S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Capital IQ Pro is being reinvented through the addition of new content, expanded analytical capabilities and modern GenAI access points.

Welcome to Capital IQ: Reinvented in New York City.

Today, we're excited to share some of those recent innovations with you. Let me now preview some of what you'll see today. We'll start with our deep sector data, which has long been a hallmark for Capital IQ Pro through our SNL content. Rodney Pedersen, who leads our Visible Alpha business, will demonstrate how we aggregate and standardize detailed models at scale from over 6,000 sell-side analysts. Next, Private Markets. Victor Eng will showcase our expanded capabilities, including With Intelligence, which we acquired at the end of 2025. Then cross-asset coverage. Rose Dezenzo will walk through our significant expansion in fixed income securities. Finally, GenAI in action. Dean Oligino will demonstrate how we're bringing our data to life through capabilities, many award-winning capabilities like Document Intelligence, ChatIQ, Chart Explainer and Kensho, along with our MCP-enabled architecture, unlocking new ways to interact with our platform and new ways that Capital IQ Pro can serve you better. Each presentation will highlight powerful stand-alone capabilities, but the real value comes from how those capabilities work together to elevate your analysis and decision-making.

My name is Rodney Pedersen. I lead the Visible Alpha business at S&P Global. We started Visible Alpha about 10 years ago to address what we saw as a really significant issue in the marketplace. And that is that consensus estimates were always available at a very high level, so you could look at revenue or EPS. But really, the investment debate was always about much more granular issues. And the sell-side, in fact, put out forecasts on those issues, they were just never captured at scale and that's what we've done with Visible Alpha. So today, I'm going to walk you through 3 different companies in 3 different industries. And my goal is to show you the level of granularity and specificity that we capture within each company in those industries. So we'll start with a name that we're all fairly familiar with, which is Apple. And as I mentioned before, you could always pretty easily get access to revenue and EPS estimates for Apple, but the debate is always about something more. It's about iPhone unit sales or about revenue expectations in Greater China. Those are the types of details that we're capturing within Visible Alpha. So from the data that we're sourcing from the sell-side, for Apple, if you follow my mouse on the left-hand side, you'll see a revenue model; a product segment model, geographic segment model; and as you might expect, an income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flow. So we'll start with the revenue model. And in this case, very specific to Apple, what you're going to find is we will give the net sales expectations for every product in their portfolio, along with unit sales and average selling price assumptions from the sell-side. So you can see a great deal of granularity here that ultimately builds up to the total revenue estimate at the bottom of the page. I mentioned earlier the Greater China example with Apple. So we could take a look at net sales in Greater China, look at the forecast for that particular segment of their business and we can actually start interrogating this data in more detail. So what we can see here is that Apple has been in a decelerating growth phase in Greater China over the last 4 years. You can see it bottomed in fiscal 2025, which we would certainly attribute, in some degree, to the tariff activity. The market has a really significant bet on Apple's Greater China business coming back in a very big way over the next 4 years. So this is an example of the importance of tracking this type of granularity within the Visible Alpha platform. It can give you so much more insight into the market level of thinking on a business like Apple. So let's switch gears and go to a different company. We'll take a look at Shell within integrated oil and gas. I mentioned the revenue and segment models from Apple a moment ago. You'll see a very different set of reports for Shell because it's a very different business. We'll take a look at their upstream business specifically, which will be an income statement showing revenue expectations for upstream, different expense lines such as depreciation, amortization and exploration costs and then getting into EBITDA and net income on both a GAAP and operating basis. Interestingly, we also provide you with some of the input assumptions that go into those revenue estimates. So for example, we can look at the volume projections on a production per day basis and we can also look at the pricing assumptions for the commodities that they have exposure to in their upstream business. So let's take a look at the Q2 estimate. And to no surprise, with the conflict in the Middle East, you see a large increase in the expectation for pricing over the last 1 month to 1.5 months. That should be no surprise to anyone. But we can interrogate this a little bit further and gain an understanding of when the market expects liquid pricing for Shell to return to pre-war levels. And in this case, we can see that deceleration happening over FQ3, FQ4 into FQ1. Now of course, this will continue to change as new information comes to market and we help our users capture this on a point-in-time basis so they can keep a very close eye on market expectations with respect to these very important issues with a business like Shell. Finally, we'll go to one more industry, which is the pharmaceutical industry. We'll take a look at Eli Lilly. And as you might expect by now, if we were to look at the models that we've created for Eli Lilly, it's very specific to their business and the different areas of disease that they treat. So we'll look at the revenue model, and you will see all of the drugs that Eli Lilly is producing or has in pipeline with projections well out into the future. We're actually tracking projections into the 2040s in this case. And so I'd like to take a look at Mounjaro, but to do so, I'm going to take us into the Visible Alpha BioPharma platform. This is a new product that we released recently. And what we did was we took all of the drugs from all the companies that we cover, so Pfizer, Eli Lilly, GSK in Europe and extracted all of those drugs into 1 platform, allowing our users to screen by indication. For example, they could find all drugs associated with ovarian cancer, mechanism of action, the clinical phase that the drug is in and really start to do a really effective screening exercise. So let's take a close look at Mounjaro. This is the leading drug in the GLP-1 category. It's been very popular in the marketplace. So here, first and foremost, we can see the revenue projections, again, going well into the future. We're displaying to 2033 and noting that peak sales happens in 2041. And as we did with Apple and Shell, we'll give you a complete decomposition of how the market is arriving at its revenue forecast between U.S. and international, where the drug is treating type 2 diabetes versus obesity. And then finally, some really important related metrics like the number of patients on GLP-1, the capture rate for Mounjaro and so on and so forth, leading to total revenue. So I hope that was a helpful example going through a few companies in a few different industries. And I will turn it over to my colleague, Victor Eng, for an overview of private markets. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Rodney, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Victor Eng, and I'm excited to be here today to share what we're doing on the private markets side of things. As you're all well aware, the private markets are famously known for being opaque, fragmented and lacking when it comes to transparency and having a common set of standards. At S&P, we're focused on bringing transparency to the private markets by tracking the flow of capital at each stage of the fund life cycle. And it's really the combination of S&P's current coverage, our recent acquisition of With Intelligence and our linking capabilities that really put us in a great position to connect the dots across the private markets landscape. And this allows us to answer questions related to capital formation like what have fundraising trends looked like in recent years, but then also give our users the ability to break that down into any combination of asset class, strategies, regions and/or sectors. Rodney shared earlier how we can deep dive into specific sectors like pharma to analyze KPIs on specific drugs. So let's continue with the health care theme and look at PE/VC fundraising trends for health care, and then ultimately be able to see which funds are in market, what's their fundraising status and are they under or oversubscribed? Taking that one step further, let's look at the historical performance and see what that's looked like from a benchmarking perspective. What were the median and the quartile returns for each vintage year and then take that even further and look at fund level returns so that we can see which GPs had the top performing funds. And also for those funds, who are the top investors based on the capital commitments? When it comes to investor targeting, we want to help GPs find the right LPs faster and then help them understand which types of investors have committed capital to health care funds, in which geographies and then which ones are looking to increase their allocations? And this, in particular, is where With Intelligence's coverage of investor intentions and preferences is highly differentiated since they collect this insight from direct engagement with key market players. And it's also highly actionable from a fundraising perspective, given they can offer the context behind those investment decisions. We can also help arm our users with details around which GPs have the strongest relationships with each of those investors and then which ones have strong track records for delivering outsized returns? We can then take that one step further and pull up the profile for a specific investor and look at AUM over time, review the time line for their intentions and preferences, look at their investment allocations by asset class and then compare those current allocations against the target ranges. We can also identify who the key decision-makers are in when it comes to making allocation decisions and then, of course, what's their contact information? We can also look at their capital commitments and the funds that are in their roster or in their portfolio and much, much more. So the takeaway is simple. S&P is focused on bringing transparency to the private markets by connecting fundraising activity, LP commitments, performance context and then investor intent. So ultimately, GP teams can move faster, they can prioritize their outreach with confidence and tell a stronger story in the market. With that, I'm going to hand over to Rose Dezenzo to take you through the latest developments in our fixed income offering.

Thank you, Victor. My name is Rose Dezenzo, and I am the team lead for market data delivery on our desktop offerings. As part of the expansion effort, we achieved broad coverage across the fixed income universe, adding over 30 million government, sovereign, agency, corporate, municipal loans and CD securities, enabling you to efficiently review the entire debt and equity capital structure of an issuer. As you can see, we have a heat map here at the top as well as a ratings distribution chart. The heat map will be present on the corporate's page and then you'll also be able to toggle to a government and agency and sovereign page to view a heat map based off of the world map. Both of these views allow you to get a perspective or a comprehensive view of market dynamics across sector and region. You can also use these heat maps to filter. I'll select the health care industry. And once I do that, you'll see that it has expanded to the entire industry tree. As you scroll down, you'll also notice that the information has expanded to also filter the bottom grid. And you'll note that by identifying under the industry tab, the health care information. You can select any of those items and be directed to a security detail page. Here, you'll see the full depth and breadth of the offering. The various tabs here at the top allow you to navigate through the content. You will land on the pricing and analytics page, which provides a comprehensive view of pricing over time, and included in that would be the price and analytics information as well as liquidity scores. Scrolling back up, you'll notice that the reference data tab now includes comprehensive coverage of all of our deep and rich terms and conditions information for any of the fixed income securities, including scheduled information as well as regulatory information, which you'll find here at the bottom. Fixed income ownership reveals who holds each security, concentration levels and institutional ownership, including owner type, portfolio turnover and debt emphasis. The AI-driven comparison tool found under the Similar Securities tab allows you to quickly compare similar securities by rating, debt type, currency and maturity, helping you spot outliers as well as portfolio opportunities. How can these enhancements help you? First, it enables faster, more confident decisions by quickly accessing the data you need for risk and analytical workflows. It will reduce reconciliation time through the use of integrated tools to streamline your processes. It offers comprehensive coverage to analyze the full capital structure and market landscape with ease. And finally, it provides actionable insights. You instantly visualize market trends and liquidity and assess risk with advanced ownership and comparison insights. Now I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, Dean Oligino, who will take you through our GenAI offerings. Thank you.

Thanks, Rose. My name is Dean Oligino, and I'm excited to close the demo portion of today's session by sharing how AI is transforming Capital IQ Pro. First, it's important to recognize that AI isn't new to Capital IQ Pro. We've been using it for years for entity tagging, topic classifications, table extraction, sentiment analysis and audio transcriptions for our live transcripts. Last year, we took a big step forward in launching major new capabilities, leveraging generative AI and LLM technology. I'm going to show Document Intelligence; Chart Explainer, very briefly; and then deep dive into how ChatIQ is evolving. So with Document Intelligence, users can sift through millions of documents in our platform and extract insights using GenAI. Here, I'm going to select some filings, some transcripts and a whole bunch of S&P authored articles to get insights into an M&A transaction. Since this is an M&A deal, I'm going to ask for a deal memo. And very quickly, you can gain insights into the deal terms, the financial metrics, the strategic rationale and the time line of the deal. All of that is backed by the underlying source documents, so a user can validate the information and gain more context. Now I mentioned millions of documents, but we're always expanding. For instance, the 20,000 documents from With Intelligence, that powers much of what Victor showed earlier, will be coming soon. Also, later this year, we'll be adding the ability for users to upload their own proprietary documents, so they can co-mingle chats with their documents and ours. Next, I'm going to look at Chart Explainer. Who here has ever looked at a chart and wondered, "Huh, I wonder what happened there?" Well now, with Chart Explainer, you can visually inspect peaks and valleys and see all the news and key events that happened behind the chart. That provides the user context you cannot get simply from a visual. Moving over to ChatIQ. We are moving in a direction of a workflow partner, not just a chatbot. And let me show how this works. First, ChatIQ has access to the whole repository of data within the Capital IQ Pro platform. If you want to ask a complex business question that is quite open-ended such as what's the outlook for weight loss drugs? Well, Cap IQ Pro can access the really deep and rich data from Visible Alpha that Rodney showed earlier, but we can also supplement it with broker research, news, filings, transcripts to bring a comprehensive and robust view of this kind of question to our users. You can ask what are the current implied deal multiples in the health care sector, combining analytics and screening. We even have macro data. So how has tariff policy impacted retail pharmacy sales. So these are open-ended questions that a user may ask. But we also know that there are tasks that our users do day in and day out, and we're building skills to help them on those tasks. For instance, if you are looking at monitoring the market, if you're sourcing a deal or if you're doing a financial analysis plus many others, we have the information in the system and the workflow skills to be able to support those. Here, I'm going to generate a company valuation. Now what ChatIQ is doing is not just pulling data or presenting you a view, it's actually doing all the tasks necessary to produce a valuation. It's finding the comps, it's pulling the multiples, it's finding the precedent transactions, it's creating the DCF. So all of these tasks that a user would have to go manually do, it's pulling together on the user's behalf. And then it's assembling it all into the actual analysis that a user needs to consume. Now this isn't just a chat response, this is fully interactive and editable. So if a user wants to change a metric or add a peer to this valuation, they can do that very easily and see the whole analysis update. Now in the journey of our users, this is not the last step, but oftentimes, they want to go create a deck. So I'm going to go ahead and ask ChatIQ to create me a PowerPoint. And now since we were looking at a valuation analysis, ChatIQ knows that typically in these types of analysis, there might be an overview. We're going to feature the visual. We're going to have some backup exhibits, maybe a SWOT analysis. All of this applied in the client's own proprietary brand. Now the best part about all of this is every exhibit is backed by an Excel file linked to our Excel add-in, which is fully refreshable. That gives the users full transparency, full auditability and full control. Now with our GenAI initiatives, it's not just in the browser. We've introduced ChatIQ into mobile. And with our recent acquisition of Drift AI, we are now bringing modeling into Office directly. So in a simple prompt, I can ask for a DCF model. And this is creating the inputs, the SPG formulas, the ifs, the sums, all the dependencies, all the things that make a model work are being created in the background. Everything I've shown here today is built on top of MCP. And what does that mean? Well, simply, it means all the investment that we are doing in Capital IQ Pro's GenAI capabilities are now available for clients and partners to build their own agentic solutions. An example of this live today is in Claude. Claude can access Cap IQ data through the Kensho LLM-ready API and produce analysis. And if you're in Claude, you can specify, I want Cap IQ, knowing that it's trusted, accurate and verified data. So for us, we're building GenAI tools in the browser, in office, in mobile, but also in any of our partners such as Claude and ChatGPT. We want to be wherever our users are.