Moody's Corporation Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Good day, everyone, welcome to the Moody's Corporation Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded, and that all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the request of the company, we will open the conference up for question and answers following the presentation. This call is scheduled to last approximately one hour. I will now turn the call over to Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. Shivani, please go ahead. Thank you.

Hello, thank you for joining us today. I'm Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations at Moody's. This morning, we reported our second quarter results. The press release and today's presentations are posted at ir.moodys.com. We'll reference non-GAAP or adjusted measures. Please see the tables in our earnings release for reconciliations to U.S. GAAP. Today's remarks may include forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Please see the safe harbor language in our earnings release and the risk factors in MD&A in our most recent Form 10-K and other SEC filings available on our website and the SEC's website. These factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Members of the media may be listening in a listen-only basis. With that, I'll turn it over to Rob.

Thanks, Shivani, hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. I have the dreaded summer cold, so pardon if my voice sounds a little bit gravelly today, but today's earnings are certainly making me feel much better. One quick update before we get to the results. In late June, we welcomed Christina Kosmowski as CEO of Moody's Analytics, Christina brings three decades of experience scaling technology and analytics businesses. I have to tell you, just five weeks in, she's already moving with the pace and focus that MA's next chapter demands. We're thrilled to have her, and I look forward to all of you connecting with her soon. Turning to our results, Moody's delivered a standout second quarter with strong performance across the board. At the enterprise level, we achieved 15% revenue growth.

We grew adjusted operating income by 25%, expanded adjusted operating margin by 440 basis points to 55.3%, and we grew adjusted diluted EPS by 31% to $4.68. That's a great progression from the top line to the bottom line. I think what's most encouraging is not just the strength of the quarter, but how broad-based it was. In Moody's Investor Service, transaction revenue grew 34%, and we rated more than $2 trillion of debt for the second consecutive quarter. That reflects both the rebound in market activity as well as the enduring value of Moody's ratings in large, complex financing markets like we've got right now. MIS also delivered adjusted operating margin of 68.3%. That was up 410 basis points from last year. Moody's Analytics also continued to perform very well. ARR reached approximately $3.7 billion.

That was up nearly 9% from the prior year, with trailing 12-month retention remaining strong at 95%. MA also expanded adjusted operating margin, in this case by 150 basis points to 33.6%. These results reflect the continuing demand for our decision-grade intelligence to help customers manage risk, to improve productivity, and to make better decisions. Taken together, I really think this was a quarter that demonstrated the power of the Moody's model, a franchise that's capable of capitalizing on strong issuance activity, durable recurring revenue growth in analytics, and disciplined execution across the company. Now we're raising select full-year 2026 guidance metrics, including our rated issuance expectations and capital return guidance. By narrowing our adjusted diluted EPS range, we're increasing the midpoint of our range to $16.75. I know we'll talk about this more in the Q&A.

More broadly, we continue to believe that the trends shaping our business reinforce our long-term opportunity. Capital markets are evolving, risks are becoming more interconnected, and AI is transforming workflows across industries. In that environment, customers are increasingly turning to Moody's intelligence, our ratings, analytics, and insights to make consequential decisions with greater confidence, and that's creating meaningful opportunities across our business, which we're translating into powerful operating leverage and earning strength. Now let me turn to Moody's Investor Service. This past quarter, Ratings delivered 25% revenue growth with broad-based strength across all asset classes. Global issuance was powered by the multiple funding deep currents that we've been highlighting over the last few years. Reflecting this, we upgraded our issuance growth outlook to mid-single digit percent growth for the full year.

This quarter really showcased a real breadth of funding drivers that included refinancing, AI-related investment, private credit, digital finance, energy transition, and emerging markets. Our comprehensive global coverage and our very deep targeted sector expertise really allowed us to capitalize on these drivers. I want to give you a few examples from the quarter to really bring this to life for you. Starting with AI and data center financing, obviously that's a topic that's dominating the headlines. It is only one of several powerful drivers that's supporting issuance growth. Beacon Point DC is a very good example of the large data center transactions that we're rating across the U.S. That was a roughly $4 billion financing for a 350-megawatt hyperscale campus developed by Hut 8.

I think more importantly, it illustrates how AI is becoming one of the largest capital formation stories in the global economy. It's creating financing needs that extend well beyond data centers into power and infrastructure and other sectors, and supporting what we believe is a sustained pipeline of issuance activity. In fact, hyperscalers have already exceeded our 2026 forecast for issuance and issued more debt this year than in the last three years combined. The opportunity extends well beyond hyperscalers to construction, power, hardware, chips, and the broader infrastructure required to support AI at scale. Hyperscaler CapEx alone is expected to approach $800 billion in 2026 and grow meaningfully again in 2027. Even excluding AI data center and hyperscaler activity, issuance still grew double digits year to date.

In the second quarter of the issuances over $5 billion, approximately 20% were tied to AI-related investment in supporting infrastructure. That means that the other 80% was very well diversified across a range of sectors. Private credit is another important tailwind, with more than 40% growth in private credit-related transactions, including structured finance mandates versus the second quarter of last year, and more than 110 new first-time mandates this quarter as investors and issuers demand more analytical rigor, transparency, and independent insight. In digital finance, our leadership and trust earned Moody's Ratings the distinction as Best Digital Asset Ratings and Analytics Provider this quarter. We're the first rating agency to deliver ratings on-chain, and now we extended our token integration engine to Solana through Alphaledger, embedding our ratings directly into tokenized fixed income assets on a leading public blockchain. We've been building on our Canton deployment.

This reinforces our network-agnostic design, bringing our independent credit insights to where the markets transact. We've rated double-digit digital issuances globally this year. While it is early, we're encouraged by the green shoots as we have more transactions in the pipeline than we have rated year to date. We also recently rated BlackRock's tokenized money market fund. That's the world's largest at $2.6 billion market cap, and it's a cornerstone of the tokenized liquidity stack as a stablecoin reserve and on-chain cash entry point. We're also a critical rating partner to innovative transactions in the emerging markets. This quarter, we rated a second emerging market CLO from the International Finance Corporation. That's similar to the one that we called out on our third quarter 2025 call. We were again, the sole agency on this unique transaction, which securitized corporate loans to borrowers in emerging markets.

It's helping the IFC and other multilateral development banks broaden access to institutional capital and mobilize more private sector investment. I'm also happy to share that we marked our re-entry into the insurance-linked securities market in the second quarter, and we served as both credit rating agency and modeling agent on a EUR 100 million flood risk cat bond in the quarter. This really, I think, exemplifies our One Moody's strategy in action, combining ratings and catastrophe modeling expertise to play a critical role in addressing the insurance protection gap, which we recently estimated at $375 billion, and by some estimates, could be as high as a trillion dollars. Like the other areas that I spotlighted, we are building pipeline here as well.

In Africa, where we own the largest rating agency on the continent, we were pleased to celebrate 30 years in the region this quarter. A shout-out to all of our colleagues there who are playing an important role in Africa, developing the growing debt capital markets. Taken together, these examples really reinforce, I think, the same point, which is Moody's plays a critical role in global capital formation, and we continue to be exceptionally well-positioned to monetize the massive funding deep currents around the world. Turning to Analytics. ARR grew nearly 9%, reflecting strong second quarter execution, and we're maintaining our high single-digit ARR growth outlook for the year. We're embedding trusted decision-grade intelligence directly into high-stakes customer workflows. That's lending, underwriting, compliance, and more. That's really our sweet spot, at the intersection of speed and trust and explainability and auditability.

During the second quarter, we made further progress in broadening how customers access Moody's intelligence and how deeply it's woven into their mission-critical day-to-day workflows. With Amazon, we brought Moody's Connected Intelligence directly into Amazon QuickSight, giving AWS customers access to our ratings and research and curated data on hundreds of millions of public and private entities without requiring users to leave Amazon's AI experience. This quarter, we announced our sunset timeline for our on-prem modeling solutions and insurance, which means we plan for our remaining customers to migrate to our cloud-based Intelligent Risk Platform over the next several years. To further support this migration, we partnered with AWS to add the IRP to our AWS Marketplace catalog, and that enables our migrating customers to count their IRP spend towards their AWS cloud commit.

With Microsoft, we launched our first AI skill on Microsoft 365 Copilot, and that enables agents to apply Moody's analytical frameworks and subject matter expertise, not just retrieve content. Joint go-to-market activity is building momentum with more than 20 engagements globally and initial customer trials underway. We now also have more than 100 MCP and Smart API connections being used and trialed by our customers, which is an encouraging signal of demand for our trusted intelligence delivered through AI platforms. Together, these integrations let customers spend less time questioning output and more time acting on it while giving the industry the intelligence infrastructure to accelerate enterprise adoption. Our massive company data estate now covers more than 630 million entities, and our proprietary ownership linkages remain one of the most heavily used data sets in KYC and across the company.

That data advantage is translating into growth in KYC and compliance use cases, helping customers reduce unnecessary screening alerts. To that end, our AI-powered screening solutions are helping drive an approximately 50% reduction in costly and time-consuming false positive alerts. Our customers are making high-stakes decisions that have little to no margin for error, which is why good enough data is not good enough for these kinds of use cases. A recent competitive win in EMEA shows our strategy at work, and we had a Fortune Global 500 home appliance maker where we displaced an established incumbent. It wasn't just with one point solution for credit decisioning, but we brought together our company data, our credit models, and our intelligence screening for broader third-party risk management.

Back in June, I attended Exceedance, which is our flagship insurance event, and it drew a record attendance of more than 600 leaders across the property and casualty insurance sector. We announced further enhancements to our cloud-based Intelligent Risk Platform, including our Risk Data Lake, more high-definition models, and new agentic AI capabilities, plus the extension of our casualty solutions. I've got to say, I came away feeling very encouraged by our position and opportunity with the global insurance industry. I want to share a few recent proof points. First, our new capabilities enabled us to grow ARR by nearly 60% with a top three U.S. auto and property insurer. This win reflects strong demand for our geospatial AI integration into property underwriting and broader adoption across personal and business lines, along with continued volume growth.

This is a particularly important win because it's going to be a lighthouse customer that will support further expansion into the primary carrier market, where historically we've had less penetration. Second, we expanded our relationship with one of the top insurers and reinsurers in the Lloyd's of London market, and we deepened our penetration into their workflows, including data preparation, pricing, and regulatory reporting, enabling us to grow ARR by 12% off of a multimillion-dollar base. Third, in APAC, we more than doubled ARR with one of the world's largest life insurance and financial services groups. This insurer now uses our credit value at risk framework as part of their investment and risk decisioning. It's supported by our credit models and economic scenarios, and it's a great example of how we're helping leading insurers connect credit, macroeconomic, and portfolio risk intelligence across their institutions.

Now, turning to banking. I also recently joined more than 400 customers at our annual banking summit, and one message really came through clearly, and that's that banks are under pressure to make better decisions faster, but many remain constrained by fragmented data, disconnected systems, and increasingly complex risk environments. I think the conversations were really less about AI itself and more about how AI can actually deliver outcomes and improve lending and strengthen risk management and streamline compliance, and ultimately, as I hear from our banking customers all the time, help them operate more effectively and more efficiently. That's exactly where we're focused, and it continues to create some attractive opportunities across our banking franchise. Again, I want to give a couple examples from the quarter here.

First, with a top three Southeast Asian bank, we moved from proof of concept to production on an enterprise-grade, AI-enabled early warning solution spanning wholesale and commercial banking across 19 countries. What won the deal was governed explainable workflow orchestration, combining our proprietary data analytics and AI-driven narratives so that their bankers can spot and investigate counterparty risks earlier and with greater confidence. The result, 20% ARR growth with an already very important customer. Second, we expanded with a major regional bank in the Northwestern U.S., turning a two-bank merger integration into a meaningful growth opportunity. Through sustained executive engagement, we cleared implementation hurdles, replaced legacy tools, and helped the combined institution modernize credit risk assessment at scale. Rather than becoming a cost synergy, we became a growth partner, lifting ARR by 8% with a clear path to broader AI-enabled workflow adoption.

Some great examples from ratings and analytics from the quarter, all contributing to exceptional second quarter results and further positioning us to capitalize on the opportunities ahead. With that, Noémie, let me turn it over to you.

Thank you, Rob, and hello, everyone. Echoing Rob, our second quarter results reflect impressive execution against the durable demand drivers we've been highlighting. Let's dive into the numbers, starting with analytics. MA delivered a very strong quarter with healthy recurring growth, disciplined investment, and operating leverage. Over the past 2 years, adjusted operating margin has expanded by more than 500 basis points, while we have continued to invest in our highest priority growth opportunities. The story in MA is consistent. Recurring revenue is growing, transactional revenue is shrinking by design, and ARR and margin expansion remain the clearest indicators of underlying business performance. MA revenue increased 4% reported, or 8% on an organic constant currency basis, following our recent divestitures that closed in the second quarter and reflecting robust demand across the franchise.

Recurring revenue grew 7% as reported, or 9% on an organic constant currency basis, and now represents 99% of MA revenue. Transactional revenue declined 72% year-over-year to about $10 million, consistent with the deliberate portfolio repositioning we've discussed previously. ARR ended the quarter at nearly 9% year-over-year growth and remains on track for high single-digit growth for the full year. The quarter reflected strong sales execution with proactive contract renewals, robust cross-sell, and upsell activity across the portfolio, as well as new logo wins. Decision Solutions remains MA's primary growth engine, representing 44% of total MA ARR and delivering 10% ARR growth. Within Decision Solutions, KYC grew 13%, driven by deeper penetration within existing banking customers and expansion beyond financial services. A notable win this quarter was a new logo deployment of our investigation solution and company intelligence in a mission-critical government security application.

Banking ARR grew 10%, with lending an important contributor, delivering mid-teens growth again this quarter. Customers are migrating to our new Lending Suite packages, generating meaningful uplift on renewal. As customers consolidate multiple workflows onto a common platform, we believe this deepens our role in their day-to-day decisioning processes, creating additional opportunities, cross-sell, and long-term ARR growth. We anticipate the banking line of business exiting the year more aligned with the typical historical high single-digit ARR growth range. Insurance ARR grew 9%, supported by strong demand for catastrophic data models and underwriting solutions delivered through our Intelligent Risk Platform. A good example of that is a large specialty commercial insurer that has historically utilized on-premise modeling and is now piloting the IRP platform. What began as a modeling relationship has the potential to evolve into a broader platform deployment, illustrating how we create value in insurance.

One platform with integrated data, analytics, and workflows that increases customer value. With less than half of our insurance customers fully transitioned to the IRP, following sunset announcements at Exceedance, we see a clear runway for continued growth, although the trajectory may not be linear. Research and Insights ARR grew 6%, supported by demand for CreditView and early momentum for Moody's OneView launch in April. OneView goes beyond bringing together our data, research, and analytics. It now embeds Research Assistant as an agentic contextual chat available across every company page, giving customers deeper insight while working more efficiently. These migrations continue to generate attractive upsell opportunities while making it easier for customers to access a broader set of Moody's capabilities. Data and Information ARR grew 8% year-over-year, driven by continued demand for ratings data feeds and Orbis data in non-compliance workflows.

In the second quarter, we expanded a long-standing relationship with the German government, embedding Moody's data and AI-enabled capabilities into core tax administration workflows, audits, investigations, transfer pricing, and risk assessment. In governments, and particularly in EMEA, we're a source of double-digit growth within the Data and Information business. The same dynamic is also visible across our corporate customer base. The mega-cap e-commerce and technology company we first highlighted several quarters ago has more than doubled ARR since the end of 2024 and now is a more than eight-figure relationship. What began as a targeted credit decisioning use case has expanded into a broader workflow deployment powered by company data, credit models, and predictive risk analytics. This is a powerful illustration of the MA model. Establish a foothold in a high-value workflow, demonstrate measurable customer outcomes, and then expand as that workflow scales across business units, products, and geographies.

Across banking, insurance, government, and corporate markets, we're seeing a trend towards embedding Moody's into critical workflows rather than purchasing standalone products. Those relationships tend to be larger, stickier, and create greater opportunities for expansion over time, giving us confidence in both our AR growth outlook and continued margin progression. Turning to profitability, MA continued to deliver adjusted operating margin expansion and remains on track for full-year margin guidance of 34%-35%. As we simplify the portfolio and consolidate platforms, we're generating operating leverage while funding our top growth priorities, benefits that both build and support continued margin progression toward a mid to high 30s target by year-end 2027. Switching over to MIS. Rated issuance exceeded $2 trillion for the second consecutive quarter, up 33% year-over-year, 20% year-to-date.

Despite the geopolitical volatility, issuers remained focused on accessing capital with constructive credit conditions, strong investor demand, and continued financing needs across both corporate and structured markets. Importantly, Q2 results were not driven by a single market dynamic. There was broad-based participation across asset classes. The diversity of issuance activity reflects the multiple secular and cyclical funding drivers we've discussed over the past several years. Revenue growth outpaced issuance growth in several key areas, benefiting from favorable transaction mix and larger, more complex mandates. At the same time, recurring revenue grew 6% to $369 million, supported by our pricing initiatives, new mandates, and growth in monitored credit. First-time mandates increased by about 45% and are on pace for the 750-850 expected for the full year, reinforcing the health of our new business pipeline and supporting future recurring revenue growth.

Looking across the portfolio, corporate finance and PPIF benefited from a number of jumbo AI and infrastructure-related deals, while speculative grade and bank loan activity remained robust, with transaction revenue growth of 33% and 50% respectively. Structured finance and financial institutions rounded out the quarter with steady ABS, RMBS, and frequent issuer activity. Taken together, these results demonstrate the breadth of opportunity available to MIS and the value of our global franchise, sector expertise, and market position. On profitability, MIS delivered impressive adjusted operating margin expansion that underscores the substantial operating leverage embedded in the business. We absorbed significantly higher transaction volumes while maintaining analytical rigor and without commensurate cost increases, aided by ongoing technology investments and disciplined resource management. As we continue investing in the franchise, we believe we remain well positioned to convert revenue growth into attractive earnings growth over time.

We're raising our issuance outlook from low to mid-single-digit percent growth while maintaining our MIS revenue outlook. Markets proved resilient through the early April volatility, supported by AI-related financing, infrastructure investment, and FIG activity. Hyperscaler and large transactions drove strong issuance in the first half and are already reflected in results. Our increased issuance forecast is concentrated in PPIF and banking, driven by more data center activity in PPIF and frequent banking issuers in FIG. Because these issuers can carry lower average revenue yields given their pricing programs, the higher issuance outlook doesn't change our full-year revenue expectations. As previously communicated, we're maintaining both MIS revenue and MA ARR guidance in the high single-digit range. For MIS, we expect low double-digit revenue growth in Q3 as market activity slows through the summer, with Q4 revenue roughly flat versus prior year, consistent with normal seasonality.

We expect that MIS margin will follow a similar seasonal pattern. For MA, we continue to expect ARR growth in the high single-digit range and margin expansion remains on track. For modeling purposes, we expect our tax rate for the full year to be towards the high end of the guidance range of 23%-25%. On adjusted diluted EPS, we are raising the low end of the range by $0.10, bringing full-year guidance to $16.50-$17, or 12% growth at the midpoint. We are also expanding our restructuring program envelope by $100 million and extending this program through year-end 2027. When completed, the full program is expected to result in annualized savings of $300 million-$350 million.

This program extension expands our ongoing transformation agenda, driving further organizational health, capturing efficiencies from AI adoption across the enterprise, and creating additional capacity to reinvest in our highest return growth opportunities. Our capital priorities of the business are unchanged: fund growth, expand margins, and return excess cash to shareholders. Year-to-date, we have executed approximately $2.2 billion in share repurchases, we are raising our full-year share repurchase guidance to be up to $3 billion in 2026. Free cash flow was $688 million in the quarter, up 47% year-over-year. We're adjusting full-year free cash flow guidance by about $100 million to $2.7 billion-$2.9 billion, reflecting our latest working capital forecast and restructuring costs.

We are now on track to return more than 130% of free cash flow to shareholders this year, supported by proceeds from recent portfolio actions, while preserving balance sheet flexibility to continue investing in growth. The through line is consistent. We're converting revenue growth into margin expansion and durable cash generation while reinvesting with discipline in our people, AI, data, and workflow integration. With that, we'll be happy to take your questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. We will ask that you please limit yourself to one question. The option to rejoin the queue will not be available. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Manav Patnaik with Barclays. Manav, your line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good morning. I just wanted to understand the guidance, the assumptions in the second half, maybe some cadence commentary on third and fourth quarter. I think I understand the explanations of the mix, it feels like it's pretty conservative. Just trying to appreciate where you've drawn those lines.

Yeah. Thanks, Manav. I frame the second quarter as us catching up to where we always expected to be, just a bit sooner than we'd planned. If you remember and go back to our April guidance, we had assumed a meaningful portion of the, call it March air pocket, would get recovered in the third quarter against what was a tough year-ago comp. What actually happened is that recovery came through in the second quarter instead. A record June issuance pulled that activity forward. I guess I'd say at the halfway point of the year, we're sitting where our full-year plan always expected us to be. Now, what that means for our issuance guidance, we're raising our outlook from low single digit to mid single digit % range growth. We're holding revenue guidance at high single digit growth for the year.

The issuance upside, Manav, came with a bit of a mix that's a bit less rich than we'd expected. More of the growth is coming from data center, financial institution transactions, and these tend to carry lower average yields, given deal size, and a bit less from areas like insurance issuers or CLOs or CMBS, which are typically more revenue accretive per $ of issuance. The increase in volume doesn't translate one-on-one into incremental revenue. We're not raising the outlook. We continue to feel very good with where we are and what we told you at the beginning of the year in February. Q2 reflects the planned recovery in lending earlier than we expected. It does de-risk the second half a bit. We can talk about the puts and takes as well.

We're no longer leaning on an outside third quarter against what was a pretty difficult prior comp. We think that's a meaningfully better lower risk setup than what we were sitting three months ago, even though the headline full-year revenue guidance hasn't moved.

Yeah, I just want to double click on that, Manav, because like Noémie said, we talked about this in the April call, obviously we had some air pocket at the time, we decided not to move the guidance. We've caught a bunch of that up. We're right where we thought we were going to be for the year. I think last year was pretty instructive as well. If you think about what happened last year, we had Liberation Day in April. We really had a lost April. We did adjust guidance down, we brought it back up, we ended up finishing the year pretty much right on where we thought we were going to. I think that has also, Manav, informed us this year.

We're where we thought we were going to be halfway through the year, we're holding guidance.

Fair enough. Thank you. Yep.

Your next question comes from the line of Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets. Ashish, your line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks for taking my question.

I just wanted to follow up on the same question on issuance. Just wanted to better understand what would be, as you mentioned, the puts and takes going forward, what could provide upside. You obviously talked about some of the pulls forward into 2Q, but are you also assuming a more conservative approach, just given the geopolitical uncertainty? Then maybe on the same line, how do you think about these first-time mandates? You talked about that being up 45%. How could that provide upside also to the numbers? Thanks. Yeah, Ashish, thanks. I'm happy to talk about kind of puts and takes.

Obviously, there are some variables here. We're in a complex operating environment. There's a few things that I think could add to the upside. This would be tailwinds for us. If we see a kind of a sustained pickup in M&A activity, obviously that's going to be good. Obviously, Noémie talked about us moderating our assumptions for hyperscaler and data center issuance through the second half of the year, but if it runs hotter than what we've already built into our issuance guidance, then that's going to be some upside. We know that there is multi-year demand, and we're happy to kind of double-click on the hyperscaler stuff in a bit. If inflation remains under control and if we actually get a rate cut, that could trigger some incremental opportunistic refinancing.

We've got some very big maturity walls now sitting out, not just 2027, but really into 2028. Two things, Ashish, I do want to note here as I think possible tailwinds for us. One, we're watching high yield spreads, and our original assumption for the year was that they were going to widen modestly into the second half of the year. They're actually still very tight by historical averages. Our spec grade default rate outlook continues to decline. That tells me there may be some support for tighter spreads further into the year, which may provide greater support for leverage finance issuance than we've been forecasting. Right? We'll see. The other thing I want to flag, Ashish, is there's a seasonality angle here that I think many of you are very familiar with, and issuance is historically skewed to the first half of the year.

In fact, if you go back to the period from 2015 to 2025, roughly 55% of full-year issuance came in the first half, that would be 45% in the back half. This year, we expect that mix to be shifted more to the first half of the year, kind of in the high 50s. Again, because of the things that Noémie called out, particularly around the pull forward of the hyperscaler issuance and some of the frequent FIG issuance. If conditions hold, it's possible that we see a first half, second half split that looks more like that historical pattern, if so, that means that there would be some more upside for the second half. I'd be remiss if I don't acknowledge maybe a few of the risks that we're focused on.

Obviously, headline risk, it still exists out there, that can trigger some risk-off windows. We saw that actually at the beginning of July in the high-yield market. We're just keeping an eye on that as well as any, I think, extended disruption to global energy flows that may put more pressure on inflation expectations and potentially lead companies to defer M&A. Then, I think Noémie also kind of noted the second half of 2025 is also a tough comp. It was a very robust second half of the year last year, that's also informing the guide. Net-net, I think we have a very constructive environment heading into the second half of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan with Morgan Stanley. Toni, your line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks so much.

I was wondering if you could talk about how much of an uplift you're seeing from MCP adoption right now, how we should think about it as we go forward. Should this continue to be a positive driver as more companies adopt MCP, or will lapping sort of the initial uptake of it create tough comps for you? Everyone who maybe will have already wanted it will have adopted it. How should we think about the dynamics there going forward? Thanks. Thanks for the question, Toni.

As you heard from our prepared remarks, we've got some very good traction with customers both buying and trialing our intelligence through MCPs and Smart APIs. We've also got, I think, an encouraging mix. Some of the very big banks are accounting for some of their early paid customers for all of this. That is encouraging. I would say there's kind of five so far, or it's early, but five primary content sets that are driving a lot of the demand. We've got the AI-ready research, entity data, news, economic data, and our credit models. As you said, we're seeing a real willingness to pay for this.

I would say that going forward, I think you're going to see us increasingly focused on what I'm going to call agentic assembly and delivery of our Connected Intelligence, where we've got the opportunity to be more integral to customer workflows than just through MCPs and Smart APIs. That's something that Christina is focused on. I think the bottom line is, Toni, good momentum. We've got good runway, we have good pipeline, and I think there's an opportunity to go from the early adoption of MCPs and Smart APIs for our content to this idea of Connected Intelligence, agentic Connected Intelligence, I think that's a very interesting opportunity for us that's got some legs.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Meuler with Baird.

Jeff, your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you.

Good morning. Rob, could you just kind of talk through how you're thinking about the deep currents on a multi-year basis, especially the private credit activity monetization build for you, as well as the broader infrastructure build-out? Just how do you think they build on a multi-year basis? I mean, just what risks are you monitoring and managing too on those deep currents? Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for the question.

I was trying to think about when we first started talking about these funding deep currents on the horizon. It was at least a couple of years ago. We're really seeing that. Obviously, we've got this, I'd say, relatively new deep current with all of the AI infrastructure. As we talked about, there's a lot more than that. If you just step back and think about what's going on in the world, there are massive infrastructure financing needs. This isn't just data centers and everything related to it, but it's also related to good old-fashioned infrastructure. BlackRock had a number that was something like 68 trillion of infrastructure funding by 2040. The real, I think, challenge around the world is that governments don't have a lot of fiscal space.

That means that you've got to have the public and private markets playing a very important role in funding all of this. If you think about it, I'd say traditional infrastructure, a major theme, AI-driven infrastructure, energy transition, let's not forget about that, military buildups around the world, then, of course, private credit is a funding mechanism for a lot of this, and there are drivers for private credit. I would say, first of all, private credit is pushing into retailization, right? I think as private credit pushes into retail markets, that's going to drive a need for greater transparency, a common language for risk assessment, valuation consistency. You've got the NAIC engaged in some regulatory modernization and overhauling its investment framework to address this shift towards complex structured private assets that insurance companies are investing in.

I think there's some good tailwinds behind private credit. I would also say that private credit went through a little bit of a correction these last few months. I think that's been a good thing for the private credit market. Investors became a little bit more circumspect. That probably tightened up underwriting and some of the structures, and I think ultimately that is good for the sustainability of private credit growth trends.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Jeff, your line is open. Please go ahead. Thanks so much.

Wanted to go back to MIS. You mentioned a couple of times about the lower yield on some of the data center financing and the related financing. Is that because it's moving more towards frequent issuers, or are there different fee structures? If you can give us a little color on that will be great.

Yeah, Jeff, thanks for the question. I would say, this stuff comes into the rating agency in all different ways. It comes in through corporate finance. We see it through the big hyperscaler issuance. Those hyperscalers, as you can understand, have become very frequent issuers. It comes through our project and infrastructure finance area. It comes through, in some cases, structured finance and CMBS. It depends kind of who the issuers are, the complexity of the structure. When we see big frequent issuers doing big investment-grade bond deals, like with any other investment-grade frequent issuer, that tends to be revenue mix unfriendly. When we see complex structures, sometimes in project finance and in CMBS, that tends to be revenue mix friendly.

We also have a rating assessment service, and sometimes the issuers in project and infrastructure finance will come to us to get a view on their proposed capital structure, and that presents a few different monetization opportunities for us for any given particular issuance. That tends to be revenue mix friendly.

Your next question comes from the line of Curtis Nagle with Bank of America. Curtis, your line is open. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks so much.

Maybe just turning to MA for a bit, thinking about the organic growth, nice number in 2Q at 8%. I guess for the kind of the remainder of the year and thinking about the sequencing, is that a sustainable rate? Could we perhaps see an acceleration on the product roadmap case picking up or easier comps? How should we think through that?

Yeah. Rounding up to nine, Curtis, for the quarter. Obviously we feel good about the momentum there. I want to caution a little bit against extrapolating that acceleration going forward. We didn't change our guidance. We continue to call for high single-digit ARR growth. I think it's worth remembering that analytics sales have always really been more heavily weighted to the back half of the year, particularly the fourth quarter, that's just given the rhythm of enterprise budgeting and renewal cycles, this year is no different, and we're building a real pipeline of opportunities going into the end of the year. Obviously, time will tell. I also would note that we have a new leader of MA, she's been in the seat five weeks, and she's doing exactly what you'd want her to do.

Taking a very close look at our go-to-market execution and sales productivity and where we can sharpen the model further. I would say there are some things that are supporting this growth. Just at a very high level, you've heard us talk about lending. That's a great growth story, and we've got the migration from CreditLens into our new AI-enabled Lending Suite. That's a theme I think we're going to see throughout the year. In insurance, you heard my enthusiasm about what we're doing around insurance, and it's not just around the further migration of our customers from on-prem into our cloud-based IRP. That's a great monetization pathway for us. Lots of new high-definition models sitting on that platform that customers are now consuming. Also our extension really into casualty, and that market has been underserved historically. We've gotten a lot of interest from the casualty market.

We just recently formed a casualty steering group with the biggest players in casualty insurance. I think I feel good about the product roadmap there. Of course, we've got two other things I'd say that are supporting growth. One is around our solution for KYC customer onboarding and monitoring, and compliance that we're rolling out to corporate customers. That's for customers who need kind of a less heavy-duty solution than financial institutions, and we've got some interesting sales that we've spotlighted in the past and a good pipeline. We've got the migration of customers from our CreditView to our CreditView research platform to our Moody's OneView platform. This is the ability to consume, Noémie mentioned it, consume a lot more of our content in one place enabled by AI and agentic capability.

All of that together is supporting kind of the growth theme that you're seeing across MA.

Your next question comes from the line of Surinder Thind with Jefferies. Surinder, your line is open. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Just following up on M&A, just any color on maybe some of the key initiatives that Christina might be looking to pursue at this point? I think you mentioned go-to-market execution and sales productivity, but also any revisiting of the tech stack or anything like that, and then maybe what that would potentially mean for would we be entering a period of accelerated investment or anything like that?

Hey, Surinder. Welcome to the call. I hope you gathered from my opening remarks that we are very excited about Christina joining us and the experience and perspective that she brings to us. As I said, she's got 3 decades of scaling technology and analytics businesses out of Silicon Valley. That is exactly the experience set that we need at this moment in time. She is thinking differently about the business. For those of you that have heard me at these investor meetings over the last 1 year or 2, this is going to sound familiar. She's focused on how do we think about simplifying our offerings and reducing the selling friction across cross-sell and up-sell, sharpening our go-to-market motions, including how we price and package our Agentic solution. She's got a lot of experience with that's fantastic.

I would say her early priorities line up with, again, our own thinking, that's going to start with strengthening our data layer, which really serves as the foundation for Connected Intelligence. Accelerating the build of our intelligence layer for Agentic integration, ultimately enabling us to uplevel our solution suite. The other thing I'd say is she's just, I think, very focused. Again, early days. This is her fifth week, but focused on organizational clarity and making sure that MA structure and operating model can move at the speed that this AI-first moment demands. Very excited about what she brings to the table.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas with William Blair.

Andrew, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning.

Thanks for squeezing me in. I had a little bit of a bigger picture question here. Last week or so, we've seen some lower-cost frontier models emerge, and with that kind of pointing to the potential for a significant decline in token costs going forward, I'm curious how you're thinking about the second-order impacts on Moody's. Does it impact your expectations for client usage, your own internal efficiency efforts, and maybe relatedly, does a lower-cost model environment change the competitive dynamics or disruption risk at all in your view? Thank you. Maybe I'll take a crack at this first, I'll let Rob chime in.

I think first on token cost, our internal AI and token cost today is actively governed. We have a variety of tools that we put at the disposals of our engineers, our back office teams. We have very strict monitoring and training to ensure they're using the best tools for the task at hand. I'm pretty proud of what we've implemented. If I listen to some of my peers and all the different noise around token cost explosion, we're not in that fact pattern at all here. When it comes to the lower costs and frontier models, I think it's still early to tell, I would tend to view this as a tailwind. Cheaper tokens ultimately would expand usage more than they would compress price, I think.

The customers would move towards increased usage of AI, which I think we're well-positioned to benefit from. The other thing I would want to say, though, is if you look at our customers and where we deploy AI-enabled solutions today, what the use cases they're leveraging AI for in terms of gaining productivity, gaining efficiency, getting more effective at performing the controls, especially in banking and very heavily regulated environment, I think they want to partner with us and make sure we have the right controls around our models and using the proven market leader model. We're not there in deploying, experimenting, so to speak. We're using well-established providers. Yeah, I might also add, again, this is all evolving very quickly, right?

If we see a lowering of token costs, I think we look around, there's a lot of AI native companies, but there's a lot of companies that have basically just built an AI wrapper using somebody else's model.

I do wonder how sustainable all of that is. That goes back to, look, if token costs come down and they come down for everybody, for the AI natives, they're going to come down for us as well, and it's going to enable us to be able to build and innovate faster and more cheaply. We're going to keep capitalizing and reinforcing our source of competitive advantage, and that's this decision-grade intelligence. We aren't just an AI wrapper using somebody else's model. We have an intelligent system that is integral to financial markets. I think that's something we're going to keep doubling down on that advantage.

We have reached the end of the Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Rob for closing remarks.

All right. Thanks, everybody. Great quarter, constructive environment, good momentum. Let's go, and talk to you next quarter.

This concludes Moody's Corporation second quarter 2026 earnings call. As a reminder, immediately following this call, the company will post the MIS revenue breakdown under the investor resources section of the Moody's IR homepage. Additionally, a replay will be made available after the call on Moody's IR website. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending.