risks are impacting debt capital market activity. But the fundamental drivers of issuance over the medium and longer term, we believe that those remain firmly intact. And while interest rates are forecast to rise this year, GDP is still expected to grow. Even as market volatility has resulted in credit spread fluctuations, if you look at all-in financing costs, they still remain well below historical averages. So that cost of borrowing remains historically low at the moment, and more than $4 trillion in debt needs to be refinanced in the next 4 years. So guided by our century-long experience over many credit cycles, we believe that the long-term conditions for capital market expansion, namely economic growth and disintermediation, those remain intact. We're also investing in our capabilities. And we have, what I believe, are the most experienced analysts in the industry, and that really is never more important than times like the last 2 years where you've had a pandemic, and now we're in a period of geopolitical conflict. Our deep experience and extensive coverage and thought-leading research has really served to reinforce the confidence that issuers and investors place in us, and that makes us -- we have a phrase that we like to talk about in the rating agency. We want to be the agency of choice for issuers and investors. And we're investing in the long-term future of our business by expanding geographically and enhancing our capabilities. We're building out our coverage -- domestic coverage across Latin America through Moody's Local, and we recently announced the acquisition of GCR, which really gives us an unmatched presence across the African continent serving domestic markets there. I think of that as kind of a generational investment. That's a long-term investment in our future. We're committed to building out our ESG and sustainable finance offerings. And by year-end, we expect to have something like 10,000 ESG credit impact scores, providing extensive analyst-engaged ESG coverage. We've also rolled out over 400 carbon transition assessments on companies in the most carbon-intensive industries. So by executing on our strategic priorities, we're well positioned for a future where we remain that agency of choice in cross-border and domestic markets. Now let me pivot to MA for a moment. And as we announced back on our last earnings call, we've changed the reporting structure of MA to provide you with some greater insight and transparency into that business. MA is a much larger business today than when we started in 2007. In fact, I specifically remember back in 2007 when Moody's Analytics was a PowerPoint idea, so it's really gratifying to see the growth in that business. It's grown at a 12% compound annual growth rate from 2007 to 2021, has tripled its annual revenue since inception. And it really is fundamental to our global integrated risk assessment strategy. So from the first quarter onwards, MA will have 3 reporting lines of business. The first is Data & Information. That really houses our best-in-class curated proprietary data sets that are available to customers on a variety of flexible delivery platforms. These proprietary data sets on companies and securities and credit profiles, they fuel a wide range of risk assessment use cases, and they support our competitive positioning in our other offerings. So it's kind of the -- it's an important foundational platform for us. Second is Research & Insights, through which we provide macro and industry and company research, models, analytics, expertise to help our customers identify, measure and manage risk. That includes our web-based CreditView platform, credit models and tools and our extensive predictive analytics and economics offerings. And the third is what we're calling Decision Solutions, integrates -- really integrates elements from Data & Information as well as Research & Insights, and it provides comprehensive solutions and workflow tools for specific use cases. So helping companies with KYC and customer screening and onboarding and monitoring may be never more important than right at this moment; helping banks and insurers with credit and insurance underwriting and risk and finance functions, among others. And we believe that this change provides you with a better understanding of the markets, which MA operates in and the value propositions that we are serving for our customers. So MA has got some great momentum. It's consistently demonstrated its resilience since 2007, and you think about the cycles that we've been through in those 13, 14 years. All 3 of MA's lines of business have very strong rates of retention and recurring revenue. And that consistent strong performance, I think it really reflects the mission-critical nature of the use cases that we serve for our customers as well as the investments that we've made to meet our customers' evolving needs. And I think, importantly, MA operates in large and growing markets, and that provides a tremendous source of future opportunity for us. And let me just try to dimension it for a moment. As of year-end, we estimate that MA's current addressable market is something like $30 billion. And we project that, that will grow in the low double-digit range over the next 5 years. And there's a variety of secular trends that are going to be powering the growth of those end markets: the need to manage heightened reputational and operational risk, the accelerating and proliferation of data creation and what our customers tell us is the need to understand the signal from the noise; a complex and dynamic regulatory environment, which is going to continue to result in new risk management and disclosure requirements for our customers; and, of course, increased pace of digital transformation across a range of industries, and I think that was really catalyzed by the pandemic. So we're making investments to meet these needs by continuing to invest in our people, in our technology, in our products. And we're complementing that investment in the business with inorganic investments to build our presence in targeted high-growth markets, and you've seen us do that over the past, let's say, 18 months. And we believe that is going to help us outpace market growth by up to 20% over the next 5 years. Our goal is to grow faster than our end markets are growing. And we're excited about the momentum across our portfolio, and we look forward to realizing the opportunities ahead of us. So with that, let me hand the stage over to Mark Kaye, our Chief Financial Officer.

Good morning, and thank you, Rob. As we noted earlier, the conflict in Ukraine is deeply concerning for all of us. In times of uncertainty such as these, markets and organizations look to Moody's for our expertise and our insights, as we continue to fulfill our purpose to bring knowledge and clarity to an interconnected world. When we announced our full year 2022 guidance on February 10, we anticipated constructive market conditions with the prospect of interest rate increases, driving opportunistic issuance in the first half of 2022, at least at line -- at least in line with the prior year period. Indeed, first-time mandates in the first 2 months of the year were strong and consistent with our expectations. However, the markets and stakeholders we serve have been impacted by the unfolding conflict in Ukraine and the accompanying uncertainty and volatility. These geopolitical tensions as well as various macroeconomic factors have resulted in significantly lower year-to-date issuance. Specifically, average daily investment-grade activity has declined by almost 50%, and we have experienced over 15 days with no high-yield issuance, conditions that we do not anticipate will substantively change for the month of March. Consequently, we are projecting first quarter rated issuance and MIS revenue to decline by up to 40% and up to 30%, respectively, versus the first quarter of 2021. Moody's first quarter adjusted diluted EPS is forecast to be in the range of $2.50 to $3. Per our regular report in cadence, we plan to refresh our full year 2022 outlook as part of our first quarter earnings call materials. Looking forward, the fundamentals of our business remain robust, and we are pleased to reaffirm our medium-term targets. We are confident in our ability to achieve revenue growth of at least 10% on an average annualized basis and to grow adjusted diluted EPS in the low double-digit percent range over the coming 5 years. And we are keenly focused on continuing to invest in high-growth markets, including investments in Know Your Customer solutions. These are important tools for governments, companies and other organizations around the world as they work to comply with evolving sanctions. Our proprietary databases provide company information on corporate structures, adverse media, sanctions and watch lists. And by helping our customers understand and manage their obligations related to these sanctions, we're enabling them to conduct business responsibly, while making more informed decisions. As we have for the last century, Moody's will continue to provide value to the capital markets and deliver sustainable value to our stockholders. I'll now hand it back over to Rob for final remarks.

So thanks, Mark. As you can see from today's presentation and the videos that we released last week, that was Shivani's homework to all of you, there are a number of key takeaways that are at the core of our ability to help our customers, again, you'll hear this phrase, decode, risk and unlock opportunities. But above all, we have confidence in the future for 3 reasons. One, we're laser-focused on our customers. We're focused on their experience with us and understanding their evolving needs and we've expanded our capabilities across a wider range of risks so that we can deepen our customer relationships. And that is going to help us achieve growth over the medium term and achieve those targets that Mark just talked about. Second, and I'm a runner. So I'd like to say that we're running our own race here. The Ratings business is a great business. And the structural drivers for growth, they remain intact over the medium term, even though we are experiencing some near-term volatility. Moody's is built on a unique set of capabilities, and it's anchored by this integrated risk assessment strategy that I think positions us for resilience and sustainable growth. And third, we've got a great team. That includes our more than 13,000 colleagues worldwide. It also includes the management team. And we're fortunate to have a group of dedicated and experienced and passionate leaders at this company who have been through many cycles and many situations together. And I really am excited that you're going to get an opportunity to hear from some of them today. Beyond Mark and I, who you're always hearing on the earnings call. I'm sure you're getting tired of us. And so with that, we're going to play a short video that highlights some of the exciting things going on here at Moody's. [Presentation]

Hello, and welcome to the Q&A session of our Investor Day today. I -- before I start, just a few legal words that I need to say. So I would like to call your attention to the safe harbor language, which can be found in the deck we published earlier today. Today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In accordance with the act, I also direct your attention to the Management's Discussion and Analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, and in other SEC filings made by the company, which are available on our website and on the SEC's website. These, together with the safe harbor statement, set forth important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such forward-looking statements.

So let's start -- and there are questions -- if you could submit your questions via Slido, please?

Nothing in the room?

No. We're just purely by Slido because we want to make it available to people who are watching virtually. I'd like to introduce my panelists who I have Steve Tulenko, the President of Moody's Analytics. I have Anne Van Praagh, who is our Global Head of Sovereign Risk Ratings and Research. I have Rob Fauber, President and CEO of Moody's. I have Mark Kaye, Chief Financial Officer. I have Isabel Gomez Vidal, who is the Chief Revenue Officer of Moody's Analytics. And I have Mike West, who is the President of Moody's Investor Services. As a reminder, if you can access Slido, the QR code is on your badges, if you would like to be submitting questions. So starting with the first question that I've got through, and I think it's very topical today is Russia and Ukraine. And the first question is, what is the impact on the Moody's business, if we can possibly touch on that?

Yes, Shivani. By the way, I love the video. This is a great way to start. It's better than the disclaimer. So Russia and Ukraine, I think there's a few ways to think about this in terms of the impact. The first is on our people and operations in Russia. The second is on the impact to our business and business outlook. And then the third is really thinking about what does this mean for -- from kind of a macro and systemic perspective. What is this going to mean for the markets? So I mentioned in my remarks that we had suspended commercial operations. We announced that on Saturday morning. We're continuing to provide the ratings. And that's very important. We're doing that from offshore. It's very important because we're continuing to provide the transparency for our investors. And a theme that I think you're going to hear today is -- this is when our customers need us the most. This is when they're looking to us. So we're going to continue to provide that analytical coverage. From an overall revenue perspective, in terms of revenue coming out of our Russian business, it's immaterial to Moody's. It's a good bit less than 1%. But I think the -- and I'm sure we're going to talk more about what does this mean in terms of financial market volatility. Mark gave you a sense of what the impact has been through the first quarter, and I'm sure we'll talk more about that. But I think it might also be interesting. Anne, I'm going to turn to you here in a second. Just we're still figuring out how this is -- effectively how this is unfolding and kind of what the transmission mechanisms are of this crisis. So I don't know, maybe you could give us some sense of that.

Yes, happy to. As the head of Sovereign, it feels like we've had a front row seat to a lot of what's been unfolding. And analytically speaking, we've been thinking about sort of 3 key channels to credit markets, credit risk. The first, obviously, the direct impacts of sanctions and the retaliatory measures that the government of Russia has taken against those sanctions, direct impact for Russia and Ukraine. The reality right now is that if you are a nonresident holder of debt coming to you by Russia, you are not getting paid. So that's pretty immediate impact of the crisis. And so most Russian issuers are going to have -- if they haven't already defaulted, have very high default risk. And same for Ukraine. Ukraine is under a major onslaught at the moment. Now there are a couple of other related issuers that will also be directly impacted. But the second main channel of risk, and with broader spillover effects, is energy prices and inflation. So energy prices now with oil at over USD 100 per barrel, and very volatile conditions. Gas prices have spiked, and had already spiked in the fall. This is coming on top of what was pretty entrenched inflationary pressures already. So that complicates the picture and create some new downside risks that we're seeing. Third main channel of risk that we're looking at is market volatility, financing conditions. And of course, it's always the weakest position to have external financing needs that are -- that are feeling the effects of higher and more volatile interest rates. So that's something that we're thinking about, and we can get more into that in a little bit.

Thanks, Anne.

I think the next question that we've got is people just wanting more detail on the impact, specifically to MIS and MA. So if I could just ask what -- how is that impacting the businesses?

You want to go first, Mike?

Yes. I'll take that. From an MI's perspective, I think that some of the prelim remarks covered in terms of the issuance impact so far, the impact, as Rob mentioned, is pretty small in terms of direct revenues. It's all now about volatility in the market. And that volatility and the duration of that volatility. At the same time, there is uncertainty around those interest rates. So what we're expecting to see, as Anne had outlined, is that transmission effect across our portfolio and the extent to which that impacts others and their decisions to issue debt. What Robert also mentioned is that this is also a great opportunity. This is a really great opportunity for MIS to really show their capabilities at this time. As a business, we've been through many of different crises. And this one is about the short-term impact. But overall, the long-term robustness of how we operate, what we do is very much intact. Steve, I don't know if you want to add anything.

Yes. So the rating analysts are working hard to make sure that we're on top of this. Of course, we've been working very hard in Moody's Analytics as well. I often talk about when risk is higher, people tend to call us more. And this is 1 of those occasions where we're very, very actively supporting our customers right now. Usage on our website is up, as you can imagine. Usage of our product called Orbis, which is the core product that provides private company information is up literally at peak levels of all time. And maybe just to give you an example of the kinds of things we're doing. Today, you may have read about -- there's certain people who have been sanctioned today in the news. If I were to give you an example of how this plays through with our KYC business, and we have to make sense of these sanctions and then relate them to all of the potential ways in which our customers might interact with the individual or the entity that's been sanctioned is to play through as it happen. There's an example we can show you when you step out and look at our product here. The example you'll see on the screen is there's 3 individuals that were sanctioned last week. Those 3 individuals are associated with 2 banks. Those 2 banks own 40 other individual organizations. And then there are beneficial ownership that's greater than 50% for another 194 entities. So those 3 individuals need to be related to 194 entities in order for you to comply with the sanctions that are being levied by the various organizations. And just to give you a sense, we've had over 5,000 entities sanctioned this year, right? So you can imagine how this [ pans out ] and how much work there is to do for us to make sense of that and make sense for our customers so that you can -- our customers really look to us to sort of get a sense for who they're doing business with. And at times like this, they're eager to get that answer as fast as possible. So we're very busy supporting customers right now.

Yes. Maybe the -- just to build on that, too. I mean you've heard us talking about customers wanting to have a 360-degree view of risk of who they're investing in, who they're lending to, who their customers are, that's the moment we're in right now, is our customers are asking am I going to get paid back, can I do business with this entity? And do I want to do business with this entity?

Yes.

Yes. So I think the next questions come from your -- the comments on the first quarter, the update. Why aren't you updating guidance today? You showed the numbers for the first quarter, looking down.

Yes. Mark, I'm going to let you take that one.

All right. Thanks, Rob. Geopolitical tensions have, as you heard from Anne and Steve just a moment ago, have rapidly escalated over the last several weeks. And that includes the recent sanctions on Russian oil and gas exports, which have caused energy prices, as Anne noted, to rise. And that taken together with higher market volatility and wider credit spreads than what we had assumed just a month ago plus the expectation for persisting inflation and likely rate increases, does mean that year-to-date issuance is significantly behind the assumptions that we had incorporated into our full year 2022 outlook on February 10. And as such, we now expect first quarter issuance to be up to 40% lower than the prior year period. We're more than 75% of the way through the first quarter at this point. And so we just wanted to acknowledge the impacts that that's likely to have on our first quarter MIS revenue, and adjusted EPS results. But to the specific question, given there are still significant uncertainty around how the conflict in Ukraine is going to evolve as well as ongoing evolution of global sanctions, it makes better sense for us to refresh that update for full year guidance rather as part of the first quarter earnings call. And also at that time, we're going to have the benefit of observing what actions the Federal Reserve may take next week to address underlying inflation.

And Mark, there's the duration and severity of the Russia-Ukraine crisis. But like the pandemic, there's also a question, I think, just in terms of how our government is going to react. So what's going to happen in terms of maybe fiscal, monetary, other kinds of support depending on where this heads. And so we're in the process of trying to evaluate that, and we'll be able to give you an update in April.

I think people are still focused on the MIS revenue numbers. So the next question is still on the same theme. But how are we thinking about the MIS medium-term revenue guidance given the market volatility, and now also just the comments you've given on the first quarter.

Yes. No, I mean, it's a great question. And again, what we're trying to do here is put the short-term volatility into context. And if you think about a treasurer that wants to come to market, they're thinking about, is this scheduled? Do I need to bring this debt to market? Or is it opportunistic? And it's what Mark really talking about, is that opportunistic debt that's just sitting on the wings. It's still there. And what we're seeing in the market at the moment is some very sizable M&A transactions. Some of the issuers that are coming are in more stable environment. And then there's the leverage loan area that is still seeing funds going, and to invest into that. So you've got different activities in the very short term. But if you recall what Rob put back up on that slide, you have to think about the longer-term driver. That's GDP. We still have an anticipation of GDP growth, albeit at a slower pace than what we saw in 2021. We are also thinking about the overall conducive conditions. And that's back to the treasurer's view. Do I need to come? How much cash have I got on my balance sheet? There's quite a bit of cash on the balance sheet at the moment. And at what point is it like a new normal? What volatility metrics am I looking at? But overall, the rate is still relatively low, as Rob mentioned, compared to historical metrics. Then you've got this maturity wall. I think, in the packs, we talk about the maturity wall, over $4 trillion, and that built up during the pandemic as people particularly early on in the pandemic issued shorter-term duration debt and then extended that. So that's been building up this maturity wall. And then when you think about who do people need to work with when they come to market. This is about issuance. It's not about Moody's not working with the various issuers or the market. This is just about issuance getting them the buildup of the supply continues. And I think Mark referenced the buildup of the overall pipeline, it's about when that comes to market. So it's a timing issue -- but the longer-term view is that we still believe in that medium-term growth.

And Mike, if I were to pick up just on that point for a second. So annually, on average, we do expect MIS revenue to grow in the low to mid-single-digit percent range. That is coming off of 2 very strong years of issuance, 2020 and 2021. And yes, while there may be periods of short-term volatility like we're experiencing in Q1, the fundamental drivers of the business over the medium term really do remain intact. I'd also add that given our medium-term outlook for MA and MIS, we do see a path organically to achieving MCO revenue growth of at least 10%. And then any incremental M&A that we participate in over the coming years will serve to augment the benefits that we're going to realize from some of these multiyear organic investments that we are making in the business.

Thank you. Just pivoting slightly. You're also talking about -- but staying on the topic of medium-term growth targets. You set some for MA. And I'm curious, can you give us just more details on how you plan to accelerate growth in MA?

Yes. Good. Okay. So maybe the first thing to say is we've got a pretty good track record of demonstrating growth. I think Rob mentioned 12%, the video mentioned 12% of the CAGR -- since we created the unit in 2008 it's a 12% CAGR. And I'll add in. We have very intently shifted the revenue mix more and more towards recurring revenue. We're in the mid-90s now. So you've got a more predictable ballast to the business in some respects. We have great retention rates on that recurring revenue base. And you've had really good organic net revenue growth from that recurring base in the last couple of years. I think we're at 9% in 2020 net organic revenue growth, 10% in 2021, good sales in 2021 in the second half, especially. So we -- our confidence levels are increasing here that the range of outcomes is starting to look like those medium-term targets make a lot of sense. And I think we see, like you just said, a path organically to get there. I'll add in the growth vectors. Tremendous -- you used the word juggernaut earlier. A tremendous recurring base of revenue that's growing at very nice yields from existing customers, good new sales work as well, and a tremendous distribution for us, one we're very proud of where we do a really good job. So anyway, the confidence level, I think, is increasing. We feel better about it. Isabel, you're here in representing Salesforce very well as our Chief Revenue Officer.

Yes. Absolutely. Let me build on some of the comments that you'd just made. If you think about what we've been doing over the last 18 months, we've been really focused on our vision as an integrated risk assessment company. And we made a number of significant organic and inorganic investments to really accelerate our speed to market and be able to provide a much wider range of solutions to the evolving needs of our customers. And that's bringing us wonderful set of opportunities right now. Because if you think about our customer base, it's growing and it's expanding and it's diverse. And just to put things into context, we are serving over 14,000 customers globally, across all segments and industries. And we're engaging with many, many more customer personas. So we're having conversations with chief compliance officers, with chief risk officers, with the head of underwriting, with sustainability teams, just to name a few. And we've been able now to serve them through many more use cases. And with that is open a platform of cross-selling opportunities because now we're able to continue deepening and expanding those customer relationships. Now the last thing I'll mention, please do remember, we are operating in high-growth markets. We have a loyal and strong customer base. Our customer retention rates are in the mid-90s. And we've been able to generate growth through upgrades and pricing in the high single-digit range. So overall, we feel very, very positive. I have a great deal of confidence about the prospects of growth in the medium and long term.

Thank you. The next question, I'm smiling because I get asked this a lot. Pricing power, the 3% to 4% across Moody's. Does this change now given inflation and market volatility?

Yes. I'll take that one. This is really, I think, at the MCO level as well, Shivani. So it's interesting as I got this question a lot as the pandemic was unfolding. And people are saying, what's going to happen to your kind of pricing power and ability to pass through price. And I do not want to sound glib, I used to run the sales team on my a**. It's tough work. But I have the same answer now that I did then, which is, well, this is when our customers need us the most. And if you think about -- let's just take the perspective of one of our issuers for a moment. You're in the pandemic where now you're in this situation with tremendous market volatility. You're focused on market access, and it's really important to you that you have a credit analyst who's been through cycles, who understands your industry and who understands your company and can communicate that credit story effectively to investors. If you're a CFO or Treasurer, that's right at the top of your list of most important things to you right at the moment. And so that's what we're focused on delivering on, is delivering on that value proposition to our customers when they need us the most. And it's not just ratings. I mean you've heard -- Steve mentioned, think about the -- and I strongly encourage you to take a look at our KYC stuff out there. Think about right now, you're running your customer list and trying to figure out whether you're doing business with sanctioned entities. The most important thing is that Moody's is helping you with that. So our approach continues to be -- I always say this, a prudent long-term approach to price and to support the pricing opportunity, we think about how can we find ways to enhance that value proposition to our customers. In Ratings, that means things like ESG, and it means things like helping them with sustainable finance. So we're going to be doing second-party opinions for our issuer customers. In Moody's Analytics, it's about the integration of content sets in places that they want to need. So a great example is taking that climate content and putting it into our lending platforms or our commercial real estate platforms. That's valuable to our customers. And that's what -- I think Shivani, that's really what supports, I think, that kind of 3% to 4% on average pricing opportunity across all of Moody's.

All right. So it's intact.

It's intact.

We get asked. We do get asked. The private credit markets have been growing significantly. Is that an opportunity for Moody's? Is it something...

Yes, I'll take that one. [indiscernible] MIS actually wrote a piece on this, not long ago where the private credit market has now topped $1 trillion. And that is about 40% direct lending and about 60% through mezzanine funds and special situations. And if you compare the private credit market versus the public market, one thing that's a big differentiator is the lack of transparency. And the second thing is about the potential liquidity of the position as a lender that you may find yourself in, should there be a change in the credit environment. That's what the paper wrote about. And where we think where the issue is where the opportunity is. It's in that transparency. And the opportunity to look at assessments, look at private credit ratings, look at overall evaluation at both a fund level and a loan level and bring a greater level of transparency to a market. And from the agency, we believe we've got some of the insights. We already rate the BDCs. But the private credit market is much larger than that. So the opportunity is much greater. And I actually also think about some of the stuff that MA can do as well. But I don't know, Steve, do you want to talk about that?

Yes. I mean I think we should acknowledge this is all a part of the recipe or the formula, right? You've got content and expertise in the rating agency integrating different risks and understanding how they might apply to this new, you could call it an asset class. You can certainly call it another group of potential issuers of debt and whatever form that might take. And then we can collect, aggregate, synthesize that, expertise and content and the opinions that the rating agency creates, package that up and commercialize that like we do in the world of credit today. We have a very nice business there, of course. So it's just -- I think this is just another example of us applying the integration of the -- bringing the opportunity together in order to commercialize it through an integrated way.

That's no question.

I'm going to -- and I think this question is coming off the comments this morning about coming off a period of low interest rates, and we are expecting high inflation, another shock driven by geopolitical risk. How are you thinking about the macroeconomic factors impacting Moody's and the broader economy?

I can take that one. Okay. So I mentioned a few of the channels earlier, but I just hone in on a few things. I think the February forecast that Mark mentioned really set out our baseline view for global economic growth for the next 2 years for the G20. And at that time, in early February, we basically said, well, actually, we think growth momentum will continue, the picture looks pretty positive. It will be slightly lower growth than last year, but still very positive growth. And then growth will start to taper in 2023 as things start to normalize. Of course, the Russia-Ukraine crisis injects some new risks into that outlook. And so we are reevaluating our macroeconomic outlook at this point. And we're focused on a couple of things. One is the commodities prices that I mentioned. And it's not just oil prices and gas prices, but it's food prices. And corn and wheat come out of Ukraine in a big way. Those are going to have some bigger spillovers for food prices. We're also thinking about business disruption. A lot of companies, and you're seeing this in the news every day in the last few weeks, pulling out of Russia, stopping Russia operations, disrupting their businesses. And either because Russia is an important supplier and input to their business. Think about the European industrial machine, a lot of it relies on European and Russian gas to power itself. A lot of it relies on important inputs. Certain commodities' inputs, maybe it's palladium through the auto channel or the auto sector, or it's important metals that come from Russia and Ukraine, and into even the semiconductor sector. So a lot of spillovers. And we're in the process of kind of digesting all of this and reevaluating our forecasts. I think there's a couple of things that help me get comfortable or a little bit more positive about things. One is that we don't know how governments are going to respond, and Rob alluded to this. During the pandemic shock, governments came in, in a big way. Both fiscal measures, but monetary policy measures that really helped stabilize financing conditions for a lot of borrowers. Households, corporates and banks really took a lot of stability from those measures. There's nothing to suggest that governments can't do the same in this in response to this crisis. Also, broader issues like geopolitics and the global world order, they prompt some countries to rethink how much they spend on defense. We've already seen that out of some European countries. That kind of defense spending can also be a type of support for the economy. So yes, there are some major downside risks. There are also some potentially mitigating factors. So I think the macro view is still developing, still a bit murky, but...

Fluid.

Fluid, yes. Good, good summary.

All right. I'm going to jump back and I think this question comes from the Q1 update that we gave this morning, and it's related to -- and I know we've done this on earnings call. But can we provide just color on the seasonality of our revenues and expenses given the Q1 update this morning?

Sure. I am happy to spend just a minute on this. So we expect the majority of the MIS revenue or transactional revenue shortfall to occur in the first quarter. And appreciating that it is unlikely that we're going to make up for that shortfall as the year progresses. And that's really a direct result of some of the comments you've heard from us this morning: duration and severity of the conflict in Ukraine; the prospect for multiple interest rate hikes; higher all-in financing costs really as the year progresses. And the seasonality has obviously shifted to the question from what we provided back in February as well as what we actually experienced in 2020 and 2021, where you saw more than half of the full year issuance occur in the first half of the year. There are some positive signs in terms of the number of new mandates that we are seeing in underwriting. That has continued at a very strong pace, consistent with what we saw last year. And we have at least the 1,100 new mandates that we wrote last year, that will provide a ballast in a way to MIS transactional revenue as the year progresses. On the expense side, we are taking action to partially offset the reduction in revenue. And we want to be smart about the approach that we take here. So we may temporarily deprioritize some of the lower priority initiatives. We're going to certainly want to accelerate some of the real estate optimization. We're going to look to continue the progress on the automation programs and process improvement programs that we have in-house. So we definitely will exercise that muscle. And I want to emphasize again, and this is really important as we think beyond just the quarter, we will look to invest approximately $150 million back into the business this year in some of the high-priority markets that you heard from Steve and Mike. And in addition to that, another approximately $50 million to attract and retain the best talent so that we're able to effectively and comprehensively execute on our medium-term priorities and objectives.

And we as a management team frequently have a discussion when we hit these kinds of situations. And we've hit many of them, right? And the question we ask ourselves is, is this a structural change in the outlook for the ratings business? And that's due to what we think about market activity, but also the business dynamics for ratings, is it structural or is it cyclical? That is really important in thinking about how do we then manage expenses. And at the moment, we think this is cyclical. Like I mean you're hearing from us, we think the medium term, the foundation for debt capital market growth and for our business remains solid. So at the moment, this is cyclical. And that informs how we then think about managing expenses.

Exactly right.

Okay. Just a topic that comes up quite often so I'm glad it's being asked is RMS. And it's been 6 months, so since September since we closed. What have we learned? And what are we you most excited about? And what -- does it impact any changes to the $150 million revenue synergies that we expect by 2025?

6 months in. Where are you? Yes. Thank you. The RMS, so everybody is probably familiar with what we're doing there. We're very excited about this. Our people are very excited about this. Our customers are very excited about this. This is one of those acquisitions where people sort of say, oh, that's a pretty interesting idea. So that's quite gratifying. We're busy at work integrating, doing the work you would do with respect to systems and making the RMS family of -- well, making that group of people a part of our family. Some of that's technology and infrastructure-oriented. All that work is going on and progressing nicely. Maybe, just as you would expect, we're working hard to think about what groups need to come together. And I was just in California, I think it was probably 10 days ago, with all of the leaders of all of the teams that are related to climate risk, climate change and climate analysis. We met in the offices of the RMS headquarters, the group where they were originally headquartered, and had people from London and France and people from California and New York, and sat down and looked at what we need to do to bring our research, our data and really some of the modeling capabilities that RMS brings to the table together to help understand physical risk and think about what we can do in terms of bringing products together. So that's, I think, an exciting move for us. We're already bringing -- we literally officially brought the organization together. So we have a team now dedicated to climate, and that's happened and been announced. The other group of people that we've merged and brought together organizationally is the sales group. So in fact, our whole client coverage team is now brought under the Moody's umbrella and working together in our very -- now our team's selling environment. So we're excited about that. There's another one, Isabel, it would be great if you offered a couple of comments on that.

I'd love to add some additional color here. Look, this is an exciting time for our business right now. With the acquisition of RMS, we're bringing best-in-class climate capabilities. We're also adding more than 400 risk models across 120 geographies that nobody else has. And we're able now to open this cross-selling opportunity across many sectors and many industries. What is most exciting for me as I'm talking to customers is what we are hearing from our customers and the incredible and positive response from our customers. We now have integrated the sales teams, and we're going out there seeing customers together. And I thought I'll take a couple of minutes just to talk a little bit about what I'm hearing from customers. I was talking to the Chief Risk Officer of a major insurance P&C company in Europe. And he told me that he has 3 major priorities: enhance climate-related capabilities in terms of modeling; thinking more deeply about the cyber assessment to price risk; and then the third was around digitization, the underwriting process, so that he could pre-populate customer information. Now let's think about this for a minute. With the RMS capabilities in climate and cyber, and then you add more than $400 million of private company data that we have. Now we can answer those 3 questions, and we are now the partner of choice for this customer. So this is an example in the insurance, right? But we're talking also with government institutions because we're helping them to figure out what is the climate impact to critical infrastructure. So just think about ports, think about military base. And then what is most exciting is our banking customers. We have over 2,000 banking customers that now with RMS capability, they are able to have a financial estimate due to physical risk on a very specific location of a building. So think about whether they are residential or whether they are commercial real estate. So as you can imagine, huge excitement and huge opportunity.

Thank you. Just touching on the next -- sorry, I might go to the -- get this up and running. Sorry. Let's try to get to Slido. It's gone quiet for a second.

Shivani, can I surmise that we may get a capital allocation question?

Yes, yes.

Maybe let me talk about capital allocation. Just for a minute while you continue on with that.

I think we are going to get asked about bolt-on acquisitions, so...

I just surmise, all right so...

Yes, what's happening in the next 12, 18 months in integration.

As I mentioned -- thank you.

You can talk about that.

Capital allocation priorities remain unchanged.

Thank you.

We think, ultimately, the approach that we take really helps to optimize the long-term value for our stakeholders. I know you've heard me say this before, but it's really important we really do optimize and prioritize organic and inorganic investments back into the business. And that's really because it brings us that suite of talent, products and solutions and insights that helped to enrich our overall ecosystem that you've heard us talk about this morning. Once that organic investment or inorganic investment process complete, we do look to return capital to stockholders. There are 2 key messages I wanted to share this morning. One, we are reaffirming that we will look to return at least $2 billion of capital to our stockholders this year, again, subject to available cash, market conditions, M&A opportunities and other ongoing capital allocation priorities. But of that $2 billion, we're reaffirming at least $1.5 billion will be through share repurchases this year. And that includes the $500 million ASR that will complete in the first half of this year as well as $500 million in dividends. And then maybe just my last remark, we will continue to anchor our capital strategy around a BBB+ rating. We do think as a management team, that provides us the best balance between lowering the cost of capital and ensuring financial flexibility. Good on time?

Good on time. Thank you. Now the Slido is back up again. So it's...

The pandemic has taught us to be agile.

Yes, absolutely. So actually on the topic of acquisitions, we've done a number over the last 12 to 18 months. Are we busy integrating? You touched on RMS earlier, Steve. But how is the integration going across the business?

Yes, so it's true. We've made a few acquisitions recently. I guess maybe the way I'd answer that question is just big picture, just how do we think about all this? And this is a part of our product development program, the way we think about responding to customer needs. In a lot of ways, we have our product road maps. We have a bunch of people who are working hard to understand what customers are looking for. And then weaving the understanding of that into new value propositions and thinking about how we can bring those things together. So a big part of the idea behind these acquisitions we've made is to make sure that they integrate with our existing products and help us to round out the value propositions and the -- help our customers do their job every day. We have a great organic product development program as well. It's been going for years and years, but this supplements it. I mean a good -- a couple of good examples, of course, would be if we think about PassFort or kompany in light of what we've been talking about, today, those are really good examples. PassFort was a company we bought that specializes in a workflow technology that helps to bring customers on board and do checks and screening to make sure that you're comfortable doing business with them. So that's a workflow technology that we, of course, we're looking forward to building. And we're going to accelerate our time to market and our ability to respond to customer needs with that right away. kompany is another example of that where kompany goes out and confirms that, that organization exists with the local national registries or the local authorities and does it through API technology. So that as you're considering this name, and maybe it's a supplier or maybe it's a customer you're going to do business with, PassFort's workflow capability helps you keep track of that. kompany does an API call out to maybe the authority in Germany to confirm that, that particular entity exists, which is in and of itself, a useful thing these days. So that's, I think, a good example -- or maybe a fair way to describe how we how we think about these acquisitions and the integrations.

And Steve, maybe to give you a little insight. When we're contemplating these acquisitions, Steve referenced we've got these product road maps, obviously, as you'd expect, right? What do the customers want and need? What are we missing? Where are the gaps? Well, one thing that gave us great confidence around PassFort and kompany was the customers were already asking for integration of these. So there was integration of kompany and Orbis and GRID into PassFort.

Right. Where they already exist.

The customers were leading us to that. And we said, okay, having this workflow platform will be really important for us because now it allows us to integrate these -- all of our content sets into this workflow platform. So that stuff is critical, especially in this kind of M&A market, it's really frothy. You've got to be the right owner. And one way to get confident you're the right owner is the customers are asking you to pull these capabilities together.

Very good point.

Just kind of following up from that and just kind of we've been evolving and changing a lot. How are you -- how do we think about the customer engagement model and ensuring that we're keeping pace with customers? Rob, just touching off what...

Yes, perhaps I'll take that one. Look, when we think about our customer engagement model, it's really focusing on leading with customer centricity and really creating additional focus on reinforcing -- getting to know our customers really, really well. And so we have been evolving, and we now have organized our customer engagement model and our customer team and teams by customer segment. We have reemphasized the orientation towards use cases, which is really important. And we have sharpened our focus on solution value selling. And why this is important? This is important because that enable us to bring different pools of talent and expertise and a skill set to engage with our customers at the right time, in the right place, with the right customer. We have been very focused on investing in a number of roles to help with that customer engagement. So we have now relationship managers. We have industry practice leads. We have sales specialists. And we have customer success team that are really focused on making sure that our customers are extracting most value for the solutions that they are engaging with us. I would also say that this ecosystem of roles enable us to serve our customers deeper and wider in those discussions as our customers are really having multi-dimension and multifaceted problems to deal with today. The last thing that I will mention, we're very focused on building a scalable go-to-market strategy. So we are implementing a number of best practices and standards in our go-to-market like thinking about more deeply about customer segmentation and what should we be spending most of our time, thinking about standards around incentive strategies and how we onboard and upscale our talent so we can drive more productivity and really produce and enhance the customer experience as we engage with all our customers globally.

Yes. That, Isabel, that's a great point. I think it's an important takeaway here because we get -- we've been getting asked a lot of questions about, well, what's been giving you confidence to hit these medium-term targets? When we're talking about capabilities, and this is an important part of what's giving us confidence, is that reorientation solutions-based selling. I think it's an important takeaway.

Touching now on ESG, and we -- we get asked a lot, and this question is asking us about our approach versus some of our peers. Can we talk about our strategy in the space?

Yes. Let me take a crack at that. So I'm going to talk about ESG and climate together. And I would say that we continue to hear that our customers, they want us here. They appreciate our transparency and our rigor. So they want us to be in this space. As you think about ESG, maybe I'm going to think about it in terms of, we're thinking about how do we drive relevance with our ESG products? I mean that -- at the end of the day, that's one of the ways that we compete, right, is you're relevant, your views matter. And so if you think about what we're doing around ESG scores and building out our coverage and reinforcing our relevance, it starts with, and you've heard reference already today, about the fixed income investors are asking us, well, what's the impact of ES&G on credit ratings and credit profile? Well, we're building out that coverage. Engaging with our issuers, our analysts are engaging with issuers. And we have -- we're going to have by year-end, something close to 10,000 credit impact scores where we're engaging with our customers on ESG, impact of ES&G. Then you've got -- if you think about the information available to us, so that's information as part of our rating relationship. And then you've got broader than the rating universe, you've got, I'll call it, kind of the public company universe. And there, the disclosure and availability of information is varied. But we've got scores that then cover thousands and thousands and thousands of companies that are both rated and unrated that are used for things like portfolio construction and monitoring. But then you think about private companies, and that's really -- you think about in our wheelhouse. And we have developed something called an ESG predictor score (sic) [ ESG Score Predictor ]. It's out there. I encourage you to look at it. And we're producing modeled ESG scores and with climate and carbon data as well that we're modeling on over 140 million companies. And we're integrating that into things like, again, whether it's commercial lending or it's know your supplier, sustainable supply chain solutions. There's just -- there's a lot of interest in understanding the ESG and climate profile of who you're doing business with. And so I think that's a really interesting way for us to be able to compete and leverage that massive -- those massive company data sets along with our ESG and climate expertise. Let me move to climate for just a moment. Climate, I see 2 distinct areas for us. One is around understanding the physical impacts of climate change. And we've talked a little bit about that already. Isabel touched on it. We see RMS as a very important component of that because of the models and the data and the expertise that they have. This is banks understanding physical impact of climate change across their portfolio, complying with stress tests. It's corporations thinking about supply chain vulnerability. It's governments, like Isabel said. The next is around carbon transition. And this is where there's a very significant gap in the market today. So many, many companies and countries have put out net zero targets. That's great. I saw some Oxford study that something like 80% of the world's economy is covered by net zero targets. That's super. The same study says about 20% of those are deemed credible. And the market is asking, okay, you put out a net zero target. How are you going to get there? And what does it involve? It's going to involve a change in your business mix. It means you're going to do acquisitions and divestitures, capital allocation, R&D. There'll be new regulations. It's -- in order to achieve that net zero target, the market is going to need insight. And the market is going to need to understand what a common decarbonization pathway looks like and the take for the -- for any given industry, and how is then a company doing relative to that decarbonization pathway. And this is important because there are going to be trillions of dollars of capital that's going to get allocated to finance carbon transition over the next 2 decades. We have a real role to play there, we believe. We've rolled out these carbon transition assessments. We have deep climate. We're building carbon data. And we think we have a real role to play in helping the market there.

Do you -- and this came up on the earnings call, and we mentioned it again this morning, which is why I think we've got the question. The $150 million of investment, where is it going exactly?

Yes. Where is it going? So some of the things that you've heard today, fortunately, right, first is around sales and go-to-market. We're building what Isabel talked about. We're further building out those sales and go-to-market capabilities. That's important. Second, we're building out a product offering. So you heard, we've talked about KYC. We've acquired, but we're also investing significantly organically against that product road map. Another place where we're doing that is in our banking business, where we've got that Software-as-a-Service transition in that business, ESG and climate, as we've talked about. So investing in those product road maps. Third is around, I'm going to say, data access and technology interoperability. I never talk to a customer who tells me they don't want our data sets integrated into some of our technology platforms. I never hear that. I always hear, when are you going to get more of the data into more of your offerings, right? When are the more of these offerings going to be working together so I can get a more holistic solution? So we are investing in data access for our customers through a variety of different channels and data and technology interoperability where the customers want and need it. We're not making things all work together just because it's -- we think it's a good thing to do. Where the customers want that integration, that's where we're investing. You heard Mark talk about -- I would be remiss if I didn't say we're investing in our people. In order to achieve this strategy and those medium term targets, we've got to have world-class people. And the needs at the firm are evolving. You think about the skill sets that we need, bringing in climate and technology developers and those kinds of things. So we're investing in people. And I don't want to leave out, also, we're investing in the rating agency. As I said, it's one of the world's great businesses. And there's a real opportunity for us. You saw us invest in domestic markets. You hear about us making investments in ESG. Mike, maybe just a second on how we're kind of investing there is probably worthwhile.

Yes. Just picking up on 2 things: first of all, getting in front of the market; and second, going where our customers expect us to be. And when I think about domestic markets, domestic debt markets, they are the future cross-border markets. And that's where we will continue to play. There was a great data point I picked up, I'd say, from the UN and that about 55% of people live in cities at the moment. By 2050, about 2/3 of the global population will be in urban areas. That means over that period, about 2.5 billion people will be moving. And 90% of those movements will be in Asia and Africa. And if you think about the reference that we had to our intent to purchase GCR, that's some of the underpinning rationale when you think about the growth in those markets and those economies and the infrastructure. We've already talked about ESG. We need to get the skill sets. We need to build out our ESG capabilities. The same goes for cyber. We haven't touched much on cyber. But if you read every day, there's something about cyber. How do you base that? How do you incorporate that into a corporate strategy? And what is the cost, and what is the impact? And then you've got the technology. Our customers expect us to be delivering all these insights in a very different way: research, data, ratings. They want it faster. They want it digitized. We have to think about how can we get there. That's quite a bit of the investment. And then from my side is risk, and making sure that you're making good decisions in the markets that you're going into. As we can see, there's a lot of volatility out there, understanding the risk in order to create the value. That's what we're trying to do in MIS. And I'm very grateful to Mark and Rob for allocating funds too.

It's a great business, and we're going to keep it that way.

I'm going to keep on the theme of great businesses, and we -- KYC, we've referenced it, and I think people want to know why is it growing? Why is Moody's doing so well in this space?

Yes. Perhaps I'll start, and then I'm sure everybody has very strong opinions in this panel about KYC. Look, there is an incredible and an increasing demand for KYC checks, right? You think about regulations globally are impacting not just banks, but also corporations and also insurance companies. And it's not going to decrease. It's actually going to increase over time. And it's a rather difficult thing to do, right? Because you need to understand, have the right data, you need to have the right tools and technology and the expertise to do this really well, to do that at scale and to do that accurately. And when I think about the customers that we're engaging with, they want to answer the question, should I be -- why should I be -- who should I be doing business with? That's number 1. Number two, why does it matter? And then I have to be able to do that at scale. And I had to do that constantly and continuously. And so just think about the consequences of doing business or [indiscernible] a customer with unethical business practices, just think about potential customer boycotts, reputational risk, right, regulatory sanctions. You talked about interoperability before. This is the perfect example of what we have done. We have brought data sets that nobody else has on individuals and private company. We have brought workflow tools. And we've brought screening capabilities and expertise and able to provide an end-to-end solution to answer the questions our customers has.

Yes. And I would encourage you to take a look at -- we're calling this omni out there. It's kind of pushing the boundaries of what we think we can do for our customers. And we're thinking about integrating into CRM platforms, where before you're even thinking about originating a customer relationship, you say, do I want to? Can I and do I want to? And then you're able to monitor that. And you've heard us -- again, I made this point, I think it's worth reinforcing. You've heard us talk about this, understanding the risk of who you're doing business with. That's what customers are dealing with right at the moment. Do I really understand who my customers are?

And Rob, they're our suppliers.

Yes.

They are our customers.

Business relationships.

Business relationships of any kind.

Yes.

Yes.

I think we're almost at time so I'm going to squeeze in just a question that is not on the Slido, but I know given we've been talking about volatility, we've been talking about uncertainty, we've used the phrase fluid. Just Rob, what keeps you up at night? There's a lot going on in [ the world at this time ].

Oh, wow.

I suppose I could go through a laundry list of things that could keep me up at night. A number of the things certainly that Anne and Mike talked about. There's no shortage of risk. But I'm going to come back, Shivani, to this theme of -- but that's exactly when our customers need us the most. This idea of who am I doing business with, this idea of what are the impacts of what's going on globally. And there are a few organizations that have the reach and the breadth and the coverage and the expertise to be able to give the kinds of insights and support that we're giving to our customers. So am I concerned about the current market volatility and the near-term impacts and managing through that? Yes, of course, I'm concerned about that. But as I think about our role and how we serve our customers, I guess, Shivani, I'm going to leave the audience with, it really isn't about what keeps me up at night. It's these things that are giving me real confidence about our future.

Thank you. So that ends the recorded section of today's events. So thank you to our virtual audience and also our audience who are in the room. We're going to cut now for a short break. And after the break, we will have an hour and 20 minutes of just networking and Q&A. So if your questions weren't covered in the panel, there will be plenty of opportunity for all of you to get them addressed. So thanks very much.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks.