Conference Transcript - MCO 2026-05-06

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

All right. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for being here. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Manav Pitnaik. I cover business and information services at Barclays. We're pleased to kick off day two for us, at least here with Moody CFO Noemi Hewlin. Thank you for being here, Noemi. Noemi, I figured the best place to start would be, I think, last year when you came here was your first time in London when you started. It's been about two years now. So maybe just some of your reflections and thoughts over the last two years. I know maybe when you first started things were, you know, you're in a nice stable Moody's Now things have completely changed, but just your thoughts.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, it's always been a pretty moving environment for the past five, six years. So we're getting used to first quarter being a little bit hectic. But it's been, yeah, two years. I think we're fortunate to have joined at a very exciting time for Moody's. We have a very strong momentum and deep currents in our debt capital markets across both the U.S. and Europe and Asia-Pac. So Moody's has a big role to play, and I'm sure we'll talk about the different dynamics between public and private markets. A lot of very strong funding needs that underpin the demand for credit and ratings, AI-related infrastructure, maturity walls are very strong, so a lot of exciting, and we've invested a lot in our ratings business to support that demand. And on these analytics, it's been growing fast over the past 10, 15 years, and we have now completed the integration of most of the acquired entities, and we're excited to have a new president joining to help us scale further, and a lot of opportunities with our proprietary And i'm sure we'll talk about ai and what that means for us. But it's been definitely a very exciting time. And on the culture side, as you said, i think in a recent note, Rob has been really impulsing a lot of change and evolution and Automation of a lot of things we do. And that's been just a great experience so far.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. If i could just spend two minutes on the culture point.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

So firstly, on rob, i mean, i think one of the things that Have stood out, like you said, is the tech forward change almost it feels like moody's has gone through from what was traditionally a reading agency so can you just elaborate a bit more on that and you know some internal anecdote perhaps and how that change has happened yeah we i was surprised coming in two years ago i spent most of my career in technology companies and moody's was actually very advanced in the development of automated automation tools in both sides of our businesses are really leveraging technology to improve what we do internally but also how we serve customers and issuers we had rolled out at the time co-pilot across the entire enterprise and we we wanted to really have everybody experiment with the tool make sure they were familiar with it how to get their workflow better and serve their customers better and now we were at the phase where we're scaling a lot of those exciting projects so that was a pretty good surprise everybody was coding and using those tools which I I wasn't quite frankly expecting coming at Moody's. A lot of focus on continuous improvement, and I think that's been really interesting.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. And you mentioned it here, but on your call, you introduced your new Moody's Analytics head that you're bringing in. Maybe just a little bit more about her, because I know when you first took over, you were also a little bit more focused on analytics. So how's that going to work?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, Kristina Kosmoski, the new CEO for Moody's Analytics, She's joining in June. She has a very strong pedigree in technology company. She has very strong in customer success and customer experience. She is what we call customer obsessed, which I think is going to be really exciting for us as we are scaling and as we move into new territories with the monetization of AI, evolution in go-to-market, evolution in our partnerships. So we're very excited about her joining. And we also had very stable leadership, very strong foundation that she can build on, so quite exciting.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. Okay, let's move to the business. Usually with Moody's you would think we'd start with the ratings, but I'm going to start with analytics first. We'll start with yesterday's headlines around Claude putting out a bunch of new financial tools. Initially the whole sector, including yourself, sold off a bit, but then you guys rebounded because news broke that you guys were providing some of the data. So let's just start there specifically, if you can just give us some details about that.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, we have a partnership strategy with a lot of different providers, including Anthropic. About a couple weeks ago, we announced that we have an MCP app that is available on the cloud desktop environment. And what an MCP app is, is if you think about our content, our proprietary data, our insights and models, We typically have distributed those in the past through data dumps, a SaaS platform, APIs for customers to be able to consume those data sets directly in their environment. It's just a natural evolution of that where we now have enabled customers who are using Cloud or OpenAI or other large language model to consume that data directly in their environment to remove some of the friction associated with having to log into a separate website and get the data dump and then re-plug into the cloud or open AI or other environment. The MCP app with Anthropic is a step further. It's actually our, and you can also have our own data separately, but you can consume in the desktop environment, in the cloud environment, the automated credit memo agent as well as the KYC agent, which are pre-configured workflows, and what this does is really synthesize, organize And also enables you to be more efficient in your token Consumption, which I think is a very strong advantage for our Customers. You will see us including more agents In this mcp app, but that's the first step and I think that was Well received by customers. We have customers in pilot phase Who are actually paying to use those tools and getting some Significant efficiency gains as a result of that.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

And in terms of the content that providing including yesterday like what all content is available through these mcps or mcp apps so the mcp if you think about a traditional either an api feed or an mcp of most of our content is available if you think about just the mcp app which is the agentic workflow that we have built over the past two years the automated credit memo agent and the kyc agents are available today on the mcp app that is uh fed through the cloud environment and we expect to release more of that got it and and you know talking about efficiency token usage etc maybe just taking a step back how should we think about the revenue model or the revenue sharing whatever it might be today when you when you sign these agreements yeah it's uh so we a couple things i'd say in its early days i think we are all uh you know thinking with our partners about how best to to monetize the opportunity we keep the direct relationship with the end customers so there's no revenue share agreement yet we're not subcontractor of those large language model providers our customers have a direct licensing agreement with Moody's and as a matter of fact when they call out the agents or the data you can see the Moody's branding and interface and that directs you to to to our environment so that's the first thing I say what in terms of monetization we We have customers are paying a premium to access those MCP apps and content right now. What is likely to happen over time as we're, you know, getting the learnings from those early experimentation and early pilots is we'll likely have a flavor of a consumption pricing with our customers. I want to be careful because our customers have told us and we also like the recurring subscription-based revenue that is very stable and predictable. But we also want to account and benefit and make sure we monetize the peaks of data consumptions that are going to be resulting from increased usage and consumption of our content through those applications. So you'll have a likely a base fee with consumption-based pricing on top, but we're still experimenting and getting some learnings from those pilots.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. And obviously, we talked about Claude and Anthropic, but are you LLM agnostic? Can you talk about some of your other partnerships and strategies?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, I talked a bit earlier about our historical distribution channels where we had either a direct API feed to our customers' environment. If you think about large banks, they've always consumed our content through their own applications. If you go move up down the tier a little bit, you have our customers in tier two and tier three banks who are consuming our content together with prepackaged workflows because they don't have the IT, you know, power to build their own things themselves. So we've already had a pretty agnostic distribution channel, depending on where the customer is in their journey and how they want to consume our content, and that will continue to be true with the large language models. We have a partnership with Anthropic, OpenAI, we have a partnership with Microsoft, and also AWS, and so on.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. Just to dig deeper on some of the moats that are, you know, either debated or that need some clarification, maybe you could just help start us by setting up Moody's Analytics in the mix, the three different segments and what's in there?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah. So you have decision solutions, which is about 45% of AR, so annualized recurring revenue. Now, 98% of Moody's analytics revenue is recurring, so that's why I like to talk about the annualized recurring revenue as a good proxy for how we think about the business. Decision solutions have been growing the fastest. This is where you have the workflows for banks, insurance, as well as the KYC. So for banks, the flagship product is our credit lens offering, which has grown in the high teens in the recent past. That is what I referred to earlier as for tier two and tier three banks to perform loan origination workflows all the way from, you know, underwriting to portfolio monitoring and so on. We have our insurance models, catastrophic models that are fed on industry claims data data over decades, so it's really proprietary models based on data that we have curated over time, and then KYC workflows that leverage our Orbis data estate as well as the politically exposed people database. So that's in decision solution. In research and insight, we have which is about 29% of the AR. This is where you have credit view, we'll now call Moody's view, the models, ratings, probability of default model, economic research that is used by banks to do their stress testing and models have been calibrated over a decade by give get data concerns so very proprietary as well. And then data and information for the rest of the AR, which is where we have the pure data feeds from the rating agency as well as the data feeds from Orbis that we feed into a client's environment directly.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Okay. Let's start where you ended. On the Orbis data set, there is some debate there because a lot of the raw data is available publicly, but then there's some partnerships, some licenses. So can you just help us sort through all that nuances and why you think that's still modded?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

If I think about Orbis, so Orbis is a private company database that has over 600 million records now. That's grown from 300 million when I joined. So we continue to invest and expand the coverage and the breadth of the data set. I'll start with the first layer, which is the firmographic data, which is one could ARGUE AVAILABLE MORE BROADLY ON PUBLIC SOURCES, BUT WE TAKE THAT AND WE CURATE IT AND WE MAKE IT RELEVANT FOR YOUR SPECIFIC USE CASE AND LET ME GIVE YOU A FEW EXAMPLES AS WELL. IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT IS RELEVANT FOR A PARTICULAR ENTITY THAT YOU'RE DOING BUSINESS WITH, YOU CAN USE SOME OF THAT PHYRMOGRAPHIC DATA TO BE CONNECTED WITH THE OTHER DATA SETS THAT ARE PROPRIATORY THAT YOU'RE USING TO MAKE THAT ASSESSMENT. Then when you pass the thermographic, and by the way, if you think about what customers are tapping into when they go into Orbis database, we have a lot of data into that. This is not so much for the thermographic, that's a small portion of it. The majority is for what I'm going to talk about next, which is the curated corporate hierarchy mapping. That is, we spent decades curating those, and we have license rights and IP agreements with registries in about 800 jurisdictions. So we have license rights, we have IP, and then we take that raw data from those registries and we contextualize it. We, semantic definition is also important. A dissolution doesn't mean the same thing in Germany as in other jurisdictions. So we want to make sure our customer ingests and have context around those data sets.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

And some of these data licenses that you talked about, so one of the debates, obviously, is LLMs can get the data and do it. but are your license partners opening the data up more?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

No, actually, that's the interesting trends that we've observed over the past couple of years is registries are reducing the number of partners that they're monetizing those data sets with. And again, it's not just about the raw data. It's about all the context that we have built on top of it. The entity mapping, the corporate resolution, that's very important. And if you think about the use cases for those data sets, If Barclays wants to do a KYC, you don't go with good enough data that you scrape on the web, right? It has to be auditable, traceable, documented, and then we have auditors of our customers who come in and audit our data sets. And so that's, I think, where the value is beyond just the context that it provides. It's also trusted content that's been, you know, trusted for decades.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

And the corporate hierarchy aspect that you pointed out, that's why people come to Orbis more. My understanding is right now LLMs are not good at doing that, but is the moat there more the context that you just provided?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Is the context layer that we bring to give you all the associated risk aspect or corporate links for a particular given entity? and I think Shivani, my IR lead, has a great example that I think is very powerful. A few years ago, there was a school district in New Jersey who was using a bus company registered in California, and that company had a linkage a few layers above by a Russian oligarch. So they weren't allowed to do business with that particular party, and that Orbis was the only way for that school district to find out, And that was actually a very strong argument for why large language models or other public sources cannot go into that level of detail.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Just one layer back that I thought about was, I think whenever Claude or one of you guys put out a tool, they think, OK, they're coming off to the R-space. But when you guys partner with them, I mean, they are partnering with you, right? So what does that discussion look like? I mean, they need you to help.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

CLAIRE D' Yeah, so we don't train those large language models with our IP that's a very important part but they if you think about what a large language model does is it provides some you know workflow support on actual context and data those large language models do not have that contextualized information and data that we have and so I think that's a natural partnership for us we're not also trying to compete in the UI or front office. That's not what we do. We pride ourselves in having, you know, trusted what Mike and Rob like to call decision-grade data sets and insights that then get used into different applications depending on where you are in your journey. So that's where our strength is. And again, we're not trying to compete in the front office or UI space.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

If we can move to decision solutions, you know, when you were describing the sub-segments, you mentioned workflows a lot nowadays workflows is a risky word i guess so can you just help you know how how moated are those workflows or is there something more to it than that so if i'm going to go through the main ones lending in banking we typically cater to tier two and tier three banks who are looking to automate their loan origination systems we We acquired a company called numerated about two years ago that had some AI native embedded feature like spreading financials, automated credit memo and things around those lines. So we've embedded now all the numerated capabilities in our lending package and we gave some stats about customers upgrading from the legacy package into the new one with a pretty significant price uplift. That's a product that's grown in the high teens with a very strong retention rate. So we feel pretty good about lending. If you think about lending and credit underwriting, you don't want to be the one who's using a third-party large language model or an unverified source to come up with your assessment and have this come back and bite you later on. So I think we, and again, we're audited by our customers. Our solutions go through a very rigorous regulatory and audit process, and I think that's very important. Then I'll move to insurance, which we have the main one here is the climate risk assessment models and again this model are these models are could the AI come up with a model sure but the model is fed on data that comes from the industry industry claims data that we get to train and inform our risk outputs and again that's used by insurance to do their risk underwriting so very core to the business of the insurance company very core to the front office and growth of those insurance companies. And then KYC, this is more like a preconfigured workflow to perform KYC checks, leveraging our Orbis database, leveraging our politically exposed people database as well. And again, if you operate in a regulated industry, you want to make sure you have the right tools and workflows and auditability, traceability, how did you come up with that decision, where is it recorded? What is your, you know, justification for making that decision? And the regulator comes in and audits that. So I think that's also another area where we feel quite comfortable.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. On the KYC, we get a lot of questions, too. So maybe first on the data set, you already talked about Orbis, but can you talk about the politically exposed PEP data set, like how important that is, how differentiated that is?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, we, this comes from an acquisition we did A FEW YEARS AGO, WE'VE CONTINUOUSLY UNRICHED THAT POLITICALLY EXPOSED DATABASE. I GAVE AN EXAMPLE EARLIER ABOUT HOW POWERFUL THAT WAS IN IDENTIFYING, YOU KNOW, SANCTIONS AND SANCTIONED INDIVIDUALS. AFTER THE RUSSIA INVASION OF UKRAINE, WE HAD A LOT OF INTEREST AND DEMAND FOR THAT POLITICALLY EXPOSED PEOPLE DATABASE. AGAIN, IF YOU OPERATE IN A REGULATED BUSINESS OR EVEN, YOU KNOW, YOU'RE LOOKING AT SUPPLY chain or vendor risk management especially with dora and things like that you want to make sure you have a clear understanding of who you're doing business with from a third-party risk standpoint got it and then in kyc as well and maybe it's a broader question right but the view is ai can you know scour the web find out who's exposed whatever it might be but those tools that can be more efficient are you guys using those two to make yourself better disrupt yeah we are actually using it in our procurement department now so for our own customer and front office we're using it but we're starting using it now also in vendor risk management as you know we operate in Europe we are regulated by Dora so we have to comply with those regulations and our tools actually help us do that more effectively and just to round up the the segment then the research and insights but part of it I don't think there's any debate it's it's It's your ratings research propriety, but anything else? Yeah, credit research. The other thing I would say, we hear a lot about economic research, which is a part of it. But, hey, you know, economic data, you can find this on the web and other publicly available sources. The one thing to note, though, is those economic forecasts and research are used by banks to do stress testing. So if you listen to Mark Zendi, who's our economics at Moody's Analytics, he's very careful about when he talks about recession odds and other risks from an economic standpoint, because he knows that the minute he passes a certain threshold, this is going to be used by banks to adjust their stress tests. So it's pretty serious, again, things that we think is very valuable.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. Before we leave the segment, since you are CFO, I've got to ask about margins. Can you just help us with, you know, since you've come, of course, the trajectory has improved, and just remind us of your goals and how you get there and some of the moving pieces.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, so Moody's and LX margin, we have a medium-term target that's by the end of 2027 to be in the mid to high 30s. We're well on the way. We have made some significant improvements, again, in the first quarter. We started at about 30-ish percent when I joined. That was after a lot of the acquisitions that we had made, investments to be ready for AI and make sure we had the right, again, context layer in our data. We've improved significantly. We're now in the 33-33 range, and we're, again, aiming to be in the mid to high 30s by 27. We've got 150 basis points improvement again this year. And we're doing that by there's a few things that are going on in MA and not a lot of it yet has to do with deploying AI at scale in that segment. So there's a significant opportunity beyond that. It's really about resource allocation. We came to the realization we had acquired or ingested and integrated most of the entities we acquired. We simplified the operating model. We looked at, you know, having one product organization go to market. Make sure we have the thoughtful allocation of resources to drive areas of growth in lending, KYC and data. So that's really what's been driving the growth. We also have deploy AI and customer support, as you would expect, a pretty obvious use case at first that has allowed us to get some efficiencies. And we're looking at product development lifecycle, all the engineering and product development with AI, and that's very promising.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. Maybe let's use margins and shift into ratings. You know, by any measure, ratings has, you know, very impressive margins. But it sounds like AI could help improve that even. Can you just talk about ratings?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, ratings is operating right now at about 65% margin. I mean, what we say, I like to say, is being volume agnostic. We have a medium-term target, you know, in that ballpark. But we, obviously, if you have a year like 2022 where revenue went down 33%, You're not going to make it up through the efficiencies and the automation, but we're trying to be volume agnostic within a certain band of issuance. And we do that by, and this started way before I joined, actually, we have automated a lot of the workflow that an analyst goes through before the actual human rating committee and assessment happens. Things about, like, spreading financial statements, getting data from different sources, putting THOSE INTO THE METHODOLOGY TEMPLATE, RUNNING ALL THOSE WORKFLOWS HAS BEEN REALLY AUTOMATED SUCH THAT THE ANALYST CAN SPEND A LOT MORE TIME TALKING WITH ISSUERS AROUND WHAT'S HAPPENING IN THEIR SECTOR. AND LAST YEAR DURING AROUND LIBERATION DAY WE HAD A PEAK OF DEMAND FOR ANALYST TO REALLY MAKE SENSE OF THE NOISE BEYOND THE HEADLINE. SO THAT'S REALLY WHAT'S BEEN DRIVING A LOT OF THE MARGIN EXPANSION. WE'RE CONTINUING TO INVEST THOUGH IN RATINGS. I TALKED ABOUT A LOT OF THE FUNDING NEEDS AND DEEP CURRENT IN THE MARKET. WE WANT TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE THE ANALYTICAL CAPACITY AND SKILLSET TO ADDRESS THOSE DEMANDS. AND AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, IT'S A LONG-TERM WORKFLOUS PLANNING. YOU DON'T SWITCH ON AND OFF AND, YOU KNOW, ADJUST THE ANALYTICAL SKILLSET OVERNIGHT. BUT WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO INCREASE THE LOAD OF OUR ANALYST BY AUTOMATING A LOT OF THE PROCESSES THAT PRECEDE THE TIME WHERE THEY SIT DOWN TOGETHER AND THINK ABOUT THE RATING.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. If you can just touch on issuance and trends and so forth, maybe first on a higher level before we touch on a few specifics, but if you could just help us appreciate what happened last quarter and what the current trends look like.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

We had a very strong quarter in Moody's ratings for, and I'm not going to repeat the data from the first quarter, but hyperscaler issuance was very strong. The five hyperscalers have issued as much debt as they did in 2025, and we expect this trend to continue, so that was a strong driver for investment-grade issuance in the first quarter. We had, interestingly, in terms of the macro environment and the geopolitical disruption, in March alone, 80% of the activity was concentrated in six days. So what this tells you is when the markets are open and when it's a risk on day, there's demand and transactions happen and there's no constraint. We'll have to see how that evolves, but that was a very strong driver of growth in the first quarter. M&A activity was also a very sustained in bank loan we we talked to our banking partners again recently and they they see a very strong pipeline of M&A transaction so that that we're pretty pleased with the growth in our ratings business in the first quarter got it and on M&A I know in the prior years as well there's always been you know fits and starts clearly but how how have you what have your assumptions for M&A been for the year it's clearly seems It seems like EI, there's upside, but on M&A, how do we think? Yeah, we've guided to about 40 percent. We've considered about 40 percent increase in announced M&A, so that's our assumption. Before we came to the market in April, we looked at, we talked to our banking advisors, and they haven't seen a slowdown in the pipeline, so we've pulled on to that, and we saw a very strong first quarter in that regard. We always talk about pent-up demand in M&A. We've talked about this for a while, our rating assessment services, which is a leading indicator for M&A. So an issuer comes up ahead of a transaction and says, if I do this type of financing or if I structure the deal that way, what would that impact be on my ratings? And so that business has been performing very strongly in the second half of 25 and, again, first quarter. So that's, again, a good leading indicator.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Private credit, obviously another big topic out there. maybe just high level from you know all your insights at the rating agency is this a just a headline issue is this a potential systemic restructural risk how do you guys look at that so we you're referring to a few interesting cratic events that have a lot to do with fraud or other types of considerations we private credit has been a strong growth driver for us of a very small base we We rate about 80 trillion of stock of public debt, so private credit is much lower than that as you can imagine. It's grown 80% in the first quarter. I think what those headlines bring is a flight to quality, requests for transparency, sign posts, indicators, and benchmarks, which we're very well positioned to provide. We have a lot of interaction with the private credit players. As a matter of fact, we had two credit conferences in the past two weeks, one in New York and one in London, where we had prominent leaders in private credit speak and interact with Mark Pinto, our head of private credit for the ratings franchise. And you can see, really, there's demand. We start to see insurance companies, well, those guys disclosing how much of their portfolio is actually rated. So there's a demand from investors about signposts and quality, which I think we're well-positioned to serve.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. And I know you've talked about as a company focusing on private credit across the company. On the rating side, it's pretty obvious. It's, you know, the different categories. How do we think about private credit and the opportunity on the Moody's analytics side?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, we provide credit. I talked about the credit assessments and the credit models that we provide. So we provide that as well. If you're an investor who, you know, want to know the quality of the loans you're invested in or the fund you're invested in, we provide that through Moody's analytics as well. And that gives us the opportunity as those players scale to come and potentially rate those transactions down the road if there's a need for a rating.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. And I think one of the initiatives in there has been a partnership with MSCI. Can you talk about overall what that entails and how that's going?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, the partnership with MSCI that we concluded last year, we come in with our probability of default models, our credit estimates, and then they have the best, the most comprehensive database of loans. So we combine those two to provide, you know, probability of defaults and credit assessments on those portfolios. And it's a revenue share agreement, and that's going pretty well.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. And is there another leg where they could do private indexation on the Orbus data sets?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

That could be, we're exploring different avenues on the partnership, and that could be one.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Okay, got it. Maybe in the last five minutes or so, let's talk about capital allocation. Actually, one step back. On the ratings, just to wrap that up, there's always a lot of different moving pieces. There's a lot of focus in the forest versus the trees. Maybe you can just remind everyone of the long-term model for ratings to wrap it up.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, so it's a business that if you look over the cycles, that's grown in a high single digit, me to high single digit over time obviously there's years like last year where it was significantly higher and this year as well but the the algorithm first and foremost GDP is the first pillar of that first block of that algorithm it fuels asset formation so you took GDP growth then you have the value that we provide to issuers and we've recently updated our study to shows the the savings on the coupon for an issuer that has a ratings versus a bond that doesn't have a rating. So that's two or three percentage points. And then the last one to two percentage points of emerging market trends. So here you have contribution of private credit, domestic market. We have investments in Latin America, Asia pack and affiliates to serve those domestic markets that are going to be very important in the next decade. And then digital finance as well and other emerging trends to get to the high single Got it.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Okay, moving to cap allocation, I don't think you've changed a whole lot, but just your approach and how you think about how capital allocation priorities are.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, first and foremost, growth. There's a lot of opportunities to grow both businesses, and I've talked about what those underlying demand drivers are, you know, funding needs, the maturity walls are very healthy, understanding who you're doing business with, understanding the risk of climate-related events on your businesses. So we want to make sure we have investments for that, and we've been investing and acquiring, you know, companies in those different spaces. In terms of M&A, obviously, you know, very thoughtful. We have a pretty good record of strong return on those transactions. We'll continue to be very focused on that. I think the bar is raised. Obviously, if you have asked me a few months ago whether we would be contemplating a very specific workflow for one area, I would have said probably yes. Now, it's maybe a bit of a different answer, focused on data assets and data coverage, and then the rest is capital return to our shareholders, and we just did a billion and a half of buybacks this quarter in Q1.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Maybe just on the buyback, you obviously did a big number in Q1, therefore you upped the amount for the year. Just the thought process around there, opportunity.

Noemie Heuland, CFO

So we were very pleased with what we did in the first quarter to take advantage of the the price to increase our buyback. We just divested our regulatory business and we just closed that transaction on April 30th so we'll use the proceeds to continue on our buyback program and we'll continue to be opportunistic. I think the good news is we have a lot of flexibility in our capital allocation program because of our operating leverage and our profile. So first and foremost growth and then making sure we return capital to our shareholders as well.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. I got one more. We do have a few minutes. If anybody has any questions, you can put your hands up. But just on M&A, I wanted to touch real quickly. You did mention while we were going through Moody's Analysts, a lot of what you built up has been through M&A. And so in the next, call it five years, should you be expecting a lot more, even if the bar is higher?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

I think it, again, will be very thoughtful. We have high hurdle rates in our M&A. There's a whole debate right now on whether software workflow makes sense. I would argue if it's deeply embedded in customer workflows, if it's a vertical that has a lot of value and efficiency gains for the customer with a lot of proprietary data associated with it, I think it's something that definitely should be looked at. Data coverage we just acquired a year and a half ago, Cape Analytics, which is a geospatial data to be used by insurance companies to underwrite their risk on properties and insurance actually was visiting an insurance company in the midwest last year and they love it. They really said that was something we were really expecting you to do. So we'll listen to our customers. Some of those ideas come directly from customers in terms of data integration or tuck ins. And so you would expect us to continue to do that.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

Got it. I think you had a question. Just wait for the mic if you don't mind.

Speaker 1

I'd love to hear a bit more. So you get a lot of questions on MA and the moats there. But on MIS, I guess you get a lot fewer questions. I guess when we hear about you putting a lot of financial data and then the credit guys sit in a room, the obvious question is why can't Anthropic hire a 300 credit analyst and do that? Can you just make sure we understand, is it the NSR, NRSRO certification? How do you think about the moats in MIS and why those are so impenetrable?

Noemie Heuland, CFO

Yeah, you're right to say that it rarely comes up as a concern or question. I think people understand and appreciate the value of having the benchmark and the sign post for appreciating the assessing the credit quality of a downloading loan. I think we have experts who are called in and have a dialogue. So you talk about large language model and having analysts crunching data. I think that's the, I would say, the relatively easy part of the job. Where it gets really interesting and where the secret sauce comes in and what our issuers are telling us, and I was an issuer myself, so I interacted with our Moody's analysts as well. It's really the depth of understanding of the historical trends of the sector. We have access to MNPI and things that obviously customers share with us. We do our analysts go on site visits. They think about all those infrastructure projects, AI, data center construction. They actually go on site and look at, you know, the construction size and talk to the engineers. They have a really deep understanding of the business and not only what's happening in a given quarter or a given trend, but, like, long term. Like, what does that mean in the long term? And the ratings, obviously, are not expected to move from one quarter to the other. It's really that long-term view, and I think that's what our issuers value today.

Manav Pitnaik, Analyst — Barclays

We get time for one more, or else we can wrap it up, too. all right let's just leave it there then thank you thank you appreciate everybody being here