Good morning, and welcome to S&P Global's Third Quarter 2017 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.

Thank you and good morning. And welcome to 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 third quarter 2017 results. If you need a copy of the release and financial schedules, they could be downloaded at investor.spglobal.com. In today's earnings release and during the conference call, we're providing adjusted financial information. This information is provided to enable investors to make meaningful comparisons 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 descriptions of future events. Any such statements are based on current expectations and current economic conditions and are subject to risks 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 forms 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 today. Consistent with the first half of the year, the company delivered another solid quarter. The underlying environment for business is unfavorable with global GDP growth in every geography, higher and stable commodity prices, strong equity markets and modest growth in US bond issuance. With this backdrop, S&P Global is doing well. Let me begin with the third quarter highlights. We attained strong organic revenue and adjusted operating profit in every segment. We delivered 190 basis points of adjusted profit margin improvement and adjusted diluted EPS growth of 19%. As a result of our year-to-date performance, our expectations for the remainder of the year, we're increasing our adjusted diluted EPS guidance to a range of 6.55 to 6.70. We will complete our $500 million ASR agreement and believe that reinvesting in our stock represents a great investment and a good use of our cash. We returned $604 million through share repurchases and dividends, bringing our year-to-date total to 1.2 billion. We continue to focus on delivering meaningful revenue growth, launching new products, investing in productivity and returning capital to shareholders. Looking more closely at the financial results, the company reported 5% revenue growth and achieved 12% on an organic basis. The company achieved 190 basis points improvement in adjusted operating profit margin due to strong organic revenue growth, the sale of lower margin businesses, and productivity initiatives. We delivered 19% adjusted diluted EPS growth. There was some puts and takes to these figures, recorded $0.03 a share unfavorable impact for ForEx and $0.14 a share favorable impact from stock option exercises, both of which Ewout will discuss in a moment. What I would like to do first is, provide a bit more color on some of the current and future drivers of our businesses. Let me start with bank loan ratings, which has been a growing part of the ratings business over the past few years. Bank loan ratings are primarily issued on leveraged loans typically rated BB+ or lower. Over the past few years both the volume of leveraged loans and the percent of leveraged loans rated by S&P have increased. During the quarter bank loan revenue of $83 million was a key factor in the revenue growth of the rating segment. This chart shows the US leveraged loan inventory with each part depicting leveraged loans maturing in the next eight years as of the end of each period. At the end of 2014 for example, $809 billion was going to mature in the following years. At the end of 2015 850 billion was going to mature in the next eight years and so on. The total amount of outstanding leveraged loans has increased each other at a compounded annual growth rate of 11% since 2011. When tracking issuance data, we always try to point out to where issuance takes place, which type of issuance and the size of the deals make a difference in the revenue we realize. Global issuance in the third quarter excluding sovereign debt decreased slightly. Structured finance sovereign was quite strong. Geographically issuance in the US increased 5% in the third quarter with investment-grade increasing 9%, high-yield increasing 1%, public finance down 19% and structured finance increasing 26% due primarily to the strength in CLOs and CMBS. In Europe, issuance decreased 17% in the quarter with investment-grade declining 22%, high-yield decreasing 29% and structured finance increasing 13%, with strength in CLOs and RMBS. In Asia, issuance increased 4%. The vast majority of Asian issuance however is made up of local China debt that we don't rate. Ratings recently published its final issuance forecast for 2017 combined with its initial 2018 forecast. This forecast provides a range of issuance estimates for each of the major issuance categories. For 2017, excluding international public finance which is not material to our results. We expect a medium increase of approximately 2% in 2017 and approximately 1% in 2018 in overall issuance, where both financial services and structured finance are forecasted to increase in both years, U.S. public finance is forecasted to decline in both years. Our cautious outlook is primarily due to the expectation that most developed countries' central banks will begin to bring in a monetary stimulus and non-financial monetary programs. And many financial markets have reached new heights in low volatility and it has become more likely that in 2018 market volatility will increase. Here is a new chart that shows how U.S. investment-grade corporations utilize bond proceeds. Issuance for M&A, buybacks and refinancing depicted in the bottom three colors of each bar has increased considerably in recent years. There has been a material raise in debt financed M&A and share buybacks since 2013 as investors have become more comfortable with blockbuster offers. Note that of the largest 40 deals ever printed nearly all had been transacted since 2013 for M&A or buybacks. Results in our investment-grade financial sector issuance, which can make up as much as half of total issuance is included in the general corporate purpose category. If we take a look at U.S. high-yield issuance over the same timeframe, we see that the high-yield issuance is much more heavily dependent on refinancing needs than the investment grade market. High-yield borrower's general issuance bonds to maturing debt are for specific M&A or recapitalization efforts. Finally providing let me share some of the progress we have made with our Green Evaluations. Propelled by the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and the impetus it created to finance $1 trillion a year in investments for renewable energy and other initiatives to limit global warming, Green investment is on a firm upward trajectory. S&P Global Ratings launched its Green Evaluations in April and it includes evaluations of buildings, transport, energy efficiency, water, traditional power plants and nuclear. We are encouraged by the acceptance of our Green Evaluations in the market. This slide includes some of the global bonds we have evaluated today, such as the Mexico Airport Trust and the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority subordinated revenue bond. Within Market Intelligence, we continue to extend our capabilities of our offering during the quarter. First, we launched RatingsDirect monitor, which features real time, visually interactive in intuitive ways for end users to receive information that is relevant to the company's investment and counterparty portfolio. Second is an expansion of SNL data available via Data Feed. Historically, SNL is a very small data feed business. Earlier this year we began adding certain SNL data sets to Xpressfeed, our data feed management system. During the third quarter, we rolled out new alternative and unstructured data sets through Xpressfeed such as the regulatory data, bank branch data, real estate property data and corporate transcripts. This should prove valuable to investor seeking new sources of alternative data that can help uncover relationships and new alpha generating ideas. Third is enhanced credit analytics workflow, which facilitates counterparty analysis and integration of SNL data. It also expands model coverage to include loss given default for Europe and the Middle-East as well as relative contribution analysis and 30 years term structures. Turning to Platts, we often share new product launches, but today I want to share with you progress made on a launch from a few years ago. In the past, we have discussed the increasingly important role that LNG will play in unifying global natural gas market. Platts, Japan, Korea Marker is the LNG benchmark price assessment for spot physical cargos delivered into Japan and South Korea. As these countries take the largest share of LNG imports in the world, Platts JKM has become a key reference price for the physical shipment, and as often the case when a physical market develops, market participants want to be able to hedge their position. This chart shows the surge in monthly JKM swap volumes on ICE. Volume depicted here represents a total amount of trading activity or contracts that have changed hands during the month. Open interest is the total number of outstanding contracts that are held by market participants. Next, I'd like to share with you several new products in S&P Dow Jones Indices. The first is the launch of the S&P/BMV IPC VIX Index in conjunction with the Mexican stock exchange. This index utilizes the same methodology as the CBOE Volatility Index. Second is the launch of the corporate carbon pricing tool, which helps companies assess exposure to regional carbon pricing mechanism. The tool combines the company's greenhouse gas emissions and financial performance data with Trucost regional carbon pricing information to provide insights on carbon pricing risk after 2030. Trucost has accumulated a global database of current carbon regulation, emissions trading schemes, fuel taxes and potential featured carbon pricing scenarios designed to achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2° centigrade or less. Third, Transamerica Asset Management has launched four new strategic beta ETFs designed to provide core equity strategies with an embedded risk management feature called the DeltaShares by Transamerica suite, the new ETFs first attract the S&P Managed Risk 2.0 index series, which offers exposure to a given segment of the equity market while seeking to control volatility. Even though ETFs were only launched in July two of them have market caps that are among the top 10 of the new ETF launches this year. And fourth is a strategic investment in Algomi. Algomi is an innovative fintech company that has created a bond information network that enables buy side and sell side firms, as well as exchanges, to harness data to improve financial trading decisions allowing for greater transparency and artificial intelligence-powered trade facilitation. With that color, let me turn the call over to Ewout who will provide more specifics on our business results during the quarter. Ewout?

Thank you, Doug, and good morning to everyone on the call. This morning, I would like to discuss the third quarter results and then provide specifics on our increased 2017 guidance. Doug already discussed the 12% growth in organic revenue and a 19% increase in adjusted diluted EPS. I'd like to touch on a few other line items. First, I would like to point the $12 million increase in adjusted unallocated expense in two perspectives. About one-third was due to due to a company-wide IT project to replace our order to cash system. About one-third was for professional service fees, encouraged to identify additional growth and productivity opportunities. We believe that this will be the big quarter for spending on both of these initiatives. The final one-third was for performance related incentive compensation. Second, the adjusted effective tax rate of 27.9% improved primarily due to the discrete tax benefit on stock option exercises which I will review in a moment. And third, our ongoing share repurchase program coupled with our recent ASR led to a 7.4 million decrease or 3% decline in average diluted shares outstanding. During our fourth quarter of 2016 earnings call, we noted a recent FASB guidance change for accounting of stock payments to employees which we estimated at the time would increase 2017 EPS by $0.10 to $0.15 depending on SPGI's share price and option exercise activity. This change also impacts EPS whenever the fair market value of employee stock grants exceeds the grant price. The impact is recorded as a reduction in tax expense. Due to exceptionally high levels of option exercises, during the third quarter from private and recently retired employees we recorded a reduction in tax expenses that improved third quarter adjusted EPS by $0.14. It is difficult to estimate the impact in future quarters, but let me make two observations that should be helpful. First, the company no longer grants stock options and at the end of the third quarter there were 2.1 million employee stock options outstanding. When the stock options are exercised assuming that they are still in the money there would be a tax benefit. Second, the company continues to grant restrictive stock. Each year in the fourth quarter an average range of restrictive stock units will pass and provide a tax benefit whenever the fair market value of the stock exceeds the grant's price. For the fourth quarter of 2017, if we assume more stock options are exercised and the stock remains at today's stock price, we estimate that we will record a tax benefit of approximately $0.07 in the fourth quarter associated with restrictive stock. This amount is included in our updated guidance. Net of hedges, foreign exchange rates, had $4 million positive impact on the company's revenue and $12 million negative impact on adjusted operating profit or about $0.03 per share in the third quarter. The bulk of the impact was in the ratings segment. Ratings adjusted operating profit was primarily impacted by the Australian dollar and British pound. Taken together, the quarter included a $0.14 gain in stock option exercises, a $0.03 loss from FOREX and adjusted unallocated expenses that were much higher than our annual run rate. Now let me turn to adjustments to earnings to help you better assess the underlying performance of the business. Pre-tax adjustments to earnings totaled to a loss of $19 million in the quarter and included restructuring actions in Ratings and Corporate. We anticipate that these restructuring actions will result an annual savings of approximately $30 million. Despite strong year-to-date results we are continuously looking for opportunities to transition to lean our more effective organizations. In addition, we excluded $24 million in due related amortization expense. In the third quarter, led by Ratings every business segment contributed to gain organic revenue. The reported revenue decline in market and commodities intelligence was due to several divestitures. Each business segment reported adjusted operating profit growth, market and commodities intelligence reported a 1% gain in adjusted operating profit as organic growth and synergies more than made up for the lost profitability associated with the divestitures. I'm pleased with the adjusted operating margin improvement in Ratings and market and commodities intelligence. Well I'll just discuss Indices margins in more detail in a moment, let me just say that we want to invest intelligently in such a high margin business, while simultaneously maintaining a disciplined cost structure. Let me now turn to the individual segments' performance. I will start with Ratings. Ratings revenue increased 15% or 14% excluding a favorable impact from FOREX. Adjusted operating profit increased 19%, while the adjusted operating margin increased 170 basis points to 53%. As we have said in the past, we managed our Ratings business on a rolling four quarters basis, and you can see on that basis the adjusted operating margin increased 270 basis points. Both transaction and non-transaction revenue recorded strong growth. Non-transaction revenue increased to 7% due primarily to growth in fees associated with surveillance, entity ratings and short-term debts including commercial paper. Transaction revenue increased 24% primarily from gains, U.S. corporate bonds, global structured products and European bank loans. If you look at the Ratings' revenue by its various markets, you can see the greatest gains were in corporates and structured finance. Bank loan ratings are part of corporates and boosted results in this market. Structured finance increased primarily due to strong CLO activity in both the U.S. and Europe as well as increased CMBS activity in the U.S. The only market that declined was governments due to the 19% decline in U.S. public finance issuance that Doug mentioned. Let me now turn to market and commodities intelligence. This segment includes S&P Global market intelligence and S&P Global Platts. In the quarter, the third quarter, reported revenue declined 6% due to divestitures. Excluding divestiture and acquisition activity, organic revenue increased 7%. Despite the loss of earnings associated with divestitures, adjusted operating profit improved 1% due to organic growth and synergies realization. Adjusted operating margin improved 270 basis points primarily due to strong organic revenue growth, the sale of lower margin businesses and SNL integration synergies. Turning to Market Intelligence, excluding recent divestitures organic revenue grew 8%. There are three primary reasons behind this growth. First, we serve a diverse set of segments beyond Wall Street, including corporations, banks, insurance, professional service firms and others. Several of these have better underlying growth characteristics than investment banks and investment management. Second, we serve all of those segments from the largest to smaller companies and grow our contract values as our clients grow. Third, our renewal rates and sales performance are strong as we enhance the product, train customers and leverage our unique and proprietary conduct. One area greatest growth can be seen is in the number of SNL, S&P Capital IQ and risk surfaces desktop users, which expanded 13% year-over-year. Emphasis continues to be on instituting enterprise-wide commercial agreements and combining desktop platforms, approximately one-third of RatingsDirect and Capital IQ desktop business has been conferred to enterprise-wide commercial agreements. With respect to combining desktop platforms, two events will occur in early November. First, we will launch a product of the new Market Intelligence desktop for all SNL customers. This will have an updated look and feel, will contain all SNL content and the new Capital IQ content and functionality. Second, we will launch an official beta release of the new combined platform for investment banking customers after just completing a successful preview campaign with selective users. Looking more deeply at Market Intelligence revenue, all three components delivered a strong organic revenue growth. Desktop products grew 8%, enterprise solutions had been renamed data management solutions and revenue increased 9% leading growth of Market Intelligence. This surface has grown 5% with Ratings Xpress and RatingsDirect providing high and mid-single digits respectively. And finally note that about $37 million of revenue in the third quarter of 2016 from businesses that were divested. Turning to Platts, organic revenue growth fixed higher, up to 4% growth in the first half of the year, Platts delivered 6% organic revenue growth in the third quarter. This growth was due to the poor subscription business which grew mid-single digits and Global Ratings services revenue which increased by more than 20%. The effective trading was strong at the intercontinental exchange in oil and at the Singapore exchange with iron ore. If you look at Platts revenue by its four primary markets, you can see that petroleum and power and gas makeup the majority of the business. Platts growth this quarter came primarily from petroleum which benefited from solids of subscription growth and strong global trading activity. In addition petrochemicals contributed 6% growth and metals and agriculture returned to growth with a strong recovery in global trading services revenues. Please note that there was $9 million of revenue in the third quarter of 2017 from the PIRA acquisition. Let me now turn to Indices. Revenue increased 14% mostly due to continued growth in ETF assets under management. Adjusted operating profit increased 10%, adjusted operating margin decreased 190 basis points to 64.3%, as revenue gains were partially offset by increased expenses related to performance driven costs and investments. Performance driven costs includes sales royalties paid to our partners, sales commissions and incentives. And investments include true cost expenses, expansions in India and Mexico and technology. Asset-liked fees, which are principally derived from ETFs, mutual funds and certain OTC derivatives experienced greatest growth in the third quarter rising 17%, driven by 31% increase in average ETF AUM. Subscription revenue increased 6%, due to growth in data subscriptions and custom indices. Exchange rate of derivative revenue rose 6%, with gains in S&P 500 Index options and fixed futures and options activity. The trends of assets moving into passive investments was again very strong in the third quarter, with the exchange traded products industry reaching net inflows of $124 billion. The quarter ending ETF AUM guide to our indices totaled $1.214 trillion, up 33% versus the third quarter of 2016. As the chart shows this was the result of $150 billion of net inflows and $150 billion of market appreciation over the last 12 months. The $1.214 Trillion was a new record. The third quarter average AUM associated with our indices increased 31% year-over-year and this is a better proxy for revenue changes than the quarter-end figures. Exchange rate of the derivatives volume most mixed. Key contracts include increased S&P 500 index options and fixed futures and options activities which experienced robust activity and a decline in activity at the CME equity complex. Now, turning to our capital position, there was little change from the end of the fourth quarter of 2016. We now have $2.3 billion of cash and $3.6 billion of long term debt. $2.1 billion of this cash was held outside the United States at the end of the third quarter. Our debt coverage as measured by adjusted growth leverage to adjusted EBITDA was 2.0 times versus 2.1 times at the end of 2016. Year-to-date free cash flow was $1.1 billion dollars of which nearly 500 million was generated during the third quarter. As for return of the capital, the company returned $604 million to shareholders in the third quarter, $500 million through an accelerated share repurchase program with 2.8 million shares received in the third quarter and additional shares expected when the program is completed at the end of October and 104 million in dividends. Now, I will review our updated 2017 guidance. Based upon strong year-to-date results and our expectation for the remainder of 2017, we have made several changes to our 2017 guidance. This slide epics our GAAP guidance and the changes that we have made. Please keep in mind that our guidance reflects current spot market ForEx rates. This slide shows our updated adjusted guidance. The changes are highlighted on this slide. I'm going to discuss the changes to our adjusted guidance which were as follows. We have increased our organic revenue growth from high single-digit to low double-digit growth, with contributions by every business segment. We have increased our unallocated expense from a range of $130 million to $135 million to a range of $135 million to $140million, driven by continued IT spend and higher incentive compensation. We have increased our operating profit margin guidance from a range of 45% to 46% to a range of 46% to 47%. We have lowered interest expense by $5 million to $145 million and we have increased diluted EPS, which excludes deal-related amortization from a prior range of $6.15 to $6.30 to a new range of $6.55 to $6.70. Overall, this guidance reflects our expectation that 2017 will be a very strong year for the company. With that, let me turn the call back over to Chip for your questions.

Thanks, Ewout. Just a couple of instructions for our phone participants, please press Star 1 to indicate that you wish to enter the queue to ask a question. To cancel or withdraw your question, simply press Star 2. I would kindly ask that you limit yourself to two questions; that's two questions, in order to allow time for other callers during today's Q&A session. If you've been listening through a speaker phone, but would like to now ask a question, we ask that you lift your handset prior to pressing Star 1 and remain on the handset until your question has been answered. This will ensure better sound quality. Operator, we'll now take our first question.

Thank you. Our first question comes from Peter Appert from Piper Jaffray. You may ask your question.

Thank you. Good morning. So Dough the performance on margin perspective continues to be exceptional and then you've addressed this before, but I'm required to ask you again, your confidence and the ability to continue to sustain the currency margin improvement you have seen, how much more upside is there how is been used up already.

Peter thanks for the question, good morning. We continue to be committed to improving our margins and at the same we are investing the businesses we think that obviously one of the best indicators of improving our margins is to keep growing the top line. We have invested in however approaching commercial markets, we put in place commercial heads of all of our businesses we are working towards looking at the best ways to penetrate markets and then improve our top line growth, but at the same time we are also committed to managing our expenses in a way that are professional as well as appropriate for our business growth. So we continue to be believe that we can improve our margins, we have thought about a lot about this and it's something that we think that we can still do.

Alright, thank you and with that I am just wondering if you have got any - if there has been any evaluation in your thought process in terms of appropriate level of leverage on the balance sheet.

Good morning, Peter. If you have heard us speaking last quarter with respect to our capital philosophy and targets, that is a new frame work we have set out to you our investors that hopefully provides clear guidance on our expectation with respect to capital return. Our balance sheet, share buy backs, our dividends and also leverage expectations for the future. What we have said is that we want to be investment great overall and that our adjusted growth leverage should be in the range of 1.75 to 2.25 versus our adjusted EBITDA. This quarter we are at 2.0 so just at the midpoint of the range and therefore a very comfortable where we are with respect to leverage at this point in time.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Joseph Foresi of Cantor Fitzgerald. You may now ask you question.

Hi, so you are obviously having a fairly good year here. How do you think about the long-term growth rates and margin profile for the overall business?

Joseph, thank you for that, this is Dough let me just give you a couple of quick thoughts about that. As I just mentioned to Peter, we continue to look at top line growth as the best way to drive our margin improvements and we don't have necessarily projections for each segment, but our guidance is adjusted. Operating margins about 46% to 47% that you just saw in the slide that Ewout presented. In the ratings business over the long run we inspired to the low 50% range. We are continuing to look at how we can drive productivities through investments in IT, but maintain our quality, our controls and our analytical excellence in the market in commodities space we've got a high 30% margin over the next couple of years. We are continuing to complete the synergy program as well as the other approach to commercial discipline in IT investments as in ratings. And then in index, we don't really have a specific target in the index business. AUM levels and derivative activities in some ways are out of our control, but we are continuing to invest in the business and due target - in the extent we have it targeted. It's maintaining in the same kind of a range, but we are not giving a specific target for the index business.

Got it. That's helpful. And then my second question, any thoughts on the new tax reform that's out there and how could impact the business going forward? Thanks.

There is a couple of things on the tax reform. Obviously if the overall tax rate is reduced that would - we will be a beneficiary of a lower rate. We have been able to have a few benefits here and there and we're in this 30% range we used to be at the more of the 31% and 32% range. But if the corporate tax rate went down to 20%, we will have a very positive impact. There is other provisions which have been mentioned in the past like non-deductablity of interest expense, we have look at that carefully, we see what that might do to the debt markets. We think that there could be some potential impact to debt markets from that, but at the same time debt is the most important capital market in the United States and it's a way the corporations finance themselves and provide more leverage and better returns to their shareholders. But these are still - most of this specific details of the tax reform are really not known yet and as they become known we are going to be looking those, but based on what we know now, net-net we would probably get some benefits from the tax reform based on the provisions that we have seen.

Great, thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Conor Fitzgerald from Goldman Sachs. You may ask your question.

Good morning. I want to ask a question on the treasury white paper particularly some of the comments around the pricing ForEx data feeds. I know the comment doesn't really specifically apply to your business, but you can see there's perhaps some prolog events just fit on data business, but pricing power. Does the white paper change, I think of our pricing power in this part of your business at all?

Good morning, Conor. This is Ewout. Of course we have taken notice of that report and overall our expectation that those particular professions or proposals should not impact the S&P global. As you would see it's very much in between data providers of equity markets and broker dealers and the charge of data feeds from the equity markets. We are facilitating some of those through our platforms, but the end those are direct to relationships in terms of intellectual property between the exchangers and the broker dealers. So overall, we don't believe that will have an impact on the companies and therefore we are very comfortable that the company will have similar growth expectations in the future not impacted by this report.

That's helpful, thank you. And then just another one on taxes, if there was a lower tax rate on foreign cash repetition how would you think about potentially utilizing that?

Yeah, at this point in time, our foreign cash is focused on permanent reinvestments overseas. So that is the starting point. We might reconsider those plans when there is a change in tax profession and that could be repatriation, but we need to discuss at that point in time when we have the tax. So it might be that we reconsider our permanents reinvestments, plans we have today, but we need to see what will come out of the new tax regulation and we need to decide at that point in time.

Very helpful, thanks for taking my questions.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Miss. Toni Kaplan from Morgan Stanley. You may ask your question.

Thank you. Good morning. In light of the outside strength in transactional ratings revenue this quarter, can just give us some additional color on pricing and share gains. It is seen like based on the issuance levels that we had seen that this was a real out performance.

Good morning Tony. Let me just give you a little bit of color on the performance overall clearly this was not such a great quarter when it comes to issuance the global issuance was down almost 7% overall, but as usual there is a mix balance that we always look out to see where there might be sources of strength for the type of performance we had on the top line. In U.S. the corporate were up about 6.5% the financial services were up 9%. You know the public finance is down about 19%, but a combination of the corporate to financial services what we saw overall with some strength in the public and the - the structured finance area, there was a CMBS strength, it was up as 46% for the quarter as well as structured credit which was mostly CLOs that was up over a 100%. So truly the mix of what we saw that we benefited from and then as you know this quarter we had the first slide we showed you was bank loan ratings because that's been a very positive story for the market overall. The bank loan market has been strong through a combination of banks activities with their own balance sheets and then securitizations to go eventually sometimes into the CLO market. And it's a combination of all of that that is driven our top line growth.

Great and then in the slides, it showed that the desk top users from market intelligence to desk top users were up 13%, but that desk top revenue itself was only up about 8. So could you give us a sense of what the divergence is there is it customer mix and if you could give any color on desk top client base like sell side versus buy side, banking versus research or other functions anything that you can provide there is very helpful. Thank you.

Tony, let me take the first part of that question. On the first part of the question as you know we are slowly moving towards changing our contracts with customers to an enterprise wide contract which means that you have agreement with your organization and they can bring on its many users as possible. So as we move more, more of our contracts enterprise wide that means that there are - you open up the ability for anybody in that has approached using a license to use products and services so that's where you see the number of desk tops increasing and it's a good leading indicator for us in the future where we are going to be. We are negotiating contracts overtime as the usage goes up its gives us the ability to think about how we can get pricing increases over time on that. And Chip has some more numbers specifically about the different segments of who the users are.

Yeah, I don't know the very exact numbers, but a few quarters ago in our slide that we gave you a price chart which shows you the break down market intelligence cost by - customers and was roughly pretty evenly split between four categories. One of the categories that people don't think about a lot is corporates and others. So you know the corporate and accounting firms and consulting firms [indiscernible] those folks may buy not look at this specifically, but those kind of firms. Then that chunk with sell side, a chunk with buy side, a chunk within private equity. So please go look at that chart may, might exact figures, but take pick up that chart.

Thanks very much guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Alex Kramm from UBS. You may ask your question.

Good morning. Just staying on that market intelligence topic for a second and I heard the one third no enterprise pricing and I know there was no other question what market data cost in general. When we talk to clients some of those move to enterprise pricing, it seems to be driving decent cost increases into the tune of like double digits or so. So just wondering at what point you are reaching the limit or you still feel like you got good upside. I guess what we are hearing is that folks increasingly are looking at the cost with you guys and wondering if it is getting ended a bit too much though. Any comments will be appreciated.

Good morning Alex. This is Ewout. So we are very encouraged by the trends of moving to enterprise wide contracts. As you know that is an exclusive strategy of markets intelligence and we think that's good for the customers and good for S&P global. So let me give you a little bit of more color around that about one third of the previous capital like few customers are now come forwarded the plan in ultimately to continue to bring the whole customer set to enterprise wide contracts and we believe that's a good developments because it ultimately - it means that when one of our customers is adding new employees, new analysts they can all be added to the platform without any additional costs. And, still it will increase usage, it will increase embedding into the models, we like to see that number of 13% increase in usage, we think ultimately more users is always a positive in the long term. So, overall this is an explicit strategy, we believe we provide value for the platform, we look as you know from the enterprise wide conflicts very much to actually usage, and we try to make an estimate of the edit value for the customers. How much that's embedded into the work close. So, there's a difference between a customer that is looking at a more high-level data sources, others that go in very deep prefatory intelligence and therefore there are some difference changes in terms of the price setting. But overall, we believe that the product is well priced, is competitive in the market, is heading functionality and that is the main drive behind the growth in users and the best of revenue.

Alright fair enough, and then just maybe, since somebody mentioned that treasury report earlier, I think one of the areas that didn't get lot of attention was, I guess, treasuries push for more securitization. So, Doug may be for you, I mean, any conversations you had to that regard with the administration and obviously structure plan as markets haven't been that robust last two years. Anything that could do, or time lines you would think about here, if officially pushed to get that going again?

Well that the two aspects, the first in the US that's clearly interested in Washington and I have no idea what the term could be for GST reform, which might eventually change the dynamic of the R&BS market. The R&BS market in the US is gotten to be quite small, but in the last quarter, there was less the $12 billion of issuance of R&BS securities. So, there might be at some point, some reform there, but I'm not going to hold my breath for it. In Europe you know that Mario Draghi has spoken many times about wanting to revitalize the securitization market in Europe and they do think, to be some progresses, see more structured credits, this quarter they were $14.2 billion worth of CLO's and other type of structured credits. And we do see some interest in Europe to have a more robust securitization market, particularly because, it frees up capital on corporate and thinking down sheets, so that they can be re-invested in other type of activities and as well as provides more inventory for the securities markets and moves away from more terminal and banking market. So, I've had a lot of discussions with this with different central bankers and policy makers, but, there is no specific plans innovate that I've seen. And in the US the biggest market could get at least, if you saw the R&BS market, opening up again, but I don't see any timeline for that.

Okay, very good thank you.

Thank you, our next question comes from Hamzah Mazari from Macquarie Research, you may ask your question.

Good morning, thank you. I was hoping you could address, how investors should think about your business, and any Nett benefits post Midrid 2, is that something you guys benefit from? Historically you haven't talked a lot of that, some of your peers have, so just curious there first?

Thank you, Hamzah. Well first of all, when it comes to Midrid 2, we are obviously looking very carefully at this, there are sort of different in's and out's from this, and there is a lot of new discussions about this today related to how the US players are going to be able to deliver intelligence and research into the European market. So, first of all from our point of view, a direct point of view, we're providing research in data and analytics that is already paid for with hard dollars. When somebody gets the subscription to our products and services we are already paying for them, with a, to a subscription that is paid for with hard dollars, Euros, pounds whatever the currency is. And we are not part of the unbundling loops that is going to take place from the institutional self-side research analysis or now typically ramped in their soft dollars, which is part of a training credits or some sort of a training system. So, from a direct point of view, we don't think we are going to see any impact or business. Second, as the market does become unbundled and you see new ways for research to be delivered, our platform at market intelligence can be used by the investor banks to deliver research and we can do in a way that we are able to track usage, we are able to track how many times of different reports are opened, so that they can be charged, we can set up subscription approaches and we can do that and reach out to different types of investors and analysts that are using the kind of research we have today. Clearly the biggest question that's been coming up when I meet with you and your colleagues and peers is that, wilt her be any kind of negative impact on the research projects? And we don't know if that's going to, what kind of a potential make us impact it could be if there is a squeezing of research budgets and organizations have to look carefully about how they want to spend, how they want to spend their hard dollars overtime, if there is going to be any negative impact there. Well generally speaking, we are watching this very carefully, we're going to understand what it means for us, but, there is no direct impact initially.

Great and just a follow-up question, you know curious how investors should think about the plats business, in an up cycle relative to pass cycles. And the reason I asked that question is, you've done a ton of acquisitions in that business, it's more diversified, you probably have more supply demand data that you didn't historically when that acquisition was done. So, you know may be help us understand in a stronger oil and commodity market, I know you mentioned the business ticked up, but it could growth be similar to the numbers that business put up in the last up cycle? Granted we don't think energy is going to a 100 but, just curious any thoughts there? Thank you.

Well first of all, our expectation right now for oil, is that it's going to be in a range somewhere in the $50 to $60 range, but, let's say $45 to $60 is the expectation that we have right now. At $45 you see people pulling up production when it gets into the mid 50s, people, sorry when you get there in the 40s, in the low 40s people stop producing, get into the 50s, 55, 60s people start producing more, you get more supply coming in. so, we've seen this dynamically, so we have a much more stable oil price. We've been growing portfolio of services that can allow us to provide all the way from the exploration and the well head to the refinery onto the product, with a combination of crude oil analytics, of refinery analytics, of shipping etcetera and we are just starting to see the promise of putting those businesses together to start growing. So, we think the plats in the overtime in the couple of different buckets, one is obviously the different acid classes and sales of petroleum, natural gas, energy, plastic, petrochemicals etcetera. And then the other is pricing and GTS, that go with trained services and secondarily the trade flow analytics and data products. And we are investing in all of those to see if we can grow our subscription businesses overtime and make this one of our growing businesses. But, we do see this stability should be beneficial to the business, but I can't initially forecast what that's going to mean for us in the future.

Very helpful thanks.

Thank you, our next question from Finn Matthew [ph] from William Blair. You may ask your question.

Thanks, just one from me, I guess, on the indices you talked a bit about the margins, but can you elaborate a little bit more, I know you are trying to seen some sort of range, but it seems like we've seen kind of the second year of a little bit more investments and I think it's rational, but I guess can you talk about from here to the , should we see elaborate from this point or do you see a sustained period of wanting invest in new products and I guess the infrastructure of the business?

Hey good morning, this Ewout. So, let me first tell you about the big picture perspective have on this business and then I will provide a little bit more color, so overarching we think we can grow a business that has margins mid 60% range, mid 60% by 14% revenue growth during the quarter, that's a very good development and that creates a lot of economic value, for our shareholders. I have specific reasons why there was a 190 base point decrease in margins for indices this quarter. The first reason is, the addition of True cost on average is driving the margin down but truly that's a good investment and a capability that will help future growth. And secondly, there are some foreign related expenses, we think about certain royalties we have to pay where there is a revenue element on the one hand but then an offset on the expense line with respect to the royalty. So that is also having a slight impact on margins. But taken altogether, we believe that this is a business that we are able to grow, and the future is still at that mid-60% margin level in a very healthy way. So certainly we expect to continue to do that and will invest intelligently also in future growth in the Indices business.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Manav Patnaik. You may ask your question.

Thank you. Good morning, gentlemen. First, I just want to thank you guys for the notable increase in disclosure, color and commentary, very help for us. My first question is I guess around in the Platts side and Doug you pointed out the LNG product and the growth there and then in the Platts sort of break outside we saw power and gas I think declined 1%. And my guess is LNG is a fast-growing area but there just maybe some other offset there. So just a broad question on could LNG be a material contributor to that business, drive some more growth there, any thoughts there would be appreciated.

Good morning, Manav. We look at the LNG business as one that's - which is really a long-term investment for us. I don't know if I could say that the contributions are going to be high over the next few quarters. I don't even know how long it will take to get there. But when it comes to development of a global market, this is one that we are investing in because we think it will become a significant global market. If you go back just about two years ago, the price of the BTU of LNG was $4 in Louisiana and $16 in Japan because there was no very unified markets through LNG but as the LNG terminals get built up around the world, cost for liquefaction and de-liquefaction and in particular with Korea, South Korea and Japan being the two largest importers over time, we really think this will develop into a global market and we would like to be on the ground floor. So right now we see it more as an investment market where we are buying the right kind of and building the right kind of capabilities to serve this market. And overtime it should get bigger and we hope it becomes one of our areas of growth.

Got it. And then just on the bank loan rating and I guess it's the one side decision that's hard for us to track. So I was hoping for some color in terms of how penetrated you think you are in that market and I know it's been lumpy in the past, if any help, and how do you think in the next - in a couple of quarters it would be?

Yeah, so on the first quarter call, we shared some specifics with you, and once again I don't - how appropriate I think they were, but in the U.S. four or five years ago, we were up about 34% in the first quarter we were around 93%. And then when you got to Europe three or four years ago, we were down around 40% and got around 70% somewhere in there, but I encourage you to go look at first quarter slide. We might share that plot again, I didn't feel like putting it in there every quarter, but at least give you a sense for the really the big share gain, not taking share away from a competitor, but just more and more bank loans are rated.

One of the things that I would also point out, it's not a Science what I am going to tell you, but it is a way that the bankers as well as issuers think about it. If you look at a combination of bank loan rate of high-yield bond proceeds and CLOs together, you will get a pretty good picture of what's happening in the high-yield markets because they are substitutes - somebody who couldn't go to the bond market, they could go to the bank loan market and they could also - the banks could securitize their loans and the CLOs. And when you look at those different volumes that's what - that's the way I look at the overall high-yield market, its different pieces. And clearly with the liquidity in the banking market in particularly in Europe and then in the United States with the access to the CLO markets for its banks and then there is a lot of investors who have also been interested in floating rate exposure as opposed to fixed rate exposure especially over the last few quarters. It's a combination of all of those factors that has driven such high activity in the bank loan rating market, and we do believe that we have a good penetration there and that we are one of the rating agencies that's a go-to rating agencies for that type of activity.

Got it. Thank you for the color.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Anjaneya Singh from Credit Suisse. You may ask your question.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. First, on margin performance and Market Intelligence, up nicely year-over-year, but flattish as we have been perhaps than previous year, so in light of the synergy capture opportunity that you folks have in that segment, can you talk about what's limiting the sequential margin expansion there and any update on how the removal of some of the redundant cost is progressing?

Yeah, good morning. This is Ewout. Overall, we believe that there is a lot of opportunity to further expand the margins in Market Intelligence. You have seen very healthy growth with respect to revenues. So that is one side of the story and we believe we were talking before about the active users of the platforms. Ultimately that will help to drive up the revenues of the desktop in the future. Secondly, we believe there's opportunities for efficiencies, we are still working on the SNL integration. We will get back to you with an update at yearend where we are with those synergies, but we have all the reason to believe that we will be able to hit the target with respect to synergies we put out to you at the point of the acquisition but also at the beginning of this year. And lastly, if I look at the overall year-over-year trailing 12 months margin improvement; I am looking at 420 basis points margin improvement year-over-year. So we think that is a clear indication that we are on the right track. Again, growing the top line harder and higher than the expense line in the future, we will continue to derive the margins up.

Okay, got it. And as a follow-up I was wondering if you can share any updates on Project Simplify as you folks are moving to more of deploying pilots. Are you seeing any tangible improvements, just trying to get a sense of whether the initiatives are starting to bear fruit on the efficiencies or it's still little early to see the main results.

What I would say is that it's two answers. The first answer when it comes to progress on getting the Project Simplify and pilots were making excellent progress with rolling it out across different practices and at some point, where we are going to be moving into the largest practices, where we are going to be rolling ourselves. So up until now, the philosophy is simplification and standardization of building an embedded control and thinking about an end to end data collection all the way to the publishing process has been really good work and the overall design progress, the piloting progress and how it is moving has been quite good. When it comes to the thing on the financial impact on it, it's starting to leak in, it's not a big driver of expense right now, but over time it's something that we will start becoming more significant, but as of now it has not been an important driver of expenses going down.

Okay, got it. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jeffrey Silber from BMO Capital Markets. You may ask your question.

Thanks so much. I get one question that investors ask a lot, I want to paraphrase that. Hopefully you could help us out. So keeping focus on margins again but that seems to be the same today. Specifically, looking at your Ratings business, you said your long-term goal is in the low 50%, you are already taking over 53% year-to-date. Now you mentioned margin expansion continues based on revenue growth, you got some really strong revenue growth this year. I mean if we kind of go back to a normalized environment, do you think it's possible that margins could actually go down if you continue expanding in the Ratings business. Again long term I know where you are heading but maybe next year, would it be possible to take a step back before taking a step forward?

Jeff this is Doug, that's essentially a bit of a theoretical question, but the mid-50s or the low 50s is a medium-term goal, not necessarily a long-term goal. Clearly, there are flows of issuance that we benefit from sometimes when there is higher flows we are going to benefit from as the part of our revenue stream which is the transaction based revenue and from the point of the view of - if there is a quarter that doesn't do very well and you have heard me say this many times before that we could easily see a quarter or two or even more where there is weak issuance and our top line is not as strong as it has been and the mathematical calculation of that could lead to a lower margin. So theoretically to your question you could feel lower margin but when it comes to how we manage our expenses and how we are managing our business overall, we are very conscious of improving our performance, improving our margins. But theoretically from your question, there could be some quarters that the top line growth is very meek, and it could hit our margin.

Okay, I appreciate the answer. Thanks so much.

So let me build on Doug's answer. The other side there is we are staying very tight and disciplined with expenses. So particularly in this period with revenues going up, we don't want the expense line to go up too much. As you have seen, we have even announced a restructuring in Ratings at this point in time. So the benefit of that is when there will be some headwinds at some point in the future that we have an expense base that can withstand that in a healthy way. So certainly at that particular point that on the expense side, we continue to be very disciplined, and that should help in a theoretical scenario as you described.

Okay, thanks so much.

Thanks, Jeff.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Bill Warmington from Wells Fargo. You may ask your question.

Good morning everyone. So a clarification question on some comments that Ewout had made on the Market Intelligence piece. When you mentioned that about a third of Cap IQ base had now converted over to the enterprise wide contract, I just wanted to understand that, is that specifically just an enterprise pricing model, or is that enterprise pricing model including the combined SNL as well. And part what I'm curious about is what percentage of the Cap IQ clients who are offered that option have taken it?

So make sure we are clear, make sure - the products have not been combined yet just the commercial agreement, okay. All the SNL clients were already on enterprise-wide. So they were already there.

Right.

So as we then work through our Cap IQ customers, some of whom are also SNL customers and some of whom are not. That's what we were referring to at the third that we have made it so far. It's not really a question of acceptance or are there choice because in the future there will only be one commercial offering, one product, a combined product. So we have to get to one commercial offering. It's really in our choice in the future, so it's working our way through it. I am not sure. Does that answer your question, Bill?

Yes it does. Thank you, Chip. And then one of the question on the Ratings side, just wanted to ask, how much of a factor has first time issuers been in the strength that you have been saying? I don't know how much of that applies to the bank loan issuance in terms of the issuers versus the guys who were refinancing over the past nine months, but I wanted to ask that question.

I think where you see it, I don't have the numbers at my fingertips but there is one way you can see it occurs in a proxy is to go back to our slides and look at the part of our Ratings, which is what was transaction revenue versus what was, let me just find that slide if I could. Yes, so if you look at on slide 26 of our slides, the non-transaction revenue increased 7% and that is driven partially by the new issuers that come on that pay us for entity rating. So that would be the one area I would say that you could look at for proxy. Otherwise I think it would be better if Chip call it up a bit later with some more specific data on that question.

Got it. Thank you for the insight.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Craig Huber from Huber Research. You may ask your question.

Yes good morning. I have two questions. First one, can you just talk a little bit further maybe seeing assumptions behind the comment early on Doug about global debt issuance up 1% or so in 2018. What is sort of the thought there behind where credit spreads be in that scenario, the yield curve, how much of that might go up over time, what's your expectation behind that GDP? Does that pick up significantly from here? Obviously, there is a huge refinancing walls during the next two years, and how do you sort of get to that 1% and that was the first question. Thank you.

Okay, yes. So thanks for that. First of all, this is something that our fixed income research team in Ratings, they do this report few times a year. And the basis of this report is a combination of analysis of what is the refinancing pipeline. So what we are seeing in terms of maturities that are coming through and all of the different bond markets in the world. It's also a combination of looking at what's the expectations are for growth in the world. And there is one big wild card this year which is something I mentioned in prepared remarks about monetary policy and what kind of impact that could have. So just in terms of couple of the key components, first of all when it comes to issuance forecast in 2018 overall, it's for about a - basically flat, let's call it overall flat even though it might be around you know about 1%, but generally speaking it's flat. It's a combination of looking at financial services issuance, which is going to be up about 5%, structured finance up about 5%, U.S. public finance down about 7% and then overall globally corporate should be down a little bit based off of the maturity profile that's out there. And as a result of that, you see that the overall forecast is as I said flat up maybe you know about 1% to 2%. When it comes to GDP growth rate, our team is forecasting GDP growth rate next year on the global scale about 3.6% with the U.S. in the lows two's around 2.2%, 2.3%. We are also expecting that there will be three 25 basis point interest rate increases in the U.S. as the U.S. Fed Reserve starts to normalize monetary policy further and that's also something which is going to play in the market. We don't necessarily think that there is going to be an increase in December but those three will most likely be next year. And that in Europe, there might be a slowdown or a potential paper of the purchase of bonds in the European market. So again these are all of the different factors that we look at maturities, we look at what's happening with overall with the interest rate, the base rate interest rates in the global market's expected growth. And the growth in the global economy is actually pretty good right now. There is only six countries around the world including Venezuela, they are not growing. And it's been a long time we have seen sequential coordinated growth across the entire global economy especially after coming out of financial crisis. So all of those generally give us a pretty positive, or benign to positive environment, and we look at that when we are preparing this forecast.

Thank you for that. Another question, Doug, I think you mentioned earlier on that third quarter global issuance I guess the rate I believe was down 7%, your revenues, your transactional revenues were up 24%. Can you just talk a little bit further about the mixed issues while you outperform that revenue side soft handedly please?

Yes, so first one we talked about and we were very specific about this quarter was the bank loan ratings and that's something when we talk about issuance we are including the bank loan rating market. That's - when we talk about issuance we are talking about fixed income instruments that are issued by governments, by financial institutions, by corporates, by municipal et cetera. And so the first really one of the important elements was the growth in bank loan rating. The second is in terms of the mix. When sovereign is an example was down about 11% but we don't get a lot of income from sovereign. It's not an area that drives a lot of our income growth. In addition, there is industrial side in the U.S. the corporate issuance was up 6.5% and that for us is one of the key drivers. The corporates are those that go-to market, they pay us the ongoing issuer fees as well as how they are going to the market. There is also an addition, maybe the commercial paper market was strong in the last quarter with a lot of issuance there that maybe again hasn't really picked up. But think about for us the industrial corporate markets in U.S. were up 6.5%, financial services up 9% and despite the downturn in Europe in corporates and financial services, those were offset by the U.S. issuance. And then secondarily, CMBS and CLOs were up in both markets, in the Europe and the U.S. So it's been about the components, corporate issuance, financial institutional issuance and the world's largest capital markets in the U.S. and then structured finance issuance in Europe and the U.S. both in CMBS and CLOs, both of those up. Those are the components that drove the increase despite the total market being down.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you. We will now take our final question from James Friedman from Susquehanna Financial Group. You may ask your question.

Well thank you for taking me in here, I think most of my questions were answered, but I did want to follow-up about that slide 9 Doug about the banner year for bank loans. I knew you had a lot of questions about it, but you guys have been consistent when this is a theme since the first quarter. I guess my question is, it's a little bit difficult parse what is your gain in market share versus say the cyclical versus may be importantly the structural growth in this end market. I was wondering if you could help parse that between Europe and the U.S. we are trying to evaluate how sustainable this is and clearly you made a lot of progress since 2010 on the slide, but we are trying to anticipate how this is going to look going forward. Thank you.

First of all thank you for the question. If you look at the instead of slide 9, if you look at slide 10, this gives you a view of what are the majorities over this following years and next 10 years at the end of each of these periods and that I think is the way to look at what is the potential growth of this market. I am not going to say that you can never predict what's going to happen in the future, but this just gives you a view of in 2011 when I joined the company, I could see from having worked in a bank setup, the bank loan market was going to actually expand and we put a major focus on this in 2011 when I joined the ratings business, because I knew from coming from the banking world, but this is going to be a major focus of the banks given the kind of capital allocation and risk capital approaches that were being imposed from the regulators. And so we have seen now that over the last seven or eight years we have seen a 11 % triggered growth in that what you consider to be the majority if are going to call that the next 8 years were the majorities. The mix of this - this is the U.S. leveraged loan market on this slide. So this doesn't give you the European piece of that, but the European piece of this we look at that as the markets get more sophisticated and as the bank loan market gets more sophisticated that benefits us with the CLO markets as well as bank loan rating. But also as those many of those bank loan ratings turn into issuance they move from a bank loan into a bond issue that also benefits us as well. And remember one of thing typically the leveraged loan market are double the plus or lower rated issuers which is the non-investment grade or the speculate type of issuance which is also one where we typically get a better type of the fee profile in the investment grade. So we look at this overall as it is really important area for us to stay close to, to watch the evolution in the mix between the different types of markets, loan markets, CLOs and non-investment grade its I think it's all kind of wrapped up into one broader type of non-investment grade market. And we think that one of the really good stories for last few years has been the leveraged loan market.

And I think what we will do in the fourth quarter is resurrect that first quarter slide that shows the market shares that several of you have asked about that, so we will resurrect that chart in our fourth quarter. And you can get sense for that. The one thing I want to add is the underlying reason why these things are rated okay, if a bank were to keep the loan on books related to the loan they wouldn't need to get it rated. But if they want the flexibility they get that loan off of their books maybe wrap it up a CLO or sell it off. Then having a rating is very, very beneficial to them. So I think this to understand the logic behind why it occurs as [ph] that will occur in the future.

Thank you.

Okay, James, any more question from you?

Oh, no. that's it for me. Thank you very much.

Great, thank you. Well, let me close the call by thanking everyone for being on the call today. I think that consistent overall was how we have been doing this year. We delivered another very strong quarter and as you have heard throughout from our commentary as well as the questions and answers we are committed to continue to improve our margins. It's something that is important to us to have expense discipline, but at the same time also deliver high quality, highly valued relevant products to the markets. Whether it's things we have talked about over the years the strength we already have in industries and commodities and markets intelligence and ratings or at areas that we started growing in related to supply chain analytics in the energy industries whether it's the ESG products and climate and green evaluation areas where we also see a lot of relevance for us to create new standards as the markets continue to evolve. And we thank you very much again for all of your questions and we look forward to interacting with you as we approach the end of the year and we will be back on this call in about three months. Thank you very much.

That concludes this morning's call. A PDF version of the presented slides is available now for downloading from investor.spglobal.com. A replay of this call, including the Q&A 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 good day.