SPGI
#Thanks <UNK>.
Well, first of all on indices, you know we have been diversifying our business in various ways.
One of them is through different sorts of indices, as you mentioned, Fixed Income Indices.
Right now that is a very, very new industry, so to speak.
It's just recently had the large index complex started moving into organizations to see them more on a professional index managed approach to building up ETF products, et cetera.
We think that that space is still wide open and one that there's not a lot of ETF volume and should be growing and we are hoping to play a much larger position there.
Custom indices and factor indices are getting very popular, especially with family offices, sovereign wealth funds and investors that need some a benchmark to manage a specifically against risks or asset liability matching in their portfolio.
We continue to see that as an area where we're investing and growing.
We also have two other areas I want to mention.
One is the ESG.
We bought Trucost and Trucost is an organization that provides a very precise and high-quality climate and water and other sorts of environmental facts and environmental data.
We were able to use that to build environmental or climate or other ESG type funds.
We see a very high demand for data and analytics and now increasingly also for funds that have Incorporated ESG or sustainability or long-term growth-type factors, especially coming from sovereign wealth funds and from pensions and endowments in Northern Europe and some places around Europe and the United States, so that's another area of growth.
Generally across the business, we're looking to see how we can capitalize off of the value of our data more and more, and see that as one of our growth areas and not just the traditional ways that we've had with AUMs and a fund approach and using our benchmarks into the fund areas.
Data and data analytics is an area that we are looking at and that's where some of the other aspects to how the data is used, how we look at markets, et cetera, we're thinking there should be some opportunities there, as well.
<UNK>, I don't have enough of a base of discussions yet to give you a scientific answer.
I can just tell you anecdotally that every CEO and every CFO that we've been meeting with are studying the tax reform proposal the same way we are.
There has been ---+ if you met with the largest organizations, the largest global organizations and if you look at their repatriation topic which we have not touched on, repatriation is one that also has a very large impact on companies and could have, as I mentioned in my comments, a shorter term impact on issuance if people brought back a lot of cash and don't need to go to the markets.
We don't think it would have a long-term impact.
But there's a lot of corporations that have literally ---+ there's a couple trillion dollars, $2.5 trillion we believe in overseas cash that could also go into that equation.
I don't ---+ as I said, I only have anecdotal evidence.
I do not have anything that's scientific yet.
Each Company is impacted differently.
If you went and met with retailers the import a lot of their products from offshore, if it's whether it's clothing, apparel, toys, electronics, et cetera, this ---+ the approach towards the border adjustability has a very negative impact on them.
If you speak with large exporters like GE and Boeing and Caterpillar, border adjustability has a very positive impact on them.
A lot of the CFOs of the more highly rated companies, the combination of a much lower tax rate and interest deductibility are kind of a wash.
And so they would say that it's not going to ---+ the interest rate deductibility is not going to have any impact whatsoever on their issuance programs because net-net ---+ the after-tax cost is even going to be lower because the interest rate is lowered so much.
Again, I can only be anecdotal.
I would hope that as we get throughout the year and we get more specific proposals that I can give you better answers than I just did.
But those are the kinds of factors that are being looked at in the kinds of conversations we've been having, but right now, it's all anecdotal.
Yes, we will disclose that going forward, as well.
So you should see that breakdown in the future.
It's better than expectations.
They had a target that when I share with you folks, they would accomplish it at this point in time and the $10 million target has exceeded ---+ the number has exceeded that target.
So they were pleased with that.
Once again, it's still early days because it's a lot of piloting going on as Cap IQ reps are going to Cap IQ customers and saying, look at our SNL product and let me show you how we do this.
But to me, the biggest move really can't take place until you have one integrated platform.
That's when you can really begin to shape customers' behavior more meaningfully.
And that's not going to be for awhile.
We're going to start beta testing that in the third quarter with a very limited number of customers.
But we expect that, that will really be more the fourth quarter event when the Market Intelligence 1.0 platform is potentially ready for rolling out more ---+ on a more broader basis.
But just a slight difference answer to your question, we are very pleased with the integration of SNL.
It's been something that we made some very tough management decisions when we brought it on board in terms of how we're going to manage the organization of putting the businesses together which was not necessarily something that was very natural for this organization.
And it's paid off by making those tough decisions right upfront and having an excellent management team from SNL that came on board and incorporated some of the best management from the Company that was already here.
Generally speaking, we've been ahead of our target and we've been able to execute in a way that we've had very good financial performance principally from expense management.
We are now focusing more and more on revenues and we have a few really good early wins.
But I don't want to promise that we will get the same kind of speed of execution on the revenue synergies that we did on the expense synergies.
But it's something we're tracking, we're watching and I'm hoping that we will.
But it's a lot harder than getting expense synergies.
How you should see our guidance is really middle of the road; it's neither conservative nor aggressive.
That is the philosophy we apply.
We think the guidance we have provided for 2017 is strong guidance for all aspects: high-growth, margin expansion, EPS growth, excluding the accounting change somewhere in the range of 8.5% to 12%.
So we think this is very strong guidance we have provided.
There's no particular conservatism in this.
It's really considered middle-of-the-road.
<UNK>, there's one more thing I would like to add to your view is probably similar to other folks out there.
And January was a great month.
If January was a horrible month, maybe that question wouldn't even come in but we can't concern ourselves with one month out of 12, because we know every single year, it's choppy from month to month.
So we can't be swayed by one particular month as we think about our annual guidance.
Well, let me thank everyone for joining the call this morning.
As you see, we had a very memorable year in 2016.
Although there was a lot of uncertainty in the market and a lot of change going on with things like the Brexit and the US elections, many of those uncertainties continue into 2017 and some of the topics we just talked about on issuance trends, tax changes, Dodd-Frank regulatory changes, et cetera.
We have people all over those and generally speaking, we've got our entire organization focused on growth and excellence.
We are very excited about the prospects of taking this reshaped, very cohesive portfolio going forward.
We appreciate your interest.
And for all of the shareholders on the line, we thank you for being shareholders in the Company and we are excited about the prospects despite some of the uncertainty in the markets, and we are very pleased you joined the call this morning.
Thank you very much.
