It’s an honor to write to you for the first time here as S&P Global’s CEO. Since being elected in November, I have been listening and learning from you, our shareholders, as well as from employees, clients, and partners.

These conversations reinforce my conviction that ours is a phenomenal business and that we have the products, capabilities, and expertise to make it even better.

Our mission today, in this era of rapid innovation and change, is as clear and relevant as it was to our founders in the 1800s: to provide the insights customers need to make critical business decisions.

We have extraordinarily deep and rich data sets. We have incredibly talented and dedicated people who produce specialized analyses, research, and benchmarks. We build leading capabilities to leverage generative AI in value-enhancing ways. And we have a great culture that prioritizes innovation and embraces the highest ethical standards.

However, our markets are evolving and the ways we have done business must change as well.

As part of the CEO-transition process, I have met with over 100 CEOs to deepen our relationships with strategic customers. These conversations have revealed a consistent theme: the business environment is more dynamic than many can remember.

On the one hand, there are risks and uncertainties—from the resilience of supply chains to more severe natural disasters and higher-for-longer interest rates. On the other hand, there is a significant amount of optimism about growth. There are expectations for improved private equity deal-flow. There are opportunities across capital markets, private credit, infrastructure, and the tokenization of financial assets. And everyone is investing in GenAI.

As I spoke with CEOs about the changing landscape and how our teams can help them, I often heard “I didn’t know you do that, too.”

This revealing perspective—combined with powerful secular trends such as AI, energy transition, and public and private market dynamics—offers S&P Global opportunities to blend our historical strengths with new ways of working and bring the full strength of our company to our customers.

That’s why we created the Chief Client Office. This team is making sure that our customers understand the full breadth and depth of everything that we do. Importantly, this group will bring consistency to our go-to-market practices and will bolster our strategic client relationships.

Our enterprise-wide client focus is just one example of where we are moving quickly and in new ways to unlock the potential of everyone with whom we do business.

The themes I’m hearing from customers align with our competitive advantages and reinvigorate our optimism and confidence in our ability to compete and win now and in the future.

S&P Global has a strong record of producing excellent financial performance. Last year was no exception. In 2024:

– Revenue, excluding Engineering Solutions, increased 15%.

– Adjusted diluted earnings per share rose 25%.

– And adjusted operating margin expanded 310 basis points.

Given this progress and the confidence we have in the future, earlier this year the Board of Directors approved a 5.5% increase in the company’s regular dividend, continuing a 52-year history of dividend increases. We returned $4.4 billion to shareholders over the course of 2024, through our dividend and the repurchase of 6.7 million shares.

Last year’s accomplishments would not have been possible without the leadership and vision of my predecessor, Doug Peterson. In October, Doug retired as President and CEO of S&P Global.

Doug remains a senior advisor to the company until the end of this year and will retire from our Board in May. I have benefited from his support, counsel, and judgment. I thank Doug for all he’s done during his outstanding 11 years as CEO. He produced exceptional results and led with extraordinary empathy and wisdom, creating a legacy that I am deeply honored to follow.

Last year we continued to invest in innovation and in strategic initiatives. A notable success was expanding our GenAI initiatives, powered by our AI-innovation hub Kensho. For example, we introduced advanced analytics and GenAI functionality through Capital IQ Pro, which allows users to gain insights more efficiently from our data and automate their workflows. Just a few months after launching, more than 60,000 users have benefited from this innovation, and we expect that number to grow as adoption continues across our client base.

We developed more than great products. We developed great people. This is evident with the previously announced appointments to our senior leadership team, which ensure we have the right team in place to deliver on our vision to Power Global Markets.

We have a culture of building leaders. It’s a testament to our culture that half of our new leadership team is the result of promotions.

I am proud that S&P Global is attracting top talent, too. In 2024 we announced Eric Aboaf as our new CFO. He brings a wealth of experience in the financial services sector and a strong record of the type of disciplined execution that is, and will continue to be, a hallmark of S&P Global.

In 2024 we also benefited from several key transactions, including the acquisition of Visible Alpha. This business offers the most detailed and comprehensive consensus estimates available anywhere in the world. We frequently hear from customers that they could not do their jobs without it, and we are excited about its future.

The long-term prospects of S&P Global are bright because we have aligned our businesses around growing global markets and five areas of strategic importance.

The key topics we discussed at our 2022 Investor Day—benchmarks, private markets, enterprise data, GenAI, and energy transition—remain our focus for investment in 2025 and beyond.

Benchmarks

Geopolitical and macroeconomic risks are fueling an increasing need for trusted benchmarks across debt, equity, and commodity markets. S&P Global sits in the heart of this trend.

Take our leading position with S&P Dow Jones Indices. The shift from active management to passive investing has been one of the most transformative stories in the global asset industry over the past 40 years. We continue to see markets evolve, including the rise of active ETFs and digital wealth management. As dynamics change, we’re supporting our clients with a range of solutions including multi-asset class, fixed income, and thematic indices that become the basis for exchange-traded derivatives and other investment products.

Our index franchise is just one part of our compelling benchmarks story as users across sectors seek out transparent and trusted indices, credit ratings, and price assessments. Already, over $20 trillion is indexed or benchmarked to our indices, we rated $4.9 trillion in global debt in 2024, and we produce over 270 commodity benchmarks. Our focus is on expanding our existing benchmark franchises and growing our presence in private markets, digital assets, and other areas.

Private Markets

Private markets are experiencing significant growth and transformation. Projections are for these markets to reach over $15 trillion this year and more than $18 trillion by 2027. This growth is fueled by increasing demand from investors for high-yield, private credit, and private equity investments, driving assets into infrastructure, energy transition projects, and real estate.

S&P Global provides market participants with the benchmarks, data, and insights needed to evaluate risks and identify opportunities. In 2024 our private market solutions business grew revenue by 25% to $535 million. We are confident about the opportunities to provide private market workflows, data, credit risk, and valuation assessments.

Enterprise Data

We have unparalleled data sets. S&P Global features over 1 trillion data points. This vast resource has grown 100x over the last five years with more growth ahead.

With our newly established Enterprise Data Office, or EDO, we’re working on ways to better connect our data so that it provides interesting and easier pathways to serve our clients.

This team has hit the ground running, and I am optimistic about the ways they can bring the full force of our data and technology to bear for customers of all kinds.

GenAI

GenAI will have profound and accelerating effects across all sectors of the economy and in society. At S&P Global, we have solid momentum using GenAI to be more productive, and we are increasingly incorporating it into our products and services.

Spark Assist, our internal GenAI copilot, is driving productivity and collaboration. Approximately 29,000 of our people have used it just a year after launch, and we have a library of 1,300 different prompts on the platform any of our people can select to help them with anything from writing Python code to researching securities data.

To improve the customer experience, this year our Commodity Insights division is launching an agent that allows users to surface our content directly into familiar Microsoft tools. And Kensho introduced a solution that is helping customers save time and resources by making our tabular data available through any GenAI tool. This is just the beginning. We are building toward a future where our AI agents significantly improve our customers’ workflows. In the future, agentic AI will streamline and execute complex, multistep processes, such as allowing investors to perform quantitative data analysis.

Energy Transition

The world needs an energy system that’s secure, affordable, and sustainable. We are well positioned to support customers, wherever they are on the journey from traditional energy production and consumption to renewables.

We recently made an exciting organizational change to help our clients as they navigate this transition. Moving our Sustainable1 organization within the Commodity Insights division allows us to merge our best thinking on this topic.

While the transition is expected to continue, we must also acknowledge the critical role that hydrocarbons will continue to play in the global energy mix and ensure we meet the evolving needs of our customers.

The trust they place in our solutions is evident. In 2024 our energy transition and sustainability revenue grew to $359 million, up 19% over the year prior. We expect our products will become even more valuable as the transition continues.

People sometimes ask me what excites me most about S&P Global. The answer is our culture. Our core values of discovery, partnership, and integrity are front and center in everything we do. We have amazing technology capabilities and the best minds working on cutting-edge projects to Power Global Markets.

One of the first things I did as CEO was to affirm my commitment to fostering a culture where our people feel valued. Our focus is on empowering our people to grow and succeed. We call this our People Forward philosophy. In 2025 and in the years to come, we’ll invest in the people and programs that are needed to maintain an innovative culture that can create sustainable value for all our stakeholders.

I want to thank our Board of Directors for the opportunity to serve our company. I also want to thank you for your support. There has never been a more exciting time to be at S&P Global, and I am proud to lead our company into its next phase of growth. Let’s unlock our potential together.

Sincerely,