MSCI Inc. (NYSE:MSCI) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Toni Kaplan: Thanks so much. I wanted to take a step back and look at margins within the analytics business, really stepped up a lot this year. I guess, how are you thinking about investment in that business? Are you investing enough there? Just maybe talk about the drivers of the margin expansion and basically investment needs or growth opportunities?

Andy Wiechmann: Yes, so similar to recent quarters, there have been several factors that have been contributing to the high analytics margin. I would point out that we have been capitalizing a higher level of expenses related to the development work that we’ve been doing around things like our Climate Lab Enterprise, Risk Insights, broader enhancements that we’re making to the capabilities in analytics. I would also highlight that many of the downturn actions that we’ve been taking end up hitting analytics. And that’s not just directly within the segment. But when we take actions in corporate functions, a meaningful portion of those expenses are allocated to analytics. And then I would highlight that the analytics has benefited from the strong U.S. dollar as well.

Given the size of the expense base, a lot of the FX benefits that we’ve been getting have hit analytics. And so there are a bunch of those more, I’ll call it, technical or tactical factors that have impacted the analytics margin and caused it to run up a bit here. But to your question around investments, listen we continue to be very targeted with our investments in analytics. So we are investing there. It is not one of our top investment areas. I think you’re familiar with those areas where we are heavily focused on. But within analytics, we are focused on investing on those – in those capabilities that support the broader MSCI franchise as well as continuing to focus on investments in areas like the front office, so front on office content, including our factor models, how we go to the office on the equity and fixed income front office capabilities as well as some of the broader interfaces and applications, that not only benefit the analytics users, but also the broader MSCI franchise.

Henry Fernandez: I would like to add, Toni, if you don’t mind, the – clearly, there are parts of analytics that we’re putting heavy investments on like Climate Lab Enterprise, fixed income, portfolio analytics, equity portfolio analytics and some of the content. But also for the benefit of everyone in this call, we also run a very, disciplined, very rigorous Triple-Crown investment process in the company, in which each one of the product areas. Each one of the client segment areas and some of the support areas, when they come to – in front of this investment process, they have to demonstrate elements of the Triple-Crown. One is high return, high IRR shorter-term paybacks and in areas of high multiple valuations for the company.

So in the case of Analytics, they’ve been able to rationalize investment in some of the areas that I mentioned, but not in other areas. So they haven’t gotten capital from us because of that. Other areas like climate and ESG and custom indices and the like have gotten the capital.

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