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

I cover business and information services of Barclays. We're very pleased to have with us Moody's again this year with Noemie Heuland who is the CFO. This is her first time. So thank you for being here. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

And maybe we'll just start there, Noemie, if that's okay. You've been here about a year, I think, now at Moody's. So maybe just for some background for some of the newer people in the audience, like where did you come from? How has year 1 gone so far?

Yes. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. I've been at Moody's for about a year now, April 1. I've spent my career for most of the time in technology prior to joining Moody's as well as in -- at PwC helping companies with IPOs, transactions, et cetera, across different geographies in Europe where I'm from and then in the U.S., Canada. And I was CFO for Dayforce, which is a regulated entity processing payroll for customers in Canada and the U.S. as well. The first year has been a very interesting time to join Moody's. We sit at the intersection of a lot of deep currents: transformation of banks, knowing who you're doing business with on the vendor and customer side, unlocking the power of GenAI using our proprietary database. So a lot of very exciting things in our business. I was pretty impressed with how Moody's has evolved over the recent past. I was very familiar with the Ratings business coming in. I was on Dayforce with the issuers, so I would come to the building once a year talking to the analysts. And I was expecting coming in a very robust analytical colleagues, a lot of depth in the thinking and actually that was very true, expected based on what we do. But perhaps, a pleasant surprise was the level of innovation that spans across Moody's, not only in the Ratings, but also in the Analytics space. A lot of innovation around GenAI. We just had a piece in the Harvard Business Review about a month ago, how Moody's has leveraged GenAI internally as well as externally with its customers. So that's something I wasn't expecting to the same degree. We've invested also in a lot of our workflow application to serve a variety of different use cases beyond the traditional research business over the recent past. So those are a lot of exciting drivers and a great culture at Moody's.

Got it. And in terms of what you're looking forward to contributing to Moody's, like what are some of the areas that you're looking to further improve upon or perhaps the areas to fix as well?

Yes. I think finance and my role in general is really -- the objectives are very much in line with the company's objective of growing in the areas where we think we have a right to win in. And again, I mentioned the modernization of banking workflows. Insurance companies also are starting to digitize and modernize their workflows and their own processes, leveraging technology. So what I try to do internally, not only in finance where we obviously look at our own processes, how to gain efficiencies with automation, compliance and enhanced risks and controls, is helping internally more broadly the company to grow and becoming more efficient and leveraging the same technology that we sell to our customers. We've done a lot of interesting things recently within our Moody's Analytics and Ratings division to invest in modernizing our operations to generate operating leverage, and I think that's transpired into our margin numbers. So I think there's, again, a lot we continue to do here and that's very exciting.

Got it. And given your software background, I mean, I think the assumption is there's a lot of value I think you're going to try to contribute on the Moody's Analytics side. Is that fair? And if so, like what are some of the key focus areas specific to Moody's Analytics?

So for Moody's Analytics, we've grown in the first quarter, which is pretty indicative of the growth of that business over the recent past. We've grown our annual recurring revenue, which is a forward-looking metric to assess the growth of our business, about 9%, which has been pretty consistent. Within that, there is the Decision Solutions, which is our workflow business that's growing at 12%. It's now over $1.4 billion in ARR. And as I said earlier, that's where the company is really investing in different workflows in banking, in the lending space. We were very prominent in the back office with the compliance and regulatory aspects. Now we're helping customers also simplify and automate the front office with lending, embedding KYC in the process as well. So as part of doing that, there's a lot of exciting things around commercialization of those software solutions. How do we price, how do we go to market, we're trying to simplify a bit the approach and have a more end-to-end approach catered to specific customer segment. We may have been known in the past for coming in with a product-led approach to sales where we would come in with a compliance product or a model for catastrophe -- prediction of weather events and their impact on credit. We're trying to get a holistic view now of the end-to-end solution we can provide to a specific customer. And within a bank, whether it's a large financial institution or a smaller Tier 2 or Tier 3 bank, we're evolving our go-to-market to serve the needs of that bank as opposed to coming in with products. That's something I've seen done very successfully at places like SAP and I think we're -- we can continue to simplify and articulate our value proposition end-to-end as opposed to coming with a product lens. And that's just one example of things we've been working on with Steve recently.

Got it. And just for the benefit of the audience, the 9% ARR that you already reported, how does that compare with your long-term target? And perhaps you could also give us a comparison on margins versus the target?

Yes. So we've updated our medium-term guidance recently, which has the base year of 2022 to 2027, and our ARR growth is expected to be in that range that we just printed in the first quarter with an upside to go into low double-digit growth with lending, insurance workflows and KYC as well as more penetration with corporate customers. We've historically been very present with banks and financial institutions and insurance, and now we're expanding into the corporate sector. So that's helping as to drive growth on the upside of that range. And then on the margin side, we've been -- so we've been investing to deliver on that, as I said, with some recent M&A, but also some product capabilities and enhancements as well. And on the margin side, we've also increased our projection to the mid-30s now -- mid- to high 30s from 30%-ish where we are today. That's a business where I think has potential to deliver, obviously, more than what it does today in terms of margin. We are now through integration of most of our large acquisitions that we've made in the recent past. So there was opportunity to start consolidating certain functions in marketing, in product engineering, in sales go-to-market. That's what's behind the efficiency plan that we announced in Q4 and that's what's partially going to drive margin expansion, but there's also beyond that natural scale of the business. If you think about our banking segment, for example, our banking customers, there's still a pretty sizable portion of those customers who are on, on-premise version of our products. So as those customers gradually migrate into our platform and cloud platform that naturally generates scale and eliminate some technology debt. So that's another component of the margin expansion for -- through 2027 and beyond that.

Got it. In terms of some of the impacts that companies are seeing with the environment out there today, from Moody's perspective, and maybe let's just talk Moody's Analytics, maybe a good way to frame it would be why you lowered kind of the MA revenue numbers for the year?

So the revenue number hasn't changed. It's still high single-digit growth for the full year. What we've slightly lowered at the high end is the ARR guide, which is again a forward-looking metric, representative of our book of business and the future recurring revenue. What we've acknowledged here after a very strong first quarter where we had very nice wins in KYC as well as in banking and Research & Insights as well is just the fact that there's potential for our customers to take more time in making a decision about a large investment. We haven't seen that in the first quarter, as I said, but at times of market disruptions, what we've historically observed and what I've observed in my past life as well is decision-making tend to be a bit more subject to the macroeconomic headlines or some other projects taking a front seat in customers' priorities. So we've shortened -- we've shaved the high end of our guide a little bit to account for that possibility. 40% of our business in general is generated in the fourth quarter typically -- which is pretty typical for companies in our space. And we just wanted to acknowledge the possibility that some of that may be pushed to the next year depending on how the macro uncertainty settles.

Got it. So just to be clear, it was just you're anticipating a potential weakness as opposed to seeing anything. And if that's true, can you just also talk a little bit about your pipeline and your visibility?

Yes. The pipeline has been growing. It's very strong. We have a pipeline that went up 4x, for example, between Numerated and MA cross-sell opportunities. That's just one example. We also have the number of meetings per sales rep, which is a metric that we track religiously, has gone up significantly year-over-year. The average deal size interestingly is also going up. So even though there might be a little bit more time to close a specific transaction, the average deal size is going up because the magnitude of the effect and the ROI as well as the transformation potential for that project at our customers is much higher than it was before by looking at just a product. So that takes a little bit more time in terms of sales cycle. But all the metrics around our sales activity are green and are tracking very well. And again, it's a matter of are those customers going to make that decision in May, June or July, that will drive ARR for this year or later in 2024, which will have a limited impact.

Got it. Perhaps the one area you don't have as much visibility is your federal contracts, I think you had mentioned a little bit. So maybe just help us, what's the exposure there? What are you hearing? And what have you assumed for that?

So our exposure to the U.S. federal government is less than 1% of our book of business. We had modeled some attrition in our initial guidance in February to account for some of the possibility that those contracts wouldn't be renewed. We had -- we experienced a little bit more attrition in the first quarter than we anticipated initially, that's one of the reasons we shaved a bit the high end of our ARR guide as well. Having said that, we still have some very good business with non-U.S. federal government in the U.S. But as well as with the European government entities, we had some very strong, good wins in Europe with fraud detection, sanction screening and large transactions with public sector. So that continues to be an area of growth. But we've acknowledged that some of those contracts that we had initially in our pipeline wouldn't be renewed, and that's what's behind the change in our guidance as well.

And I think even last quarter, I think you also called out the MSCI partnership and some impact there from the ESG side, if you could just help clarify what that was?

Yes. We -- in the second or third quarter of 2024, I think it was second quarter, we entered into a partnership with MSCI where we gave access to our customers their ESG content, and that has obviously a bit of an attrition effect on our pipeline because customers were not sourcing our ESG content any longer, but were rather going with the ESG from MSCI. That's reflected now fully in our ARR, and that's also why we had a little bit of downtick in the growth rates in some of our areas in MA this quarter. But all of that is already factored in, and I think it's the right thing to do for the customers.

Fair enough. I guess, let's continue with the MSCI partnership. Part 1 was ESG. Part 2 you guys just announced was more on the private credit side. So can you just help us with what is it exactly that Moody's is contributing? What's MSCI contributing?

Yes. MSCI has a vast universe of private capital data. They have data over 2,800 private credit funds, over 14,000 companies. And so we're providing our default prediction model, EDF-X, to those private company to help investors assess the risk -- the credit risk associated with those assets. And that's a very interesting opportunity. You can imagine further collaboration later on with indices, benchmarks, et cetera. So that's a partnership, to your point, that started late last year and that we're enhancing now with this new opportunity and it's probably further down the road.

Got it. So the first partnership with ESG almost sounded like a swap for products, but is the -- is this current one and future one is going to be kind of joint IP go-to-market?

Those are going to be accessed through both the MSCI and Moody's platforms. It's going to be co-branded. So yes, there's -- that's right.

Got it. And just one question. We had a lot of questions on what's the EDF-X model you mentioned. Like what is the real value with that? I guess most equity investors don't appreciate it. I know some credit investors know exactly what EDF-X is.

It's a probability of default model that's based on our proprietary algorithm and depth and breadth of research and data. So that provides a good point in time assessment of the probability of default of a company or of an asset, an instrument.

Got it. Okay. Going back to Decision Solutions, you said that's the fastest growth area, where the most investments is. Maybe just to help frame, what are the key solutions in that business and why is it growing so fast?

Yes. So -- and we're simplifying that a little bit going forward. We'll talk a lot about -- more about our -- what we do for banks, insurance and corporate. We're not there yet. But right now, the workflows that we provide that either get fed from our Research & Insights or from data that's coming from Orbis or data that's coming from third-party sources or customer data, those workflows are embedded in what we call Decision Solutions, which is about $1.4 billion in ARR from Moody's Analytics, growing, to your point, 12% in the first quarter. You have workflows for banks, and we were traditionally very strong in compliance, regulatory asset and liability management. And now we're expanding in the front office, as I said, with the acquisition of Numerated, where we're now trying to automate and simplify the loan processing and loan origination process, embedding KYC in there as well. That's one. In the insurance space, we were initially very strong in life insurance. And now we're moving into property and casualty underwriting. So we've acquired a company called Praedicat. We recently acquired CAPE Analytics, which has data on actual properties and infrastructure roofs, building infrastructure that helps ensure getting more granular in their pricing and underwriting of risks. So that's, again, we had some existing joint go-to-market and partnership initially that we now -- now that we integrate them in our insurance risk platform that provides additional data sources for insurance to underwrite their risk. And then finally, in KYC, which initially was an offering catered for banks, but we now start to see use cases for corporate. We had some very nice wins in the first quarter with corporates around, again, sanctioned screening or things like that. And we're expanding those into third-party risk management beyond just know your customer. If you think about vendor risk management, supplier risk management, supply chain, those are areas that leverage the Orbis database and the KYC workflow that we've now made available through a platform for our corporate customers as well to configure their use case, their -- the access to their data and their workflow based on the party and the risk they're trying to address.

Got it. So I think you mentioned earlier as well, for the MA margins to go up, your acquisition and integration is complete and there's leverage on the top line. So is Decision Solutions the key area where all that is happening basically?

It's across the board. I think there's also if you think about our research and data and information, we are investing to make our data more interoperable. So those are investments, but that also translates into efficiency gains and less technology debt in those areas as well. And more broadly, I think if you build a -- you saw us do that very successfully with the insurance risk platform and now we have the ability to embed those data elements into that platform for customers to configure their workflows based on their needs. So it's -- I would say it's almost like an end-to-end MA play. It's not just centered around the workflow, it's also centered around the enablers to those workflows, which are our research and our data estate as well.

Got it. And maybe a good way to digress into the M&A strategy. I think Moody's has done a pretty regular stream of smaller deals, midsized deals. But in terms of the pipeline, in terms of the ambitions, are there more RMSes out there? Are there bigger deals? Like how should we think about that?

So we've recently -- the recent acquisitions have been a complement to our existing capabilities. I talked about Numerated, CAPE, some other smaller ones like Able AI at the beginning of the year that complements our lending offering very nicely. So we're always looking to -- for companies or assets that have industrial logic and the question is always, are we building the platform ourselves? Are we building those capabilities? Are we building the software ourselves? Or is there a company out there that's better that we think we can acquire? And what we've done in the recent past is partnering with those companies to really prove the go to market, get the customers' reaction before deciding to acquire like Numerated or Praedicat even for that matter. And I think you would expect us to continue to do that in the near future.

Got it. And so just a quick follow-up. On the larger size of deals like that's -- I mean that would be opportunistic, but nothing that...

That would be opportunistic and we have large hurdle rates, as you would expect us to do -- to have to -- before we make a decision to invest.

Got it. And maybe just to round this question up like broader capital allocation priorities and strategies, especially with you taking over the last year, any updates there?

We've always be reinvesting for growth. I talked about some of the areas where we're making investments in our lending workflow. But also in our Ratings business, we're also investing to automate and modernize some of our workflows internally within the Ratings business as well. We've acquired domestic rating agencies as well in Africa, in Latin America to complement our existing offering in the ratings space and cater to the local domestic market. So those are examples of investments. And we'll continue to do that as a priority and then return capital in the form of dividends, steady growth year-over-year and then share repurchases as well.

Got it. Good time to move to the Ratings business then. So let's just start with -- obviously, you made a lot of changes to your guidance in the first quarter when you reported. So maybe just help catch us up on what those changes were?

So we had a very strong first quarter, building on the momentum that we saw in the fourth quarter, especially around structured finance, investment grade, and -- but we also took a look at the macroeconomic volatility. It's a very much headline-driven market right now. And we also had the insights of the first couple of weeks of April when we came to publish our results, which had led us to temper our expectations a bit for issuance and MIS revenue. Having said that, we still continue to see like in the long term upside with the maturity walls, private credit, domestic markets, transition finance and the need to fuel investments -- to invest in infrastructure finance, which will then generate debt. So those are things we're looking at like beyond the current quarter. But you're right in we just want to acknowledge the fact that the high-yield and spec-grade insurers are -- it's more of a question mark how and when they're going to come to market this year. The majority of the adjustments we've made is in the second quarter, a little bit in the third quarter as well. We still expect the fourth quarter to grow year-on-year versus Q4 last year. There is still pent-up demand for M&A, we've tempered that expectation down as well. We had expectations for announced M&A growth of 50% in February. We've taken that down to 15% gross, 1-5, for announced M&A, which translates into flat-rated M&A growth year-on-year. That's another inputs to our guide, but overall, just reflecting the uncertainty. And we are not accounting for a recession. We're still expecting U.S. GDP and global GDP to grow, albeit by a smaller percentage point. And the other thing I would say, if you try to zoom out and look at the puts and takes of that, we've looked at years where there was a market disruption to kind of understand the universe of outcomes. A good year was 2018, where we had a first -- very strong start and then a muted second half, that year where Rating revenue declined a little bit. And then we looked at 2022, where it was pretty much hands off in Q4 and risk-off period. We're not planning for anything like that, but that's also something we obviously look in the range of possible universe. But again, as I said, there's still expectation for M&A to ramp up in the back half. And if market settles and high-yield issuance environment is more constructive, then you could see some activity picking back up in the back half of the year.

Got it. So just to follow up on the 15% M&A -- announced M&A versus flat-rated M&A. Can you just help appreciate the difference between those two because I think initially, there was a view that even 15% sounded aggressive for the year.

So announced M&A is just the -- by definition, by the term, it's announced and what becomes rated, the difference is either the M&A transaction doesn't happen or we don't rate it. That's the delta. But...

And is that delta just a typical spread you've seen historically? Is that why -- yes?

I would think so.

Okay. Fair enough. And then just maybe one more. Since you've taken over in the seat, like how would you describe the visibility into issuance? Like how much visibility do you really have?

If you think about our first quarter, we were pretty much right where we delivered on exactly what we said we would on $1.065 billion revenue for MIS, which is pretty remarkable given the different inputs to the model. So we have a lot of data from different sources. We talk with, obviously, our banking partners, different players. We have very strong dialogue with issuers as well across the different sectors. Our Ratings group publishes research around macroeconomic outlook, sector insights, subsector insights as well. We use all those inputs to inform our view of what the issuance environment is going to look like. There is uncertainty, and that's why we've widened the range a little bit to account for the ranges of outcome, and we'll continue to update that throughout the year as we see.

Got it. You mentioned private credit earlier. And obviously, for the last several years we've been getting a lot of questions on whether it is a threat, the competition, et cetera. So just first broad-based the views a couple of years on from Moody's perspective?

I think we've talked about it more recently as a tailwind and a potential to bring more transparency to the private credit market participants. We've been traditionally in our FIG franchise, Financial Institution Group franchise, being present in fund financing. We've also developed methodology for subscription lines as well. So that's been something we've been very present in. And we have also a large -- the largest franchise in PDC in the ratings, in the FIG asset class group. Now what we see is an interesting development and growth area is around asset-backed finance assets that are coming off bank's balance sheet that require more transparency. Investors of those assets like insurance companies, pension funds are requiring more transparency and signposts to assess the credit profile of those investments. And that's where I think the rating agencies have a role to play, and the large private market participants acknowledge that as well.

Got it. In the quarter, you provided some stats on how much private credit is contributing to growth and so forth. So a, maybe you could talk about that, but also, b, I think over the last several years, Moody's set up its own private credit team, I guess. Can you just help us -- does that encompass both MIS, MA? Or how does that work?

Yes. So we had -- the number of private credit deals in the first quarter has doubled from the first quarter of 2024. That's just one example of the contribution of that private credit into our numbers. In terms of how we approach it at Moody's, we've set up a private credit team that spans asset classes so we really are having a dialogue with the players in that market, the big PE companies to really understand their needs, the fund flows to between -- across the different asset class. And to your point, we also have offerings that may not be public or private ratings, per se, credit ratings, but just credit scores, appreciation of the creditworthiness of the company through different types of offering within Moody's Analytics that we can certainly offer as well that could then pave the way for expanded relationship in the ratings when and if that company or that instrument comes for a public rating.

Got it. So it's fair to say private credit is one of the key focus investment areas for Moody's then?

It's one of them and we have, again, a lot of dialogue with our market participants to really understand the flow, what the market demands and where we can play a role and where we don't want to play a role as well.

Got it. And also just to clarify, I think in the long-term model I think you guys typically talk about GDP plus price plus emerging. And private credit would be in that emerging?

Yes. That's correct. We have the growth algorithm for Moody's Rating, you have the GDP growth, which is the primary driver for our business in ratings. Then you have what we call the value proposition of a Moody's Rating allows us to get price increase of 3% to 4% a year. And then the remainder is emerging markets. You mentioned private credit. We also have transition finance, domestic markets. I talked about the things we're doing Moody's Local in Latin America, for example, or with local domestic rating agencies in Africa and India. So that's another contributor to growth. Infrastructure financing as well. Those are examples of additional incremental to our existing revenue model.

Got it. One more on MIS. I mean, I guess, in terms of more longer-term visibility, it's the maturity walls. So can you just talk about what the maturity walls look like over the next several years and how you guys factor that in?

Yes. We're looking at -- in the last -- we published our maturity walls study around the month of September. Those have increased by 11% from September 2023. If you look at speculative grade in the U.S., that's an even higher percentage of 27%. So there's a good -- that bodes well for the issuance in the subsequent years. 2028 is obviously the largest refinancing wall year with post-pandemic paper that was issued that needs to be refinanced. The question is how much of that will be pulled forward in previous year will depend on the yield and the macroeconomic environment at that time. But yes, those maturity walls are very healthy and have grown since the last study.

Got it. One of the questions we get a lot in our universe and you guys have talked about a lot is just the topic of GenAI. So maybe just first, broader question, what is Moody's approach and strategy with GenAI?

Yes. So I would separate -- I would talk about it in 2 different ways. One is customer -- what we're doing for our customers, which also build on what we do internally, and then how we use GenAI internally to drive some efficiency and improve and enhance our control. So on the customer side, we -- and there was a piece in the Harvard Business Review that I mentioned that I think was very interesting about -- talking about the approach and how we were kind of a frontrunner in building GenAI -- embedding GenAI in everything we do with Moody's, which was one of the great surprise for me coming in, a positive surprise. But for our customers, we have different -- we now have GenAI capabilities embedded in over a dozen of our products in the form of navigators to help our customers make the best use of our product, get more efficient in how they consume the workflows or the data. And then we have add-on modules that we sell on top of our existing offering like Research Assistant, which we released in the last days of 2023. We have Automated Credit Memo. We have early warning for our banks and insurance to give a view of the impact of specific news events on their portfolio of assets. If you have a tenant or a retailer that announces that they exit a certain location, what would that have as an impact in terms of your portfolio of leases and portfolio of assets where that particular customer might be a tenant. So those are things that can be automated and flagged pretty quickly through our product, and that's another example. We have KYC, we just sold our first agentic KYC product in first quarter. So if you think about KYC, that's a very labor-intensive, time-consuming process for our banks, insurance and corporate customers. There's a lot of opportunities with GenAI agentic workflows to simplify and have customers gain efficiency from using that. So those are just examples of how we embed GenAI in our offering. Within internally, we've talked about some of the efficiencies we were able to gain already and where the opportunity resides. You have the traditional use cases around customer support, which we've talked about 20% efficiency gains in that function by just using GenAI and tools in our customer success group. Engineering. We've deployed Copilot GitHub across our engineering population that helps accelerate coding, quality assurance around the codes before they get released, those types of things. And then most recently, a very promising use case that is currently for sales, but I think can be expanded beyond the sales group is around the preparation for sales meeting, where we have a tool that takes all the external and internal data pertaining to a particular prospect, be it their investors presentation, their communication, their priorities, a news feed about that particular customer, what they've sold in the past using Salesforce or other tools' database, the contract universe, how they're consuming our product. Gather all those and determines themes and topics that may be of interest to the prospect and coming -- having worked with a lot of salespeople in the past and still now, that's part of the work is very time-consuming and that time that takes them away from being with their customers. So that's a good example of efficiency gain in the sales organization that I think can be replicated across various functions within Moody's as well. The last thing I'd say is on the -- so that was more for Moody's Analytics. On the Ratings side, we are a regulated business, obviously. So we are very mindful in working with our regulators, our compliance department before we deploy GenAI-enabled capabilities to our analysts, but we're also modernizing our workflows, the time between an issuer comes to us to request a ratings on a particular transaction all the way to the point where that ratings is published on moodys.com. There are a lot of different steps within that workflow, a lot of quality controls that we absolutely need to maintain. And some of that is being enhanced through automation in various forms.

Got it. Maybe just one follow-up on each of those. So first, from the commercial side, the Research Assistant and all the other stuff you mentioned, is that contributing to revenue growth? Can you give us any numbers to help us visualize how it's doing?

So we've talked about the 2 different monetization aspects to that. First of all, for the stand-alone modules that we sell like Research Assistant, we've talked about how their customers with an existing CreditView license, when they renew and add to their existing solution Research Assistant, how that's contributing to growth in the first quarter -- in the fourth quarter of 2024, so we said it's about 25% of the Research & Insights ARR growth in the fourth quarter was coming from those existing customers of CreditView who renewed and upgraded to Research Assistant. So that's just one example. It's still a modest contribution. I think where we see that transpiring in our numbers as well is if you look at our retention rate, mid-90s, very strong NPS scores across the board. Having those Navigator embedded as part of our offering now actually helps us maintain a high renewal rate and high retention rates as well as allows us to price -- to increase our prices of subscription, embedding innovation as part of our price increase as well.

And then maybe a similar question, but on all the internal use cases. I guess there's a thesis broadly that GenAI should help costs and efficiencies and margins, like how should we think about how that might play out at Moody's?

Yes. We already saw that in the first quarter and that's -- some of that is embedded in our guide. A lot of it is coming from efficiency from just the operating model in MA and then later on from more broadly spans and layers and things like that, but also the scale of our existing Moody's Analytics business moving from legacy platforms into the cloud, and of course, the use of GenAI in back-office function. We have a lot of use cases in finance. And I know Shivani, for example, in Investors Relations, has a lot of exciting use cases around the use of GenAI by pulling a lot of research summaries in our treasury group. We, as you can imagine, have access to a lot of data around issuance to model on the things we talked about in guidance. We leverage a lot of data. And so how do you take those large language models and GenAI capabilities to simplify and accelerate your -- the production of your forecast. And that's true across the board in back-office function, and that's part of the drive for margin expansion.

Got it. And maybe just last question, a follow-up to that. On MIS itself, I mean, the margin is already pretty nice there and with volume it goes up. But can GenAI materially change that trajectory?

As I said, we are working with our regulator who was very mindful about embedding GenAI capabilities within our Ratings business. Our analysts have access to some of the tools to make their job easier in aggregating the data that comes from our, again, the different research pieces. But we also have invested over the past few years in automating our workflow. As you can imagine, for a company of over 100 years old, there's still a lot of -- there were still a lot of legacy technology. Each asset group had their own methodology for spreading, analytical tools that we're now modernizing to give them more time to be with issuers. As you can imagine, times like these our analysts are in high demand to help insurers and the market make sense of the macroeconomic headlines. And so we want to give them more time to do that as opposed to repeating and keying numbers in different types of workflows or tools along the different journeys. So that's an example where we're investing in automation for our analysts to become what we call volume agnostic, but still within a certain band of issuance, and I think we've been doing that quite successfully.

Got it. Great. We're just about out of time. So thank you so much, Noemie.

Thanks, Manav.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.