Good morning, and welcome to S&P Global's Fourth Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. I'd like to inform you that this call is being recorded for broadcast. All participants are in a listen-only mode. We will open the conference to questions-and-answers after the presentation and instructions will follow at that time. To access the webcast and slides, go to investor.spglobal.com that is investor.spglobal.com and click on the link for the quarterly earnings webcast. [Operator Instructions]. I would now like to introduce Mr. Chip Merritt, Vice President of Investor Relations for S&P Global. Sir, you may begin.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for S&P Global's Earnings Call. Presenting on this morning's call are Doug Peterson, President and CEO; and Ewout Steenbergen, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. This morning, we issued a news release with our fourth quarter and full year 2016 results. If you need a copy of the release and financial schedules, they can be downloaded at investor.spglobal.com. In today's earnings release and during the conference call, we'll provide an adjusted financial information. This information is provided to enable investors to make meaningful comparison of the corporation's operating performance between periods and to view the corporation's business from the same perspective as managements. The earnings release contains Exhibits that reconcile the difference between the non-GAAP measures and the comparable financial measures calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Before we begin, I need to provide certain cautionary remarks about forward-looking statements. Except for historical information, the matters discussed in the teleconference may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including projections, estimates, and description of future events. Any such statements are based on current expectations and current economic conditions and are subject to risk and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from results anticipated in these forward-looking statements. In this regard, we direct listeners to the cautionary statements contained in our Form 10-Ks, 10-Qs, and other periodic reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. I would also like to call your attention to European regulation. Any investor who has or expects to obtain ownership of 5% or more of S&P Global should give me a call to better understand the impact of this legislation on the investor and potentially the company. We are aware that we do have some media representatives with us on the call. However, this call is intended for investors. And we would ask that questions from the media be directed to Jason Feuchtwanger at (212) 438-1247. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Doug Peterson. Doug?

Good morning. Thank you, Chip. Welcome everyone to the call. I'd also like welcome our new CFO Ewout Steenbergen. Ewout joined us in November and is participating in his first earnings conference call with us. You'll hear more from him shortly. 2016 was a memorable year with market uncertainty surrounding pivotable outcomes from Brexit, the US election and the long-awaited increase in US interest rate. Despite this uncertainty, spreads tightened, issuance was strong, equity markets ended up the year and S&P Global delivered another solid performance. Let me begin with 2016 highlights. We finished the year with strong fourth quarter results. We delivered another year of impressive financial performance with mid single-digit revenue growth and mid teen’s adjusted EPS growth. We re-branded the company's S&P Global with the new ticker SPGI. We reshape the portfolio with a number of divestitures and acquisitions. The most significant divestiture being J.D. Power. We successfully completed our 2014 to 2016 $140 million cost reduction initiative. We made substantial progress on our SNL integration synergy. We generated nearly $1.5 billion in free cash flow and we returned $1.5 billion through share repurchases and dividends. We also delivered excellent financial results. The company reported 7% revenue growth of this growth 89% was pull-through to adjusted operating profit. This is a direct result of our continued focus on productivity. On an organic basis, revenue grew 6% and the pull-through to adjusted operating profit was also high. These achievements led to a 300 basis point improvement in adjusted operating profit margin, and continued a string of annual improvements in adjusted operating profit margin of more than 275 basis points for the third year in a row. While ForEx had a $24 million unfavorable impact on revenue, it had a $43 million favorable impact on adjusted operating margin - operating profit with market intelligence realizing the majority of the game. I'm very pleased that we were able to leverage 7% revenue growth into 14% adjusted EPS growth through a combination of productivity improvement and share repurchase activity. 2016 was not an isolated year. Our revenue growth was consistent with the 7% annual growth over the past four years and our 300 basis point margin improvement capped 1000 basis points of margin improvement over the past four years. Our focus on growth and performance has material changed the earnings power of the company. This earnings powers translated into a substantial increase in adjusted earnings per share. In 2016 we almost doubled our 2012 EPS, delivering 18% compounded annual growth rate over the last four years. During 2016, we continue to add capabilities and reshape S&P Global. In Platts, we are building a world-class supply demand capability. With FinTech and Eclipse [ph] already in place providing US and European natural gas analytics, we purchased PIRA Energy Group, RigData and Commodity Flow, adding a wealth of expertise in global energy market analysis, US rig activity and waterborne analytics. With our deep history of providing benchmark commodity prices, we believe providing the supply demand analytics around these prices will be a great value to our customers. S&P Dow Jones Indices purchased Trucost, a leader in carbon and environmental data and risk analysis. Not only will this acquisition enable the creation of unique new indices, but our rating business will leverage Trucost capabilities, and new creation, new ESG products, such as green bond evaluation. Ratings added to its international capabilities with the acquisition of a 49% stake in TRIS highlight [ph] including credit rating agency. Thailand is Asean's second-largest economy and third-largest bond market. We reshaped our portfolio with the divestitures of J.D. Power, our pricing businesses, and our equity and fund research business and Quant House [ph] in January 2017. These result moves left us with a stronger, more cohesive set of businesses. Now I want to turn to our outlook for 2017 and discuss key scenes that are shaping 2017 and beyond. These are topics I discussed with our board, as well as the division president as we look to the next year and the next 3 to 5 years. We look forward to discussing these themes with you this quarter and during the year. Global GDP though increasing this year is running much lower than the past. Interest rates that have been declining since 1981 could continue to rise. Geopolitical considerations like Brexit, populist changes to government and threats to established trade deals create new risks. Regulations become an unparalleled force for change. We count 22 ratings regulators worldwide today with the majority less than five years old. All of you have witnessed the rise of compliance within your own firm. Our customers have changing expectations, are feeling competitive pressures and facing changing business model. Technology continues to disrupt every industry, including ours. According to Citibank, there's been a tenfold increase in FinTech companies in the past five years. It took 75 years for the telephone to reach 50 million users, radio 38 years, TV 13, Internet 4 years and Pokemon Go 19 days. Sustainability is becoming ubiquitous among companies and investors, climate change conferences, ESG investable funds point to significant changes in behavior. We need to stay ahead of these trends and create products that address the changing needs of our clients and markets, things like green bond evaluation, ESG Indices, new credit tool and new product platforms or opportunities that we are pursuing. Our economists expect global GDP to grow 3.5% in 2017. The chart depicts their view for the next two years in which all world areas except Europe will experience accelerated GDP growth. In the US low unemployment and increased consumer spending will underpin GDP growth. In Europe, recovery is on track and showing resilience, but not enough to boost GDP. In Asia, we expect reasonable growth and little inflation with India being a bright spot. And in Latin America, we expect improvement driven by continued recovery in commodity prices and stabilizing domestic command. Last week ratings issued its annual global refinancing study, this yearly study shows debt maturities for the upcoming five years. The chart on the left illustrates data from the 2016 and 2017 studies. The five-year period in the 2017 study shows a $100 billion increase in total debt maturing versus the 2016study. We use this study along with other market-based data to forecast issuance. Taking a closer look at data from the study reveals an important trend in high-yield maturity. Over the next five years, the level of high-yield debt maturing significantly increases each year, which is a potential source of revenue in the coming years. Last week ratings also publish their latest issuance forecast. Looking ahead to 2017, we expect an overall increase in global issuance of 3%, positive global trends for issuance include the European Central Bank's quantitative easing program, continued strong issuance out of China and expectations for slightly stronger GDP growth in the US. Global issuance is still likely, however to face headwinds from global political uncertainty and a continued evaluation of most currencies relative to the US dollar. One item that seems very clear is that interest rates will continue to rise in the US. Rising rates have been an investor concern for several years now as the belief is that rising rates will impair debt issuance. Our fixed come analytical team – our fixed income analytical team has explored this topic and published report called recent policy proposal potential impact on US corporate bond issuance. You can see it on RatingsDirect. This charges US corporate issuance in GDP since 1996. Both GDP and issuance increased over the period. We find a statistically significant relationship between US corporate issuance and GDP. This next chart shows US corporate issuance and the 10 year treasury yield since 1996. Our statisticians ran a number of tests, including the Granger causality test, a statistical test used to determine whether one time series is useful in forecasting another time series. Their conclusion was there is a weak negative correlation between interest rates in issuance. We've seen a number of tax proposals since the recent election and we've been studying them, people from our tax, finance, economics and public policy team have been evaluating potential changes. The proposals remain in a state of flux and it’s difficult to draw definitive conclusion. Nevertheless, I want to review our current thinking on the most commonly discussed potential tax changes. First, on a lower corporate tax rate, as the company with a relatively high tax rate, this would be very positive for the company. On repatriation, a one-time repatriation of that would likely reduce issuance, but would be unlikely to have major impact on long-term capital structure. In addition, much of the cash held overseas is by large technology companies like Apple and Oracle that have very little debt. For our company specifically, we would reevaluate our investment strategies and that could lead to repatriating much our overseas cash. We believe that the removal interest expense deduction could reduce the attractiveness of debt, particularly for high yield issuers and likely reduce issuance. However, lower tax rates would provide greater borrowing capacity for companies, which could be positive. As for S&P Global, this would be a negative as we currently at $3.6 billion of long-term debt. The removal of the municipal bond tax exemption would reduce the attractiveness in muni bonds to investors requiring alternative funding of local projects. Therefore, it likely hurt municipal bond issuance, but infrastructure issuance could potentially increase to partially offset this. Order adjustment could benefit our companies in next export. Please note our 2017 guidance does not consider any of these potential tax law changes. Let me finish by sharing some of the most important initiative in 2017. As always, delivering financial performance is at the top of the list. We are introducing organic revenue guidance of mid-single-digit growth, adjusted diluted EPS guidance of $5.90 to $6.15 and free cash flow guidance of approximately $1.6 billion. Ewout will provide more color to the guidance in a moment. Throughout the company, I'm stressing the need to build excellent into all that we do, to be competitive, nothing less is acceptable. Some of the more visible areas includes, launching a beta version of the new market intelligence platform in the fall, leveraging recent acquisitions create world-class supply demand analytics for Platts customers, continuing index innovation and international partnerships and advancing ratings commercial discipline, analytical quality and IT driven productivity. We continue to track and execute on our SNL synergy program and fund additional productivity initiatives and process improvement and we remain committed to compliance control and risk management across the company. We're pleased with our progress, but we're working to make this company even better. With that, let me turn the call over to Ewout. Thank you. Ewout Steenbergen Thank you, Doug. And good morning to everyone on the call. This morning I would like to discuss the fourth quarter results and then provide guidance for 2017. Let's starts with the consolidated fourth quarter income statement. Reported revenue increased 2%. However, organic revenue increased a 11%. This was the strongest quarterly organic revenue growth of the year. Adjusted operating profit increased 17% and adjusted operating margin increased 530 basis points. The adjusted operating margin improved, primarily due to revenue growth, continued progress on productivity initiatives and the sale of lower margin businesses. The adjusted effective tax rate increased 500 basis points, primarily because the fourth quarter 2015 tax rate was unusually low largely due to favorable tax benefits from the resolution of prior yield tax audits. In addition, the fourth quarter 2016 rate included the impact from dividends we received from foreign subsidiaries and a slight increase in the US state income tax rate. Adjusted diluted EPS increased 14% and we decreased our average diluted shares outstanding by 4%. Both our fourth quarter and full-year results were impacted by changes in foreign exchange rates. In the fourth quarter of 2016 the two main impacts were a $2 million unfavorable impact on the ratings, adjusted operating profit, primarily due to the weaker British pound and a $9 million favorable impact in markets and commodities intelligence adjusted operating profit, primarily due to the weaker British pound and a weaker Indian rupee. Now let me turn to adjustments to earnings to help you better assess the underlying performance of the business. Pretax adjustments to earnings totaled to a gain of $272 million in the quarter and included a $347 million net gain on recent divestitures, predominantly from the sale of the rising businesses and this also includes a $31 million expense associated with disposition of Quant House, a 54 million expense associated with an increase in financial crisis, legal reserves and a $21 million expense related to the early retirement of our 2017 debt. In the fourth quarter every business segment contributed to gains in organic revenue and adjusted operating profit, while this line shows an 11% decline in reported revenue at market and commodities intelligence. Excluding the impact of asset sales, organic revenue increased to 8%. Adjusted operating margins improved significantly in ratings and market and commodities intelligence, but declined in S&P Dow Jones Indices. I will discuss these changes within each segment discussion. Let me now turn to the individual segments performance. Ratings had a strong quarter, leading the company in both revenue and operating profit growth. Revenue increased 14%, including a 1% unfavorable impact from ForEx. Considering normal seasonality in the fourth quarter US-bond issuance was robust, despite US selection uncertainty, which only constrained bond market activity for a few days. Adjusted operating margin increased 360 basis points due to strong revenue growth, reduced legal and outside services spending, partially offset by increased incentives. While not shown on the slide, full-year adjusted operating profit margin reached 49.8%, an increase of 240 basis points aided by a modest boost from ForEx. Strong transaction revenue underscores ratings fourth quarter revenue growth. Non-transaction revenue increased 5% from growth in surveillance fees, increased inter-segment royalty's for market intelligence, and growth at CRISIL. Transaction revenue increased 26%, as a result of improved contract terms, growth in structure, US public finance and corporate issuance, as well as increased bank loan ratings. This slide is a new quarterly disclosure that illustrates ratings revenue by its various markets. First, note the corporate and financial make up the majority of revenue. Second, US public finance is the largest component of government. In the fourth quarter there were broad gains in every market with the exception of financials, which was negatively impacted by concerns about US election and an interest rate increase. If you look more closely at the largest markets, fourth quarter issuance in US was up 14% with investment grade decreasing 2%, high-yield climbing 12%, public finance growing 19% and structured finance soaring 45% due primarily to a 143% increase in CLOs and advance of the implementation of risk retention regulations, which took place on December 24 and a 40% increase in ADS. In Europe, issuance decreased a 11% with investment grade declining 18%, high-yield decreasing 1% and structured finance increasing 5%. In Asia, issuance increased 1%. However, excluding issuance, that we do not rate, notably domestic China issuance, Asian issuance increased 8%. Let me now turn to market and commodities intelligence. This segment includes S&P Global market intelligence and S&P Global Platts. In the fourth quarter reported revenue declined a 11% due to recent divestitures. Excluding these divestitures, organic revenue increased 8%. Despite disposing of businesses that contributed more than $100 million of quarterly revenue, adjusted operating profit increased 8%. This puts into perspective the enormous improvement that has taken place in the segment. Adjusted operating margin improved 600 basis points, primarily due to SNL integration synergies, Platts expense control, the divestiture of lower margin businesses and ForEx. Let me add a bit more color on the fourth quarter revenue growth in market intelligence. The most significant items in the quarter were the divestitures of the SPSE and CMA rising businesses, and equity and fund research. In addition, in January we divested Quant House. Due to the fourth quarter divestitures, revenue remained unchanged. However, organic revenue increased 10% with growth at four major products. Another highlight was the progress we made in the $100 million synergy target, as illustrated on this slide. Successful integration of SNL and delivery of synergies was a full priority for the company in 2016. We made tremendous progress as evidenced in the margin improvement and remained committed to achieving our integration synergy targets and delivering on our expected return on investment in SNL. We estimate that two thirds of the $100 million synergy target was achieved at year-end 2016 on a run rate basis. We estimate that approximately one half of the $100 million is reflected in our full year 2016 results. We are particularly pleased to have achieve about $10 million in run rate revenue synergies, about one half of the revenue synergies came from utilizing Capital IQ relationships to sell the SNL global financial institutions product, about one quarter from using SNL relationships to sell the Capital IQ Desktop and one quarter from new business combining Cap IQ risk scorecards with SNL banks data. If you look at the markets within market intelligence more closely within financial data and analytics, S&P Capital IQ Desktop and Enterprise Solutions revenue increased 7% with high single-digit growth in S&P Capital IQ Desktop. In addition, SNL revenue increased 14% over the fourth quarter of 2015, SNL and S&P Capital IQ Desktop experienced year-over-year user percentage growth of 11% and 8%, respectively. Risk services revenue increased 10% led by growth in RatingsXpress. Platts delivered solid organic revenue growth in an improving commodity environment. Oil prices rallied around the OPEC agreement to cut production. PIRA forecasts 2017 oil prices in the range of $60 to 70 a barrel if OPEC members comply with the agreement. While the OPEC agreement provide support for the oil prices, RigData has reported that the weekly US rig count reached 782 in January and that’s the highest level in over a year, rating downward pressure on pricing. Nevertheless, the outlook for many of our customers is better now than at the start of 2016. Fourth quarter revenue increased 12%. However, excluding revenue from recent acquisitions, organic revenue increased 5%, due to growth in subscriptions and double-digit growth in global trading services. The core subscription business delivered mid single digit revenue growth, led by the petroleum and petrochemical sectors. Global trading services double-digit revenue increase was primarily due to strong volumes. Now let me turn to S&P Dow Jones Indices. Revenue increased 13%, mostly due to ETF assets under management growth and increased data subscriptions. Adjusted operating profit increased 10%, primarily as a result of increased revenue. Adjusted operating margin declined 200 basis points to 61.6%, due primarily to the Trucost acquisition. Investments in a third data center, increased marketing costs, and higher cost of sales from growth in OTC derivatives activity. The highlight of the quarter was ETF AUM tied to our indices, booking $1 trillion in December. We celebrated a $500 billion mark in 2013 and three years later we doubled that milestone, clearly to trend from active to passive investing has been an advantage for the index business. Asset linked fee revenue increased 10% during the quarter. The exchange traded fund industry recorded enormous inflows for the second straight quarter, amassing $133 billion in the fourth quarter, driving yearly inflows of $380 billion, a new annual record. Average ETF AUM associated with our indices increased 19% year-over-year. As mentioned 2016, ending ETF AUM associated with our indices reached a new record of $1 trillion, increasing 25% over year-end 2015, with inflows of 15% and market appreciation 10%. Transaction revenue from exchange traded derivatives increased primarily due to an 8% increase in average daily volume of products based on our indices S&P 500 index options, that grow with a 22% increase in volume to VIX Options and Futures, and CME Equity complex contracts increased mid single-digit. Subscription revenue, which consists primarily of data subscriptions and custom indices increased 24% due to growth in data subscription revenue and the timing of subscription revenue. During the quarter the company launched 88 new indices and our partners launched new 23 new ETFs based on our indices. Our capital position is strong, as we look at the net debt of the company, we ended the year with $2.4 billion of cash, of which approximately $1.7 billion was held outside the US and $3.6 billion of long-term debt. Our debt coverage improved year-over-year as measured by gross debt to adjusted EBITDA from 1.6 times to 1.4 times. Free cash flow during the year was approximately $1.2 billion. However, to get a better sense of our underlying cash generation from operations, it is important to exclude activity associated with divestitures and related tax expenses and the after-tax impact of legal and regulatory settlements and related insurance recoveries. On that basis, free cash flow in 2016 was nearly $1.5 billion. As for return of capital, the company returned $1.5 billion to shareholders in 2016, $1.1 billion through share repurchases, as we completed our $750 million accelerated share repurchase plan in December and $380 million in dividends. Now, lastly, I will review our 2017 guidance. Based upon modestly improving global GDP and issuance growth, we introduced 2017 adjusted guidance as follows, mid single-digit organic revenue growth, the contributions by every business segment, unallocated expense $145 million to $150 million, a modest increase over 2016, due to investments in Asia and upfront investments in office consolidations, deal-related amortization of about $100 million, operating margin increase of roughly 100 basis points, interest expense of approximately $155 million, a tax rate of about 30% to 31%, diluted EPS which excludes deal-related amortization of $5.90 to $6.15. The range is wider than prior years due to recent that would be vast new guidance for accounting or stop payments to employees, which we estimate would increased EPS by $0.10 to $0.15 depending on SPGI's share price development and option exercise activity. Capital expenditures is a range of $125 million to $140 million, as we anticipate increased investments in technology, data and efficient real estate solutions. Free cash flow, excluding after tax, legal settlements and insurance recoveries of $1.6 billion and we expect an annual dividend of $1.64 per share. Our guidance does not take into consideration any potential policy changes from the new US administration. Overall, this guidance reflects our expectation that 2017 will be another strong year for the company. With that, let me turn the call back over to Chip for your questions.

Thank you, Ewout. Just a couple instructions for our phone participants. [Operator Instructions] Operator, we'll now take our first question.

Thank you. This question comes from Alex Kramm of UBS. You may now ask your question.

Yes. Good morning, everyone. First of all, thanks for the Pokemon Go, that made a highlight of my day, so I nicely done. Secondly, in terms of the business, just wanted to come into the ratings guidance a little bit more, what you are expecting there? If I look at your business – the mid single digit growth for the whole company, and I looked like – I look at what index is running right now in terms of the run rate, and I look at where now market intelligence has probably growing consistently. It seems like it's a little bit conservative or light on the rating side. In particular, if you are telling us 3% growth in India in issuance. So either you are little bit less more conservative on pricing or you just conservative in general, but what are you expecting in terms of ratings revenue here?

Alex, this is Doug. Well, thank you for the - joining the call, and for your comments. On issuance, we've incorporated various factors into our issuance forecast. As you know, in the slides we gave you before, we showed you the expectations for issuance coming up. We've always talked before about the relationship between GDP growth and issuance being a stronger one than interest rate. As you know January had very strong issuance. The issuance in January was a record, it was a $532 billion. It was up 13.6% from the prior years. A lot of that issuance was in the US. The US was up 93%. We've incorporated that into the year. Our expectation is that the first half of the year should be fairly strong, given the overall investment profile that we expect of the economy and we've looked at more uncertainty in the second and half of the year, as we don't know exactly what the impact is going to be of the new administration aspects that are going to be rolling out, whether it's tax reform, regulatory reform, infrastructure investment, et cetera. In addition, we've incorporated some uncertainty into the second half the year related to Brexit and other geopolitical of aspects. But overall we're - we believe that 3% forecast which was prepared by our fixed income analytics team is the is strong, its based off of the combination of refinancing which we already aware of and we're expecting that most of that will come through. And then what we see in pipelines from meeting with investment banks and rating issuance advisors to build our forecast. But it still off of the base, as you know of those different factors and we're comfortable today that that’s – what we're including in our guidance.

All right. Fair enough. Thank you. And then just secondly, quickly, maybe on the market intelligence side a little bit here. When we talk to customers, it sounds like you are increasingly bundling all these different products, which obviously you've put under one roof now. So maybe you can talk a little bit more about, there seems like there's more of a move to enter price pricing and it seems like you are able to maybe you know, gain a little bit of more pricing power in the process. So maybe just talk about what's going on there and how that could be impacting revenue, maybe more than what we've seen in the last couple of years?

We've made great progress on the integration of SNL and Cap IQ to turn it into market intelligence. As you know, we've been reporting on our synergies throughout that time and how we've done with the different expense synergies and revenue synergies. On our expense synergies, as you’ve seen we've made excellent progress. This is allowed us to have an intensive focus on our commercial activities, on our operational activities and be able to address customer needs in a way that's more comprehensive and integrated across the Cap IQ and SNL platforms. As I mentioned in my remarks, we are developing and will be launching later this year, a pilot program market intelligence window which will allow us on the desktop through mobile platforms, et cetera to be able to address the needs of our customers. And what that's leading to from a commercial point of view, what your question is more specifically about, is that we can provide enterprise licenses which take into account the usage and the breadth of need of a firm and provide them with a more simple contract that allows in many cases, more users or more access to the system, which on the one hand, might as a per user basis end up maybe being less expensive to them, but they're using a lot more data and many more users in it which is very beneficial to us. So this like many of our different products and services across the company, these truly are a customer by customer basis in terms of how we deal with them and the sales process its a long professional sales market, sales process. We've restructured our sales team. So they are unified and they've been rolling out a comprehensive approach to our different markets, whether it's by regions or it’s by different types of industries and segment. And as you pointed out that is our approach this year would be to rolling out, almost everywhere, but especially where it makes sense enterprise wide pricing for market intelligence.

Excellent. Thanks for the color.

Thanks, Alex.

Thank you. Your next question is from Manav Patnaik of Barclays. You may ask your question.

Thank you. Good morning, gentlemen and congratulations and welcome to Ewout to the call. May be just on the ratings question, in the other way to ask that question is, you're 3% issuance volume forecast for 2017. If you were to back out sovereign ratings, which I think you guys don’t make much money on and then China domestic you said you don't do, what would that 3% number look like from a volume perspective?

If you just give me one second, I've got that calculated here. So let me just give you some of the numbers, more specifically the breakdown with and without those, I don't know if I have the aggregate number in front of me, but the - when you look at non-financial, it's going to be in a range of approximately 2% to 6%, financial institutions from about 1.5 to 4, structured is right now one of the areas that I am least certain about, its more in kind of the 0% to 6% range. And even though you look at the public finance potentially dropping a lot this year, given the headwinds and what we saw a very strong issuance last couple of year. So public finance could be down 5% to 10%. So overall issuance about 3% and excluding sovereigns in domestic China is also about 3%, once you take the positive upside in non-financial, what you've seen like in this first of month of the year. And then you subtract some of the downsides. We still in up with about 3%, excluding sovereign.

Okay. Got it. And then in the market intelligence side, I think you said two thirds of the $100 million was realized so far on a run rate basis and you are targeting three fourth by the end 2017. So is that being conservative or is that you know, factoring in I guess your new platform launch that probably requires a bunch of investments. I just wanted some color there in terms of the - how we should think about the progress?

Good morning, Manav. This is Ewout. We would certainly not consider that guidance as conservative. What you obviously might see when you do an integration is that you first take care of the low hanging fruits. That's why there's always a large acceleration of the benefits at the beginning and then the remaining of the integration synergy benefits from later during the year and take more time to achieve that. And so this is really the best guidance we have, we expect that the remaining of the gains will be more backend loaded, because it is the harder part of the synergies, especially related to bringing our products to a one platform, that is really the main outstanding where the remainder of the synergies will be achieved.

Got it, Thanks a lot guys.

Thank you. Next question is from Ms. Toni Kaplan of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning.

Morning.

Morning.

Could you give us a rough breakdown of what drove the margin expansion within market intelligence this quarter on an apples-to-apples basis? Basically just trying to get at how much of the expansion was driven by legacy Cap IQ, Platts and from the SNL synergies?

Let me first of all just tell you what's some of the elements are, I don’t know if I can give you a precise basis point by basis point approach to that. But as you remember we have a combination of the three different businesses within market intelligence which you’ve seen the desktop, the enterprise business, the SNL businesses and the new risk services. We have Platt, we've taken out J.D. Power, we've taken out what was our pricing businesses, J.D. Power had generally a lower margin than the new average margin, the pricing businesses have higher-margin, than the actual businesses. But I don't have the actual numbers and I am going to look to Ewout to see if he has a chart with those actual numbers. But those are the elements that are incorporated into that margin.

Yes. And Toni, what I specifically would like to point out, is that the total margin change for market and commodities intelligence for the full year 2016 was 410 basis points. The FX element in that were 140 basis points. So that gives you the breakdown of how much was really underlying performance improvements, over the difference area versus the amount that came from FX and then as Doug said, there is the different elements of the businesses that are having different levels of margins. But we probably need to come back to you later on with more specifics on that.

Okay. And are you providing updated targets for I guess market intelligence margin, now that the segment includes Platts?

Well, let me let me just tell you little bit about margins generally, if you don’t mind, I'll give you some broader aspect to it. We don't have any guidance specifically about our margins, but we do have what I may call aspirations. As you know in the last few years we've had an intensive focus on margins, that’s a combination of improving commercial activities, growing the top line, as well as maintaining productivity and being very disciplined around investment. In ratings, we aspire to be with a – to have a five handle, its beginning of our margin where we've been there over quarters, but we aspire to be in the low 50s and this we help - we believe we could get there through the continued commercial discipline in some of our productivity programs. In the market commodity intelligence segment, we aspire to the mid to high 30s. We think that as we complete our synergy programs over the next couple years, as well as ongoing productivity program and commercial programs that we've be aspiring towards that. In index, we do not have a target. We are very comfortable with the level of margin that we have now in the 66 - in the last years or so it’s between 60 and 66. We know that there's kind of – it popped around a little bit. But we don't have any target that’s different than what we have there and which should be in the low 60s. But those are the - up for the three segments. Those are the - our aspiration of our margin.

Terrific. Thanks, congrats of the quarter.

Thank you.

Thanks, Toni.

Thank you. Next question is from Hamzah Mazari of Macquarie Research. You may ask your question.

Good morning. Thank you. The first question is just - if you could just give us an update on European bank disintermediation and whether Europe's mix, how does that stack up to the US in terms of loans and bonds?

Yes. So that is a – that’s been something that's been really interesting, as we continue to watch the development of the European market. It almost kind of goes and fits and start between when do you see issuance that’s starting off in the European markets and you get some very strong orders of European issuance and then you get some very weak orders in issuance. The main factor which is inhibiting that is really the ECB liquidity program. The ECB liquidity programs has continued to provide a lot of liquidity in the European banks and it's basically between the strength of their capital which is been improving in European liquidity programs that are in-place. It’s allowing the banks to continue to be strong lenders, but there is a general shift overall towards more and more issuance in the market. Just as an example, in this year - during the year that was in January you saw the issuance go up in Europe in financial institution, in the industrial it was down a little bit, you've also seen more in sovereign. So total Europe was up about 13% in January. Over the last couple years, it's been up and down, it goes from being up to flat, et cetera. But I do think it’s the most important aspect or is really combination of what we see happening with the LTRO programs, the ECB liquidity programs and the overall bank behavior that they're holding more and more credit on their balance sheet. Now the other final point I'd make is that the ECB itself has a very high demand for the purchase of assets. They continue as quantitative easing program and assets they want to buy or investment grade debt security and ECB itself has been talking about promoting the development of capital markets. In addition, there is a program based out of Brussels called the Capital Markets Union. The Brussels financial - the financial regulators are all in favor of having a more cohesive and more European wide approached capital market. So we are very close to those initiatives. We have people in Brussels. We visit Brussels a lot. We visit all of the major financial capital and we believe that this will continue to be a positive over the long run, but it might be going in fits and starts.

Great. And just a follow-up, within the Indices business, are you concerned that all around fee pressure with given how concentrated the ETF market is, I know back in 2012 you had a – we had a Vanguard change the way that they looked at their customer base. I know there were more retail versus institutional. But you know, any color around how you're thinking about fee pressure in the Indices business or is that just not a concern?

It is a concern to the extent that we're going through a lot of change in the industry and if I told you otherwise, I probably would be telling you something we spend a lot of time thinking about. We do have though a few factors which we think position us incredibly well. One is that we have benchmarks that are must have benchmarks, like the S&P and Dow Jones and other branded benchmarks that we have that are really necessary for whether it's the actual ETFs or other investment products or for the data that’s required by investment managers to be able to benchmark their portfolios in their performance. So we think that we have one advantages in terms of the types of brands and the kinds of products we have. The second is maybe a little bit, if you go back to microeconomics and remember those curves of elasticity of demand and some of the products which we believe are going to see price cut, the price cut might be offset by the volume growth. And I don't want to say that that's always going to sort of work out that way. But if you look at the overall growth of volume in this industry and the recent DOL [ph] of ruling which looks like it might be reversed, was going to probably benefit ETF and passive investment. We probably see some sort of passive investment benefit from a lot of these trends that will also benefit us. So even if some of the fees do go down and there is some fee pressure, we should be seeing some advantage of that from volume. Just as an example, we mentioned it in our call, but it was just three years ago that we were across the $500 billion line for ETF AUMs and we now crossed a $1 trillion at the end of the year last year, even only a year ago we were $815 billion. So the growth in these - it's a combination of new flows into the asset classes, as well as obviously increasing the value of the indices themselves that we see that from, but we do - we are very aware of the cost pressure. We are working closely with ETF providers and others and it’s something that we are ensuring that we can maintain a leadership position in the quality of our benchmark, the positioning that they have. But pricing pressure is something that we're aware of and we're trying to actively manage towards it.

All right. Thank you, Doug.

Thank you. Next question is from Jeff Silber of BMO Capital Markets. You may ask your question.

Thanks so much. I wanted to go back to some of the debt issuance trends you were talking about earlier, you mentioned January was a real strong month, specifically in the US. Do you think any of your US clients might be front running some potential policy changes and will get a bit inflow early on in the year that will paper as the year progresses?

It’s really hard for me to project. I've been doing this for now almost 6 years and every quarter there is a different mix of what has been attractive in the markets, it depends on investment, on growth, on GDP growth, on what the interest rate environment is going to be, what Janet Yellen might do with interest rates, what the net exchange rates is going to be for people have global operation. I – its possible if there's some pull forward that’s taken place in January, it's also possible there were some pull forward into the fourth quarter, but there is a very healthy refinancing pipeline that we look at, some of the issuance that was done in January was issuance by companies that have - already have incredible amounts of cash on their balance sheet, like Microsoft and IBM and AT&T and Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo and BoA. And so the largest issuers in January weren't necessarily those that needed the cash, they also were all corporation and have massive amounts of cash offshore. So I don't know, I can't really answer your question about this pull forward or not. But we do in our forecast, if you look at the forecast that we prepared, we do have a more robust first half of the year than the second half year in the forecast that we've prepared, which was the 3% growth in issuance for 2017.

All right. That’s helpful. And then if I could just switch over to margin, you were kind of enough to give us some of your long-term target by segment. I know you don’t usually guide by specific segment for the year. But I'm just wondering directionally what you're incorporating for margins by segment to get to your target for the company overall? Thanks.

We don't give specific by segments. But as we said in the prepared remarks that we expect margin expansion for each of our businesses.

Okay. great. I'll follow up offline. Thanks so much.

Thank you. Next question is from Peter Appert of Piper Jaffray. You may ask your question.

Thanks. Good morning. So Doug the strength in the fourth quarter ratings revenue performance is very impressive. I am wondering if it's possible to give us any granularity in terms of the drivers of the revenue performance, in terms of market share or pricing and just overall market growth?

Let me give you some of the components here. And so I'm looking here at the revenue components, if you make a breakdown between transaction and non-transaction, transaction was up 26%, non-transaction was up 5%. If you look at a breakdown by region, US saw the largest growth of close to 17%. The EMEA region was around 6%, Asia, ex-Japan was around 8% and Japan itself was 13% and then the rest of were other small numbers. I have to note that Canada had as quite large increase of 63%. If you look at another breakdown of revenue, corporates we so up by 18%, financial services down 9%, infrastructure up 40%, US public 37%, sovereigns 10% and structure 11%. So overall I could say revenue was up very strong across the board. We saw expenses up $30 million quarter-over-quarter. That has mostly to do with incentive compensation and catch up, given the strong results for the quarter itself. So if you look at the combination of strong revenue growth across the board, in almost all regions and issuer types, as well as really good expense control with the one change an increase related to incentive compensation, we saw those margins in the ratings went up in a very healthy way.

Peter, let me add that if you go back to the slides that Ewout presented, there is a new slide which shows the revenue mix across broad categories. We thought it was helpful for you to see a little bit further breakdown on that and I don't remember the actual slide number. We can pull that that up. But it shows where we've got the growth across the different business segments and is an example in financials there was a drop in the fourth quarter, in financial issuance from 115 to 104, that’s our revenue mix. In corporates they went up 20% from 283 to 340. We think that that should also help to give you some kind of the direction as to what the - what issuance trends are, as well as the revenue that we're seeing from those and you can get a view across the board how we think we're doing those different groups. And all of them are a combination of all the different factors which Ewout mentioned.

Got it. Thank you. And then…

At slide 29, sorry.

Okay, great. Thank you. Do you have any preliminary thoughts on how potential changes in Dodd-Frank might impact the business?

Not really, we have looked at Dodd Frank, there's really two aspects to it that I could mention, but this is – think of this little bit more speculation as because we don’t have a lot of facts as to where this might go. On the - on ourselves, we believe that the overall Dodd Frank rules that is coming in place are similar to the other 21, I guess jurisdictions around the world, where we're also rated. So even if Dodd Frank changes it’s not going to change our operating model very much because we're regulated as similarly or even more heavily in other jurisdictions like it by ASMA [ph] in Europe. So there might be changes to Dodd Frank, they can have some small benefits to us in the US, but they're not necessary they're going have that much of an impact if we have to continue to comply with a similar or the exact same kind of provisions everywhere else in the world. On the actual markets themselves, to the extent that there are Dodd Frank provisions which improve market liquidity or investor issuer access or clarify some of the things around, for instance of Volcker rules we see. Thanks for getting back into more proprietary trading and a higher liquidity in issuance in the markets or if there was a change to the of risk retention rule that allowed CLOs and CMBS issuance to explode if there – it has been that much of an impact from the risk retention rule, I can't quite tell, but it looks like it might be a slight impact. But those are the things that could be more market impact. They don't have anything to do with us directly. But if they end up providing an environment where there is growth in the market, in particular growth in financial markets, higher liquidity, higher issuance, we would potentially benefit from that.

Thank you, Doug.

Thanks, Peter.

Thank you. Next question is from Tim McHugh of William Blair. You may ask your question.

Yes, thanks. Just following a little bit on that question. I guess, I think it was getting some of your initiatives to improve pricing and I guess the strength in bank loans. How much – were there any kind of big incremental changes in the fourth quarter and I guess how much more room is there to run with trying to drive – I guess, your improvement even relative to whatever the market does?

Well, I don't know if I call it relative to what the market does, but relative to ourselves, we've had a, what I would call a multiyear program to bolster our of commercial activities in the rating agency, a result of our own changes in Dodd Frank we have hired a world-class team of commercial people in our rating agency. They are now out building relationships with customers, anticipating their needs for capital markets activities by looking at their own exposures around the globe and by being closer in a relationship, having this relationship model, its allowed us to also demonstrate what is the value that we bring and have a one-off, as I call them kind of individual conversation and negotiations with customers around the globe. And we've started seeing the benefit of that from higher contract realization and we expect that that will continue to flow through in 2017. We saw the benefit of that in last year, some of that into the fourth quarter. But it is part of our top line growth strategy is to have these one-off relationship conversation with the issuers, to ensure that they understand the value and we can see some of that value through improved pricing in contractual terms.

Okay. Thanks. And then SNL the growth rate improved there versus a little bit of resources. What you guys have been talking about it, I know you listened a couple of different areas of that business that did well. But was there anything in particular that changed, I guess in terms of the performance or got much better that drove the acceleration?

Yes, if you look you know, for the last I guess, 12 years or so, we've grown over 12% per year, you just bounce in the low teens from quarter-to-quarter, I think with this kind of noise quarter-to-quarter whether there 10% or 14%. With indices nice strength in the internationals big product, which is one of new things we're launching and conversely we don't see much strength in metals and mining work, this difficult environment. So those were two kind of newest areas that we've been focusing on. Overall together its kind of better than our model, but it just kind of bounces quarter-to-quarter, are difficult to explain that.

Okay. Thanks.

Thank you. Next question is from Bill Warmington of Wells Fargo. You may ask your question.

So good morning, everyone. Congratulations on the strong quarter and also welcome to Ewout. So first question I wanted to ask about the Platts organic revenue growth. It has been trending down for the past three quarters, and this quarter it showed an improvement up to 5%. And so I wanted to ask whether you're seeing an inflection point in renewals and how those are going, whether you think the stabilization in oil price is helping and if you're seeing any differences there you know, US clients versus international clients?

Thank you for that question. On Platts, on our top line growth, it clearly is the combination of all the factors that you discussed. As you remember a few years ago and going back to the question about Dodd Frank, there was - one of the provisions of Dodd Frank ended up that all of the major financial institutions exited the commodities businesses, and now it had been a major drag on our top line growth and on our revenue level is all of the major global financial institutions exited commodities - trading and commodities businesses. A few of those have a tiny trading desk left, but most of them sold their commodities businesses to other trading organization, who are already our customers and we saw some loss of revenue there, that had been a headwind. There was also a headwind when you saw the oil price, which had been in the $100 range drop into the 20s and 30s and it put a lot of pressure on our major customers that are producers on the upstream side, who are getting squeezed by their - on their profit margins and they were in tough negotiations to see what kind of renewal levels we get, what kind of increase in pricing. So there were some headwinds there. Obviously on the other hand, some of the users, power plants and airlines and others saw a big benefit from the lower oil prices and low energy prices and we had some potential upside there. But I think we're getting into a normalized position with the oil prices in the 40s, 50s and 60s. There still are some organizations but that's not the right level that they can be very profitable in. But we do think that we will look carefully at the overall market positioning. We felt that the increase in more maybe more stable oil market benefits us. And as you know, one of our revenue streams that we talk about is the market services area. So it’s not just the - we saw a strong growth in that area which is one of the other areas. So we're not only just a subscription business, but we do have a small amount of our revenue coming from market and trading services and that area did benefit from the volatility as the market moves back up from the lower price to the middle price. So every factor you mentioned are things that we watched. We think that we're in a more stable environment. We don't think that there's going to be anybody getting in and out of this business and we'll be negotiating throughout this year ongoing long-term contract.

And probably second question, just a housekeeping question. The 590 to 615 EPS guidance, does that include or assume a $0.10 to $0.15 benefit from the stock-based comp in that or would that stock-based comp be incremental to that 590 to 615?

That includes the $0.10 to $0.15 from the accounting change for Texas-based payments.

Great. All right, thank you very much and congratulations again.

Thank you.

Thanks, Bill. And Bill I don’t want to thank any of them, I want to clarify this right now, the pronunciation is Ewout, the W is capital to V, so it’s Ewout for everybody.

Ewout. Thank you very much.

No problem, Bill.

Thank you. The next question is from James Friedman of Susquehanna Financial Group. You may ask your question.

Hi. I wanted to – just ask my two upfront. Ewout, I was wondering if you could repeat what you said if anything about what assumptions are embedded with regard to repurchase, I heard the stock-based comp, but the repurchase? And then Doug, if I could ask, just because we get this one a lot too deep into the pool, but with regard to the border adjustability tax, if you could just give us the cliff notes from your view at least, is the – do you think of the company as an exporter, and you know, maybe if you can give us some qualitative observations about that, that will be helpful?. Thank you.

Let me start James, good morning. Regarding the assumptions underneath our EPS guidance with respect to buyback activities, at this moment cannot specifically comment on the size and timing for obvious reasons. But what I can say is the following, we will continue with buyback activities also in 2017, following the strong track record of the company. We believe it's a good use of the strong cash position we have and also the strong future cash generation we predict and we believe our stock today is attractive at current levels. We will be of course be disciplined and focused on the way how we really can create value enhancement for shareholders. So definitely there is an assumption with respect to buyback, but it cannot give you the specifics, but I hope that gives you a flavor for the underlying philosophy, and especially the disciplines, capital management we will apply as a company.

And let me pick up the question the border adjustability, as you know that the tax code was updated 30 years ago in 1986 and at the time our economy and the tax code is still very much skewed towards agriculture and manufacturing, especially with preferences and special exemptions for lot of industries. And it's been a long time that we needed an update of our tax system. We also have the –as you know, and one of the highest tax - corporate tax rate in industrialized world with us ourselves paying over 30% rate, which is been very high. Now specifically related to border adjustability, this is one of those - one of those areas that is probably quite controversial because the way it impacts different types of organization. As you know because we have such a high tax rate any lowering of rate would benefit us and then specifically in border adjustability, we're an intellectual property firm that is been around for long time and our intellectual property is principally registered in the US and in fact, even in New York. And when we sell and we have customers that are paying us from offshore to use our ratings or our indices or market intelligence or re Platts data and that is being purchased overseas, that would be considered to be an export of services and we would benefit from a lower tax rate or from the border adjustability where we would not be having to pay a tax on that export of services. I don't have a specific dimension yet that I could tell you exactly what the benefit could be because we don't have enough of the proposal. But I would tell you that we would be a major beneficiary of that border adjustability and it's something that as that is developed we have our tax team, our economic team, our are public affairs team, et cetera are working closely with other advocacy groups and organizations in Washington to understand all these proposals and what the impact might be. But this is one that for us could be a major benefit.

Got it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Next question is from Craig Huber of Huber Research. You may ask your question.

Yes, good morning. My first question I guess, has to do with interest expense deductibility this whole issue, if it will or will not be included in the potential tax plan later this year, if it is included in there, and I guess depending on how it may be structured if someone like Germany were going to deduct that interest expense at about 30% of EBITDA or of its 100% eliminated. What is your – on those two different scenarios, German one versus getting at a 100%, what is your general thought again with further what it would to the corporate finance debt issuance once it gets up and rolling in 2018 or something…

Yes, and Craig, as you can imagine from my prior answer, where this is also on our list with the same teams that we're looking out with advocacy groups and our tax accounting, finance, public affairs groups, et cetera. This is one of those proposals that we think would have a - also but tends to have a negative impact on issuance. Clearly, it's a proposal that is linked with a pay for to other sorts of changes in the tax code. For example, accelerated, depreciation would be paid for with elimination of the interest rate deductibility. So we see it, typically in combination with other types of - other types of benefits which then need to get paid for it and they were paid for by this interest rate deductibility. In all of the work that we've done looking at the different systems, we think that the major impact is going to be on high yield issuers. And as you know, if you go back to what's the typical deal thesis of leveraged buyout or of many sponsor deal, there is a - the high-yield debt not only provide them access to capital and improves in ROE, it also provides a tax shield and the interest rate expense itself is part of the deal calculation as to what's sort of tax shield you get from the interest rate. And so this is the part of the yield curve and the credit card where we think they will be the biggest impact and potentially issuance could get hit there. When we look at the higher quality end of the rating scale. So, blue-chip companies, investment grade companies, even without the deduction, we think that would still be more attractive to companies in issuing equity. I don't think companies are going to be wanting to flood the market with equity, do their financing. There might be a boon to investment bankers to structure hybrid or other sorts of instruments that could be a debt like or maybe equity like, but not considered to be a common equity. We do rate a lot of those types of instruments. So preferred shares and in anything with kind of fixed coupon, we do - we do rate those kind of equities or things like that. But we do think that overall elimination of interest rate deductibility would probably be a net negative to issuance and that we're operating on right now. But we're trying to look very closely at the market and what the actual proposal is since we don’t really know what the proposal is and what it’s going to. So we're going to have to watch this. We do know that over the long-term in issuance levels are much more related to GDP growth. But this discussion about interest rate deductibility and tax law changes, does throw some new elements into our planning and our thinking that we've got to be very close to.

And then I had a question please on your S&P ratings business, up 14% revenue growth, just to want to in a quarter, I want to better understand - this better contract terms of roughly last year you guys changed your contract terms with your customers the help you put on them, that on pricing side for you guys. Do you have a sense of how much that 14 percentage points of growth came from better contract pricing and then also as you think out to 2017, is there much left to do, I realize its generally analyzed from what you can change you to help boost revenue growth in 2017, and help quantify that, was that a few 100 basis points are not event that?

We don't quantify the amount of the contract changes Greg, so we can't help you with that portion of the question. What was the other part of your question, I apologize.

Is there a much left to go with a set of…

And as Doug mentioned earlier, so we think we made some nice progress in 2016. We think there's more progress that can be made 2017. And I would say in those two years that will be probably the bulk of the progress on these programs we're working on. It could be a little tail after that, but most of it would be in '16 and '17.

Okay. Thank you.

Thanks, Craig.

Thank you. Next question is from the line of Joseph Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. You may ask your question.

Hi, guys. This is Mike Reid on for Joe. Thanks for taking our call. Can you give a little color on just on the continued prospects for indices outside of equities? I guess including fixed income, all the way through the custom indices. And also do you see the custom indices helping you gain market share?

Well, first of all on index as 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. Its just recently have the index of large index complexes started moving into organization to see them 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're hoping to pay much larger position t here. Custom indices and factor indices are getting very popular, specially with family offices, sovereign wealth fund and investors that need some sort of benchmark to manage specific against risk or asset liability matching in their portfolio. We continue to see that is an area where we're investing and growing. We also have two other areas I want to mention, one in the ESG. We've bought Trucost and Trucost is an organization that provides a very precise and high quality climate and water and other sorts of environmental facts, environmental data. We're able to use that to build environmental or climate or other ESG type fund. We see a very high demand for data and analytics and now increasingly also helpful for fund that has incorporate 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 United States. So that's another area of growth. And then 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 is one of our growth areas and not just the traditional ways that we've had with AUMs and a fund approach in using our benchmarks into the fund area. So data and data and 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 market et cetera, we're thinking that there should be some opportunities there as well.

Thanks. Thank you for the color on that.

Thank you. The next question is from Andre Benjamin of Goldman Sachs. You may now ask your question.

Thanks. Good morning. So my question is back to tax reform, I was wondering if you are talking to any of the larger CFO, how they think about their balance sheet and EPS impact. I was just wondering is there any indication that people are putting more weight on the impact of funding costs versus the bottoms up impact on EPS, I am just trying to some inside into how CFOs are actually weighing those offsetting factors?

Andre, I don't have enough of base of discussions yet to give you - to give you like a scientific answer, I can just tell you anecdotally, this every CEO and every CFO that we've been meeting with are studying the tax reform proposals the same way we are. There is then – if you met with the largest organization's, the largest global organizations and if you look at the repatriation topic which we haven't 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 market. We don’t we'll have a long-term impact. But there's a lot of corporations that have literally - there is a couple trillion dollars $2.5 trillion we believe in overseas cash that could also going into that equation. And 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 in that with retailers that import a lot of their products from offshore, if it's - weather 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, order adjustability is 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 net after tax cost as even can be lower because the interest rate is lowered so much. So again, I can only be anecdotal. I would hope that as we go throughout the years and we get more specific proposals that I could give you better answers then 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.

All right. That’s helpful. And I guess just one homework question, model keeping, from as the combined market intelligence Platts business going forward, as we combine those segments in our model, should we assume that we'll continue to get the individual revenue from market intelligence and Platts going forward?

Yes. We will disclose that’s going forward as well. So you should see the breakdown in the future.

All right. Thank you.

Thanks, Andre.

Thank you. We will now take our final question from Ansh Singh from Credit Suisse. You may now ask your question.

Good morning, guys. My first question on the revenue synergies inside of market intelligence related to the integration that’s going on. I realize you spoke to some left from synergies in the quarter, but hoping for some more color on how that's going, is it going along with your expectations, slightly better, slightly weaker. Just wanted to get your perspective on how customers are responding to your early cross-selling integration efforts?

It’s better than expectation. They had a target, and we cannot necessarily share with you folks, on what they would accomplish at this point in time, and the $10 million target has exceeded - or the number has exceeded at target. So they were very pleased with that. But once again this is still early days because its a lot of piloting going on as you know, Cap IQ reps are going to Cap IQ customers and saying hey, look our arsenal product, let me show you what we do this. But to me the biggest move really can't take place until you have one integrated platform, right. That’s when you can really begin to shape customers behavior were meaningfully and that’s not going to be for a while.

They are going to start to beta testing that in the third quarter with a very limited number of customers, but we expect that that will really be more of a fourth-quarter event when the market intelligence 1.0 platform is potentially ready for rolling out more - on a more broader basis. But just as slight a different answer to your question. We're very pleased with the integration of SNL. Its been something that we made some of very tough management decisions when we brought on board, in terms of how we're going to manage the organization, putting these businesses together, which was not necessarily something was very natural for this organization and it's paid off by making those tough decisions right up front 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. And generally speaking, we've been ahead of our targets and we've been able to execute in a way that we've had a very good financial performance, principally from expense management, we're 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 can get the same kind of speed of execution on the revenue synergies that we did on expense energy. But it's something we're tracking, we're watching and I'm hopeful that we will. But it’s a lot harder than getting the expense synergy.

Understood. That’s helpful. And then one last one for me, as it relates to your mid single-digit guidance on revenue, would it be fair to say you're incorporating the most conservatism on your ratings business versus the other ones, hoping for some color on factors that drive you to lower end versus upper end, given that a lot of the potential changes impacting issuance aren’t really getting factored into your outlook at this stage? Thanks.

Ansh, 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 form all aspects, high growth, margin expansion, EPS growth, excluding the accounting change. So we're in a range of 8.5% to 12%. So we think this is a very strong guidance we have provided. There is no particular conservatism in this, its really considered middle of the road.

And I'll just – just one methodic add, and this is not of intent to point - your view is probably similar to other folks out there. January was a great month, if January was a horrible month, maybe that question would even come in, but we can't concern ourselves with one month out of 12 because we know that once every single year it’s choppy for month-to-month. So we can't be swayed by one particular month, as we think about our annual guidance.

That’s helpful. Thank you.

Well, thank everyone for joining the call this morning. As you see we had a very memorable year in 2016. There was a lot of uncertainty in the markets, a lot of change going on with things like the Brexit and US elections, many of those uncertainties continue into 2017, 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 gene4rally speaking we've got our entire organization focused on growth and excellence and we are very excited about the prospects of taking this reshaped, very cohesive portfolio of companies forward. We appreciate your interest for all 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. And thank you very much.

That concludes this morning’s call. A PDF version of the presenter slides is available now for downloading from investor.spglobal.com. A replay of this call, including the question-and-answer session will be available in about two hours. The replay will be maintained on S&P Global's website for 12 months from today and for one month from today by telephone. On behalf of S&P Global, we thank you for participating and wish you a good day.