SPGI - S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) Presents at Barclays Americas Select Franchise Conference (Transcript)
2024-05-11 15:04:09 ET
S&P Global Inc. (SPGI)
Barclays Americas Select Franchise Conference
May 7, 2024, 08:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Douglas Peterson - President and Chief Executive Officer
Conference Call Participants
Manav Patnaik - Barclays Capital
Presentation
Manav Patnaik
All right. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us here after lunch. My name is Manav Patnaik. I'm Barclays' business and information services analyst and we're pleased to kick off the afternoon session here with Doug Peterson, who's the CEO of S&P Global. So, Doug, thank you for being here.
Douglas Peterson
Thank you for having us. Great conference.
Manav Patnaik
Thank you. Appreciate that. So first, Doug, maybe just a broad question. We're about two plus years since the close of the IHS market deal, almost three since you first announced it. So maybe just – we've gone through a lot of cost energies, you've had that much time to look through it. So maybe your assessment today on what your portfolio looks like and your level of happiness with that.
Douglas Peterson
Yes, so going back three or four years ago when we first conceived of the merger with IHS Markit, we had identified some long-term trends, secular trends that we thought at that time were going to be driving the growth of the financial markets in the future, data analytics in particular, things like sustainability. We didn't call it private markets at the time, but it's the same thing as private markets.
We thought that core data and analytics would also go into the benchmark business that might change the rating space, and that we needed a partner who would allow us to get a lot more scale. We figured we couldn't do it through organic growth, and we couldn't do it through bolt-on acquisitions, so we wanted something much bigger and bolder that we could move faster with. And thus the merger with IHS Markit.
We started after the merger, before it was closed, to talk about our organization structure, our management, how we're going to our approach towards integration, our approach towards the culture. And I think we've done really well. We've exceeded our approach to synergies earlier than we thought. We had an original target of $480 million. We achieved $620 million. In our revenue synergies, our target is $350 million two-and-a-half years from now and we're already at $180 million of realized synergies. A lot of that is through cross-sell and the power of the brand of S&P Global has been even stronger than we originally thought.
A couple of surprises, there were a lot of upside surprises, the quality of the customer relationships on both sides, the quality of the technology, the ability to move with speed was an upside surprise. ...
S&P Global Inc. (SPGI) Presents at Barclays Americas Select Franchise Conference (Transcript)