Participants

Shivani Kak; Head of Investor Relations; Moody's Corp

Robert Fauber; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Moody's Corp

Noemie Heuland; Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President; Moody's Corp

Stephen Tulenko; President - Moody’s Analytics; Moody's Corp

Michael West; President - Moody’s Investors Service; Moody's Corp

Manav Patnaik; Analyst; Barclays

Ashish Sabadra; Analyst; RBC Capital Markets

Toni Kaplan; Analyst; Morgan Stanley

Alex Kramm; Analyst; UBS

Scott Wurtzel; Analyst; Wolfe Research LLC

Owen Lau; Analyst; Oppenheimer & Co Inc

Jeffrey Silber; Analyst; BMO Capital Markets

David Motemaden; Analyst; Evercore ISI

George Tong; Analyst; The Goldman Sachs Group Inc

Peter Christiansen; Analyst; Citigroup

Craig Huber; Analyst; Huber Research Partners

Jeff Meuler; Analyst; Robert W. Baird & Co

Andrew Steinerman; Analyst; JPMorgan Chase & Co

Russell Quelch; Analyst; Redburn Atlantic

Shlomo Rosenbaum; Analyst; Stifel Financial Corp

Jason Haas; Analyst; Wells Fargo & Company

Presentation

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Moody's Corporation fourth quarter and full-year 2024 earnings call. At this time, I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions)
I will now turn the call over to Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Shivani Kak

Thank you. Good morning and thank you for joining us today. I'm Shivani Kak, Head of Investor Relations. This morning, Moody's released its results for the fourth-quarter 2024 as well as our outlook for select metrics for full year 2025 and updates to our medium-term guidance. The earnings press release and the presentation to accompany this teleconference are both available on our website at ir.moodys.com.
During this call, we will also be presenting non-GAAP or adjusted figures. Please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings press release filed this morning for reconciliations between all adjusted measures referenced during this call in US GAAP. I call your attention to the Safe Harbor language, which can be found towards the end of our earnings release. Today's remarks may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
In accordance with the act, I also direct your attention to the Management's Discussion and Analysis section and the risk factors discussed in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023 and in other SEC filings made by the company, which are available on our website and on the SEC's website. These, together with the Safe Harbor statement, set forth important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any such forward-looking statements. I would also like to point out that members of the media may be on the call this morning in a listen-only mode.
I'll now turn the call over to Rob.

Robert Fauber

Thanks, Shivani, and thanks very much, everybody, for joining today's call. After our prepared remarks, Steve Tulenko, the President of Moody's Analytics; and Mike West, President of Moody's Investor Service, are going to join Noemie and me for the Q&A portion the call. And that's something that we've done for a few years now.
Before I get into our results, I just want to acknowledge that it has been a difficult few weeks for many members of our team following the tragic loss of our dear friends and Moody's colleagues, Chris Collins and Melissa Nicandri in the Washington, DC plane crash. They really were cherished members of our team, and their loss leaves an immeasurable void. And our thoughts are with their families during this incredibly difficult time.
Now onto our results, Moody's delivered a record year in 2024. We grew revenue by 20% to over $7 billion, with strong growth across both businesses. And through disciplined cost management, we expanded our adjusted operating margin by over 400 basis points. And that translated into a 26% adjusted diluted EPS growth, all while executing on strategic investments across both of our businesses.
So MIS finished the year on a real high note, 18% total revenue growth powered by 29% transactional revenue growth in the fourth quarter. And our rating standings were really active, and it wasn't just in the fourth quarter, but throughout the year, delivering 33% revenue growth for ratings and over 500 basis points of adjusted operating margin expansion for the full year.
Moody's Analytics also had a strong finish to the year with 10% recurring revenue growth in the fourth quarter and 9% ARR growth. Decision Solutions continued to lead the way was $1.4 billion in ARR, growing at 12%. And as we look to the future, we're continuing to invest to deliver market-leading growth and attractive shareholder returns, and there are some very powerful deep currents that are driving demand across our business. And we've been making investments to ensure that we can capitalize on that demand.
And thinking about the future, as we enter the third year since we introduced our medium-term targets, today, Noemie and I are going to provide an update on our key metrics and what underpins our higher adjusted diluted EPS growth range.
So as we set out this time last year on last year's fourth-quarter call, 2024 was a year in which we really doubled down on our investments in order to help us capitalize on some big opportunities that are in front of us. And we executed on those foundational investments that we've called out on that earnings call at the start of last year. And those included platforming and modernizing and included new products and also Gen AI. And we focused on the accessibility of our data state and also enhancements to our risk and resilience posture.
We continue to invest in a rating agency in our positioning as the agency choice for investors and issuers, and I have to say I'm really proud that we were named best rating agency for an impressive 13th year in a row by Extel, formally Institutional Investor. It's our experienced analysts, insightful research, and active market engagement that really reinforce our leadership position in the market, and that allows us in turn to capitalize on robust periods of issuance like this past year.
We've also made investments to address the big shifts that are going on in the capital markets. The first of those is private credit. And I am not just talking about direct leverage lending, which is a roughly $1.5 trillion market and growing, but also fund finance, infrastructure debt, and asset-backed finance, to name a few. And with dedicated analytical and commercial focus on private credit made really good progress in this space this past year, rating nearly 400 private credit-related transactions in 2024.
Similarly we have a product suite to serve transition finance, and we issued over 150 second-party opinions and more than 20 net zero assessments in 2024, and we have a strong pipeline there as well. We also have a coordinated commercial and analytical initiative focused on digital infrastructure and data centers to ensure that we are the agency of choice in this space for the years to come.
Now, our strong financial performance this year allowed us to accelerate the build-out of MIS's technology applications for our analytical, commercial, and operational teams, and these investments are driving improvements in operational efficiency and allowing us to be increasingly volume agnostic within a range of issuance. And you can see this come through in our 60% margins in 2024 and our guidance for 2025.
So I thought I'd just put this in perspective for you for a moment. We rated nearly 6.2 trillion of issuance in 2024. That's an increase of 42% compared to 2023. And Mike West has given me an interesting statistic, that throughout last year, our ratings teams issued a press release related to a credit opinion on average every 20 minutes. And that's without needing to meaningfully increase our analytical staffing levels, and very importantly, we did this while maintaining the robust controls that the market and our regulators expect from us.
And as you've heard me say, we are always looking for ways to invest inorganically in ratings because it's a great business. And if you recall in mid 2024, we invested further in GCR, that's the leading domestic credit rating agency in Africa, taking our ownership up to almost 100%. And in November, we expanded Moody's Local again, this time into six more countries across Central America.
And we are really pleased with the growth that we are seeing in Moody's Local. Revenue is up 16% in 2024, and we signed several hundred first-time mandates. So that's a great expansion of the rated portfolio across the region and really bodes well for the future.
So let me turn to Moody's Analytics for a few moments. We have invested there to enhance our product platforms and go-to-market strategy as we continue to deepen our relationships with our traditional customer base, banks, and insurers, we've also expanded our data coverage and workflow solutions to serve large corporate customers and in-demand third-party risk domains. That includes things like KYC, supplier risk, trade credit, transfer pricing, and master data management. And within the last six months, we also made three important acquisitions that have enhanced our offerings in our banking and insurance businesses and added valuable data and analytics to our risk operating system. And those include Numerated which extends our loan origination system for banks, Predicat which adds to our capabilities in casualty underwriting and analytics, and most recently in January, CAPE Analytics which enriches our insights on properties and will integrate with our cat risk models.
So just a little bit more on Numerated for a moment. We've been We've been collaborating with their team on joint offerings for some time, and that really highlighted the great fit between our respective lending workflow solution. So there was an obvious industrial logic to this.
And we've had some really encouraging response from our customers. In fact, we've already had a few noteworthy wins with Tier 2 and Tier 3 banks in the fourth quarter with our enhanced end-to-end commercial lending offering, and it's really resonating with our customers. Switching over to insurance. Over the last several years, we've talked about the foundational investments that we've made in our cloud-based intelligent risk platform. We call that IRP.
And these investments are now delivering meaningful ARR growth for our insurance business. In fact, in 2024, we grew the number of customers on the IRP by almost 20%. And migrating to the IRP then enables insurers to reduce, sometimes by as much as half, the time that they need to model complex scenarios across billions of property locations. And as our platform hosts the most modern, sophisticated, high-definition models, our customers are able to better measure and quantify their financial exposure as well as monitor the evolving risk in their portfolios at scale. And this is helping to deepen our relationships with our customer base and expanding our strategic relationships with the largest global insurers, reinsurers and brokers in the world.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that for the third consecutive year, Moody's was ranked number one in the Chartis RiskTech100, providing market validation of our best-in-class solutions serving nearly 15,000 analytics customers. So a lot to be proud of in 2024. And while we had a strong 2024, I'm very excited about 2025 and beyond due to a set of deep currents that are changing the way that businesses and markets operate. And given the investments that we've made over the last several years, we really are well positioned to ride those deep currents. And there are five that we are particularly focused on: first, the ongoing expansion and evolution of the debt capital markets that I just touched on; second, the increasing pace of digital transformation and automation across banks and insurers; third, the imperative for businesses to know more about who they're doing business with; fourth, the growing needs across industries to understand the financial impact of extreme weather events and a changing climate; and fifth, the transformative power of generative AI and the potential unlock for owners of proprietary data and insights.
So let me just double-click on the impact of extreme weather for a moment because this has been so much in the headlines lately. And on past calls, we've talked about the need to better understand the physical risk relating to extreme weather events and climate change. And when we announced the acquisition of RMS a few years ago, some folks asked us why did we think it was important to have these capabilities. Well, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the L.A. wildfires, I don't think anyone is questioning the need to better understand this.
I really believe we are at an inflection point. In fact, the issue of insurability of edits, both weather insurance is available and what the cost will be over time, has become a very important issue in property and financial markets. And we've witnessed the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, combined with ongoing property development and inflation, which have made these events even more costly. And the demand to better understand these risks, not just by insurers but by banks, investors, companies, governments, is only going up. And that's why we acquired Cape Analytics.
Their AI-powered technology delivers address-level risk insights, which are a natural complement to our catastrophe models. And these sophisticated models, combined with our really rich and deep data and insights on credit and economics and properties, means that we are uniquely positioned to be the authoritative voice on quantifying the financial impacts of physical risk. And we see this need continuing for years into the future. So we feel good about these deep currents as durable demand drivers for our business. And Noemie is going to walk you through our full year '25 guidance assumptions in a moment.
And as we look forward after delivering a remarkable performance in 2024, we're going to provide an update on the progress against our medium-term targets. But let me give you the bottom line: we have fundamentally strengthened the earnings power of this business, and that should support Moody's as a serial compounder in the years ahead.
So with that, Noemie, over to you.

Noemie Heuland

Thank you, Rob, and hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Starting with our Q4 results. We delivered a very strong finish, tapping a year of remarkable financial performance in '24. You can see the highlights from our full year results on slide 9. But Q4 revenues were nearly $1.7 billion, up 13% year-on-year.
And our adjusted diluted EPS was $2.69 -- $2.62, up 20% year over year. MIS delivered its second highest Q4 revenue on record with growth across all business lines. The anticipated volatility around the US election didn't materialize. And with spreads at their tightest levels in over a decade, particularly in spec-grade, and the robust demand environment continued throughout the quarter until the last days of December.
MIS revenue in Q4 were $809 million, up 18% year on year. The growth was driven primarily by three key factors. First, healthy leverage loan issuance activity, which was up 134 in Q4. However, with the mix weighted towards refinancing and repricing, transactional revenue for that asset class was up 27%; second, the continued strength from infrequent issuers in the banking and insurance sectors; and third, strong performance from structured finance, and particularly in US CLOs and CMBS, reflecting strong demand in a very favorable spread environment.
MIS' fourth quarter performance and corresponding higher incentive compensation translated into a 51.3% adjusted operating margin, which exceeded our implied guidance. Turning to MA. We also had a strong Q4 with revenue of $863 million, up 8% year-on-year. Recurring revenue, which accounts for 95% of total revenue in MA, grew 10% year-on-year, broadly in line with the 9.4% growth in ARR. As Rob said, Decision Solutions drove the performance with 12% growth year on year.
We delivered strong growth across lines of businesses in Decision Solutions with banking, insurance and KYC achieving ARR growth of 9%, 12% and 17%, respectively. More specifically, KYC ARR grew 17% with strong demand from customer and supplier risk data usage and sales from new customers. Insurance ARR grew 12% driven by improved customer retention and strong demand for our cat model tools as extreme weather events are becoming more pervasive and impactful across industries. This is generating demand for our best-in-class risk modeling solutions with the IRP. And our Q4 -- Q1 2025 acquisition of Cape Analytics only builds on this, as Rob highlighted.
Banking ARR grew 9%, reflecting strong customer retention and expansion of relationships with subscription-based offerings that are enabling customers' lending, risk management and finance workflows. The other two lines of businesses in MA include our more established data and research franchises. Data & Information grew ARR by 8% driven by demand from Orbis within the corporate sector. Research & Insights grew ARR by 6% with the attrition events from the asset manager space we discussed earlier in the year affecting the growth rate. That said, sales, meaning cross-sell, upsell or upgrades, grew meaningfully above ARR trends in full year '24.
And some of this was from upselling Research Assistant to our CreditView customers, which accounted for 25% of our overall Research & Insights ARR growth. We are encouraged by the customer engagement for Research Assistant, one of our GenAI offerings, and that's building a healthy pipeline for 2025 and has already reached more than 100 customers in Q4. MA adjusted operating margin of 33.8% increased 240 basis points versus Q4 last year, leading to a full year margin of 30.7%, which is towards the high end of our annual guide. Now turning to fiscal year '25 guidance. We expect MCO revenue growth in the high single-digit range with an adjusted operating margin increasing by about 200 basis points to approximately 50%.
And this is on the back of a fiscal year 2024 where we increased adjusted operating margin by 420 basis points. Our adjusted diluted EPS guidance range is a range of $14 to $14.50. Now for MIS, we expect market conditions will remain constructive this year with tight spreads, declining high-yield default rates and an uptick in M&A activity. You'll see our issuance outlook for individual asset class on this slide. But all in all, we projected MIS rated issuance growth to be in the low single-digit range for '25 with 700 to 800 first-time mandates.
For MIS revenue, we expect growth in the mid- to high single-digit percent range for the year, benefiting from a positive issuance mix. We expect the revenue performance to translate into an adjusted operating margin of 62% to 63%, which at the midpoint represents about 250 basis points of margin expansion year-over-year. For MA, we expect revenue growth in the high single-digit range with ARR growth in the high single-digit to low double-digit range. We expect MA adjusted operating margin to be between 32% to 33%, which at the midpoint represents 180 basis points of margin expansion year-over-year. Turning to what underpins MA and the expected MCO margin expansion.
We took a hard look at our operating model and believe we have an opportunity to simplify our organizational structure. In our Analytics business, we are, for the most part, through the integration of the businesses we've acquired over the recent years. We are also gradually reorienting our go-to-market from selling individual products to selling end-to-end solutions to our customers in the banking, insurance and corporate segment. This puts us in a position to combine resources in our customer-facing, marketing, product and data engineering functions and further consolidate our real estate footprint. And also more broadly across the organization, we're starting to reap the benefit of the investments we made in automating our workflows, which translates to expected improvements in operating leverage.
So in connection with this, today, we're announcing an efficiency program to simplify the organization, allowing us to accelerate profitability expansion and redirect some investment capacity to strategic growth areas. We plan to incur between $200 million and $250 million in restructuring charges over the two-year duration of the plan, primarily in personnel-related costs, for an expected total annualized cost savings in the range of $250 million to $300 million upon completion of the plan. We accrued approximately $45 million already in the fourth quarter and expect to record an additional charge in the range of $8 million to $100 million in full-year '25 primarily in Moody's Analytics and to a lesser extent within our corporate functions. I'd note that we have included the full-year '24 to full-year '25 operating expense bridge in the appendix of this presentation to assist with modeling questions. And here's some color on how to think about the calendarization of top line and margin.
We expect MIS revenue in full-year '25 to follow a similar quarterly pattern to '24, with first quarter revenue up in the mid-single-digit range from the first quarter '24, ramping up in the second quarter before declining sequentially in our third and fourth quarter. For MA, we expect our year-on-year total revenue growth to be consistent in the high single-digit percent range throughout the year with Q1 revenue being sequentially flat versus Q4 '24, a pattern that's consistent with the prior year. For operating expenses and excluding the impact from restructuring and asset abandonment charges, we expect expenses to follow normal seasonal pattern. Sequentially, we anticipate expenses to increase by about $10 million from Q4 to Q1. And then we anticipate operating expense to follow a typical seasonal pattern but to remain relatively stable throughout the remainder of the year as savings associated from our efficiency program offset annual salary increases and variable costs associated with revenue.
In terms of margin, we expect MIS to be in the mid-60s in the first half before declining in the second half in line with revenue. And for MA, we expect approximately 30% in the first quarter, sequentially improving in the second half to achieve our full year guidance of 32% to 33% as revenue ramps and as we start to see the savings from our efficiency plan in the second half. In terms of how these different dynamics translate into adjusted diluted EPS, we expect this to follow the MIS revenue cadence. And more specifically for Q1, we expect adjusted diluted EPS to be at the high end of the implied quarterly adjusted diluted EPS range of $3.50 to $3.60. So finally, looking beyond 2025, I'd like to talk about how we're tracking against our medium-term targets.
It has been three years since we published those and with almost a year in the CFO seat, I'm using this as an opportunity to take stock on how our performance has stacked up. The headline is this: 2024 adjusted diluted EPS is up 46% from two years ago. And the midpoint of our full year 2025 guidance implies an 18% adjusted diluted EPS CAGR through the first three years, significantly above the low double-digit medium-term target growth rate. Now a lot of this outperformance has been driven by very good execution during a robust issuance environment, with MIS revenue up 40.5% in the last two years and MIS adjusted margin already exceeding 60% in 2024. We also have delivered strong organic growth in MA, reporting ARR growth consistently in the range of 9% to 10% over the last two years.
As we look forward, we expect our retention rate to remain in the low to mid-90% range and to continue to grow our new business at low to mid-teens percent pace, enabling us to sustain ARR growth in this 9% to 10% range in the coming years. Of note, what's most notably different now from what we envisioned when we initially published our medium-term guidance is that our recent M&A has been at smaller scale and focused on enriching our offerings to fuel durable growth in our strategic growth areas, including lending and casualty underwriting. On profitability, we've invested in GenAI and process automation more broadly for internal efficiencies. We've invested in the build-out of the MA platform and our data interoperability, all of which are expected to generate increased operating leverage in the coming years. We expect that this, coupled with our program to simplify our organizational structure, will translate into MA margin expansion in the mid- to high 30% range by 2027.
Now bringing this all together, for MCO, we are increasing the range for our adjusted diluted EPS growth from the low double-digit percent growth to low to mid-teens percent growth range, reflecting our ongoing efforts to improve the earnings power of our business. To wrap up, we believe the demand driver and the execution of our strategy will deliver attractive and sustainable growth and profitability expansion across market cycles. We remain committed to executing on our capital allocation strategy and anticipate consistent strong free cash flow returns to continue as we work to deliver on both our customers and shareholders. I'd like to thank all of our colleagues around the world for their remarkable contributions to another great year for Moody's.
And with that, Rob, Mike and Steve and I will be happy to take your questions. Operator?

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Manav Patnaik, Barclays.

Manav Patnaik

I just wanted to ask you about the medium-term guide. I just wanted to confirm if those were organic numbers, particularly on the MA side, and just maybe just some of the moving pieces in there. It sounds like, Noemie, from your last comment, maybe there's less M&A than what you initially thought. Is that correct?

Noemie Heuland

So we're in the third year of the medium-term target. As I said, I'm almost a year in the CFO seat. So it's a good time to take stock and look at how we did, how we're tracking. As I said, we're tracking ahead on MCO revenue and adjusted diluted EPS metrics, and MIS operating margin is already up 60%. So we delivered strong organic growth in MA.
We had reported growth consistently in the 9% to 10% range over the last two years, and I think that's what you should expect us to deliver over the medium term. What's -- to your point, what's to note, we had a bit lower contribution from M&A than what we initially envisioned when we published those medium-term target initially. We had a different rate environment back then. So again, we're committed to deliver 9% to 10% ARR growth, as I said, over the medium term. And that's mostly organic.
We may do a bit of tuck-ins, but that's really what's driving the main change here.

Operator

Ashish Sabadra, RBC Capital Markets.

Ashish Sabadra

I just wanted to follow up on that midterm questions, particularly on margins. So the MIS margins are already at low 60%. So just wanted to better understand, is there not much room for margin expansion on -- with issuance just given the high incremental margins there? But also what does it imply for earnings growth in the midterm? Are we implying a much more modest earnings growth profile?
Any color there will be helpful.

Noemie Heuland

So on MIS margin for 2025, just to kind of give you a little bit more color on what's on our guidance, you got to remember, we had a higher incentive compensation accruals in 2024 as a result of the extraordinary performance. We rebaselined that at the beginning of each year. So obviously, that gives us a bit of tailwind in the margin for 2025. And then in terms of further out in the medium term, we're continuing to make investments in our Ratings business. We mentioned the workflows -- the rating workflow, the analytical tool so that we can make our analysts more efficient and really focus on what they do best, which is talking to our customers, our issuance and doing some research.
And we're continuing to invest in our risk and resiliency program. As you know, we are regulated. And so we continue to improve and enhance our internal controls with automation there. And we're investing in a lot of areas that are going to fuel growth of the Ratings business in the long term like private credit, sustainable finance. And I'm sure Mike and Rob can give some color on that as well.

Operator

Toni Kaplan, Morgan Stanley.

Toni Kaplan

I wanted to ask about MA margins. Really great quarter and higher-than-expected guide. You talked about the efficiency plan, which was very helpful. Are you pulling back on investment at all? And just any additional color on simplification or the efficiency plan?
And maybe embedded in the whole thing is sort of AI and if -- how you're thinking about investment there and cost savings from it.

Noemie Heuland

Yes. Thanks. I'll start and I'll have Steve provide some color as well. As I said, we -- we said, I think in the last earnings call, we're mostly through our large investment cycles. We're redeploying now capital internally.
We're self-funding some major investments around sales to go after the corporate segment. We're making some investments there. We're continuing to invest in our platform and our data estate as well. Now the efficiency is really coming from -- that's the -- we're at the point where we've integrated, for the most part, the acquired entities. We are shifting a little bit our go-to-market to focus more end-to-end solutions towards our customer segment.
That gives us some opportunity to simplify the organization. And Steve can talk about some of the things he's doing. We've also, to your point, invested in GenAI. That's delivered some very nice efficiency gains in engineering as well as in our customer success group. So obviously, we're starting to reap the benefits of that as well.

Stephen Tulenko

Everything you said there makes good sense. I would say, the simplification dynamic is a rich one and I think a very valuable way to think about this. Maybe most importantly, we're concentrating on those use cases and those areas where we perceive the demand to be the richest among our customers. Rob talked about big drivers of growth in the future, and we're making investments in those, concentrating on those and redeploying toward those, sometimes redeploying out of some areas that aren't going to be as fast growing. So that's probably the other big change there.
But just to reinforce, GenAI really is making a difference internally. We're pretty excited about the productivity gains we're seeing in engineering especially and starting to see some on the sales side as well, already seeing some in customer service. So pretty excited about that.

Operator

Alex Kramm, UBS.

Alex Kramm

Very quickly on the Ratings side, obviously laid out kind of some of the expectations, but maybe you can dig a little bit deeper for 2025, the puts and takes on the range. Where do you think some upside can come from, for example, M&A? And what do you see as the biggest risk for the outlook here?

Robert Fauber

Alex, it's Rob. Thanks for the question. So let me give you a little insight into maybe a few of the -- some of the key assumptions here in the outlook. I mean, first of all, economic growth, we think, is going to support broader market activity. Spreads are tight.
They may widen a little bit during the balance of the year, but we'll still be well below historical levels, we expect. And we think we're going to see continued strong investor demand. Refinancing and improved M&A activity are going to be key drivers. In regards to refi, there's a fairly wide range of assumptions about refi volumes for leveraged loans, in particular, for 2025 when you look across all the banks. And it ranges from leveraged loan issuance being substantially down to being up.
And you can see in our webcast deck, we're kind of somewhere in between down mid-single digits. So that's one. And the second is -- the second key variable is M&A activity. And we've assumed something like a 50% increase in M&A for 2025, meaning that M&A will be an increasing percent of the use of proceeds. And that is favorable to revenue mix.
And just to give you a sense of the sensitivity there, if it was something like 20% to 25% increase, that might be 2 to 3 percentage points of revenue growth. We also haven't assumed any risk-off periods. When you've got a forecast that calls for more than $6 trillion, we've assumed virtually all blue-sky days. So there are a lot of things, obviously, that go in to issuance. It's not just one assumption.
But taken together, Alex, that explains our guidance range for revenues that spans mid- to high single digits on low single-digit issuance growth.

Operator

Scott Wurtzel, Wolfe Research.

Scott Wurtzel

I wanted to go back to Moody's Analytics. I'm wondering if you can speak to just the sort of broader demand environment that you're seeing and how sales cycles are trending. I know if we go back a quarter or 2, maybe on the GenAI side, there were some longer sales cycles. So wondering if we can get an update on that and just demand more broadly.

Robert Fauber

Yes. So maybe I'll take that. Thanks, Scott, for the question. So I think, first of all, the length of sales cycle has not changed materially over the last 18 to 24 months, I would say. That's been a question we've heard a couple of times.
And I think in general, we're seeing patterns that are consistent with the patterns we've seen in the last couple of years. I'd say we're very encouraged by pipeline. Our new business production has actually been very good in 2024 across the board and across segments. Retention, strong in 2024 as well. We held, in fact, at the same level -- actually slightly higher than what we saw in '23.
So retention, about the same, maybe a little bit better. New business production in general, better across the board. And I would say, pipeline going into '25 is very strong as well. So very encouraging.

Noemie Heuland

And if I just add -- sorry, I was just going to add on the new business growth. That was really an encouraging sign that we saw in Research & Insights and across all the businesses, actually, where we had new business growth going faster than ARR. And we had some very interesting use cases on Research Assistant. And that gives us confidence on the outlook.

Operator

Owen Lau, Oppenheimer.

Owen Lau

So again, MA, sorry for multiple questions here. But you expect your revenue to grow high single digit even though your ARR is expected to grow high single to low double-digit. Should we expect this dynamic -- there's still like, I don't know, maybe 2% or 3% gap between the two, like this dynamic to continue in the near to medium term? When and what does it take for revenue to actually accelerate to low double digit? And also, how much have you baked in some of the new initiatives, such as AI, MSCI partnership and other new product launch in your guidance?

Noemie Heuland

So just a couple of things on revenue. First of all, that can include some M&A, FX. And so ARR is an organic constant currency growth number. So that's just one clarification. In terms of the best way to look at it, ARR and recurring revenue over a trailing 12-month period should be pretty consistent.
If you look at 2024, for example, our recurring revenue was in 9%, and that's very consistent with ARR. What's really driving the difference is transactional revenue is going down and provides a bit of a headwind. We'll continue to see that in the foreseeable future as we have still customers remaining on our more on-premise platforms outside of the US in banking and insurance. But we expect that to continue to narrow as we migrate those customers over in the platform.
I think that's the best way to look at it. And

Owen Lau

How book guidance have you baked in any AI and MSCI, all this into your guidance?

Robert Fauber

We incorporate those into our plans. I would say, the sales pipeline is big enough that they are contributors to the pipeline, but they're not major contributors or material contributors across the whole business? Yes, I would say though that -- so it's all baked in, but Research Assistant has been very helpful to sales in Research & Insights and 25% of the growth in Research & Insight ARRs from customers who subscribe to Research Assistant. And the weighted sales pipeline for Research Assistant is double the total sales for fiscal '24. So we've got larger opportunities around workflow automation, and we're seeing good momentum.
So it's an important contributor to growth, even though it's modest in terms of the overall base of revenues.

Operator

Jeffrey Silber, BMO Capital Markets.

Jeffrey Silber

With all the discussion coming out of Washington, DC, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, first, your exposure to federal government as a customer, and then more broadly, in terms of some of the expected policy changes, what the impact on your business might be.

Noemie Heuland

So in terms of the overall impact, it's pretty small. We have an overall MCO level -- it's less than 1% of our consolidated revenue. And maybe I'll let Rob talk a little bit about some policy changes and how we're looking at that.

Robert Fauber

Yes. So I think it's important to kind of zoom out for a moment and just think about what the world has been through over the last five years. And -- we've got a pandemic. We had a huge negative shock to GDP and employment. Then we had a huge monetary and fiscal stimulus in response, then that led to record inflation and an interest rate shock.
And as the pandemic has subsided, we had two military conflicts in key energy-producing regions. But through all of this, the global economy has been surprisingly resilient and has been able to adapt. So I think it's important just to keep that backdrop because obviously, there's a large volume of executive orders and policy directives that span a number of different issues. But the headlines don't tell all the story. I think we'll see some impact in certain sectors based on what happens with tariffs, and you can imagine sectors like autos and retail and steel and aluminum, immigration sectors like agriculture and hospitality and construction.
You could see on fossil fuel producers. So they're going to be, I think, some -- again, some puts and takes here. We may see, more broadly, a stronger economic environment that's going to be good for issuance in general. So I think from a -- also from a rating agency perspective, we're really going to anchor on the credit impacts of all this, and we're putting out a lot of research about what those impacts could be.

Operator

David Motemaden, Evercore ISI.

David Motemaden

I had a question just on the higher medium-term outlook for MIS revenue, the high single to low double-digit growth now versus mid- to high growth when you guys last updated these medium-term targets. Could you help me think through what's driving that uptick? Are there any big movements in the long-term building blocks that you've given in the past? Or is it just M&A coming back that's driving that? And maybe also if you could just talk about how we should think about the third-party private credit rating assessments contributing to that as well would be helpful.

Robert Fauber

Yes. So I think maybe the first thing just to anchor on is this is -- we're still anchoring off of the base year of 2022 and the medium-term targets that we put out. So we're now a couple of years into that. We've got guidance out for the third year, and we're kind of looking out to now where do we think we're going to be five years out in 2027. So we got two years in the books.
We've got a year of guidance and two years of unknown. And so what you're seeing is us now just updating. And an important part of that is the performance that we've already achieved. So that -- hopefully, that gives you a sense. But Mike, maybe just talk a little bit about some of the demand drivers for issuance because I think that also gives some insight into the durability of growth in Ratings.

Michael West

Yes. Thanks, Rob. As Rob mentioned earlier, what you've got is a lower rate of M&A over the last few years that we do anticipate to come back because there's large pent-up demand. But if I move away from some of those traditional M&A refunding studies and think a little bit more broadly about growth of private credit, whether that is in direct lending, whether that's in securitization, whether that's in fund finance or whether it's in the broader reallocation of capital into the private market away from the banks. Then on top of that, got to think about some of the drivers in that sustainable and transition finance area.
There are clean energy commitments, around 93% of global GDP, which is expected to translate in investment needs of about 2.5 times by 2030. And Rob also talked about digitalization and digital infrastructure, which again is another multitrillion-dollar market that needs long-term financing for long-term assets, and that could be project finance, it could be corporate finance or it could be some form of securitization. So when we think of that third building block, the evolution of the debt capital market, these are some of the things that we're investing in. We are engaging in with market participants and feel very good as part of that medium-term story.

Operator

George Tong, Goldman Sachs.

George Tong

With respect to the MA segment and your medium-term target of high single, low double-digit growth, how are you thinking about growth by subsegments, so Decision Solutions, Research & Insights and Data & Information? And what do you see as driving the differences in growth between those segments?

Stephen Tulenko

Maybe I'll take -- I'll talk to that, George. Thanks for the question. It's Steve. So first of all, if you just think about the core franchises, these franchises have been around literally for decades, the Data & Information business, the Research & Insights business. These businesses have demonstrated a good track record of solid growth, maybe above average for the industry or above average for our peer group with ARR numbers in the high single digits.
We think that's going to continue very reliably into the future. You've got continued investments in terms of data quality, data coverage and -- as well as tools like the GenAI tools that we've talked about as well. So we believe these to be strong solid performers in the future, delivering good retention and good new business numbers. The Decision Solutions unit, where you have some of the higher-growing businesses, most notably KYC and third-party risk management work that we do to help people understand who they do business with, that's put up some really nice numbers in terms of ARR numbers in the recent past and continues to do so, we think, in the future. So you should see higher growth in the Decision Solutions segment, maybe high single-digit growth in these core franchises have been around for a long time, a high growth in Decision Solutions driven by a lot of innovation and a lot of work to make our customers' jobs easier, leveraging our data, our analytics and our software together to solve problems and to help them do their jobs.
So I think you'll see a differentiation in that way.

Operator

Peter Christiansen, Citigroup.

Peter Christiansen

Really nice execution here. I want to get back on the M&A -- MA side. You've had some really good speed to market on some new price, some enhancements. I was just talking -- I'd like to hear any color on your ability to to pass on value-based pricing across a number of good products and segments, subsegments there. And then lastly, just curious how you're thinking about head count for MIS and growth there potentially.

Stephen Tulenko

Maybe I'll start with questions about MA. Welcome to the call there. Nice to have you on board, by the way. based philosophy is, I think, one that we have long talked about and long maintained, we think is really important to the process. Inflation is not as important as the value we create for customers, for example.
In MA, we actually provide some statistics. I'm sure Shivani will have this in our investor deck, where we dimensioned the contributions that come from upgrades and price. And you'll see those are contributions that are very stable and continue over the course of the last couple of years. And we expect it to continue in the future. I think that number is around 7% in 2024, just to give you a benchmark.
So the contributions from pricing that are stable, and we expect them to continue going forward. Noemie, do you want to talk about the staffing question?

Noemie Heuland

Yes, of course. For MIS, I think we've talked about earlier, that actually drove our part of our performance in the fourth quarter and the full year. We're invested significantly in automation and rating workflow to make our analysts more efficient. And we expect us to -- you can expect us to continue to do that. Obviously, continue to invest in our skill set.
We have the best Elisan we'll continue to invest and grow, but probably less than the pace of revenue growth than the investments we've made in automation.

Robert Fauber

Yes. The one other thing I'd add, double-clicking on Steve's point about the value prop, it's really interesting because you have so many customers who are focusing on efficiency and digitization and automation and all of these things. And I think we've talked a little bit about the example of what's going on with our CreditView offering with Research Assistant, where the value prop itself is changing. So CreditView with GenAI enablement is a research subscription product. And CreditView with GenAI enablement, Research Assistant, custom AI workflows, those kinds of things is actually something where people can start to say, "How do I change the the leverage model for labor in my -- whether it's my investment team or my research team," or whatever it may be.
That's a very different conversation and a very different value proposition. Now the cycle time to have those conversations is different, but that's a pretty exciting evolution of that particular product.

Operator

Craig Huber, Huber Research.

Craig Huber

Rob or Mike, can you just talk further about private credit? I'm curious what -- if you're willing to give this, what percent of your Ratings revenue came from private credit last year? And how do you see the market growing here to add your Ratings growth rates for the coming years here? And then Noemie, if you could just throw in there, what was the incentive comp number in the fourth quarter and for the full year? And how did that change year-over-year?

Robert Fauber

Craig, yes, let me give you -- so we don't break out exactly like you're asking, but we can give you some data points to give you an insight -- give you some insight into the traction that private credit is getting within the franchise. So I mentioned in my prepared remarks that we had nearly 400 private credit mandates across all of Ratings. Now that includes things like Ratings on BDCs, sublines, closed-end funds, the suite of fund finance, but also asset-backed finance and middle-market CLOs, private ratings for investors. So -- and that has grown very significantly in the course of 1 year. And also just to give you a sense because fund finance is certainly a growing area, and I think it's going to continue to grow for a number of years.
And fund finance is in our FIG. We address that through our FIG rating franchise. In 2024, 30% of our first-time mandates in FIG were private credit-related. So again, this goes back to the -- when you look at it in the total base, it's still modest. But when you look at it as a percent of growth, you can see that this is starting to make a difference.
Mike, do you have anything you want to add just in terms of how we're addressing private credit?

Michael West

Yes. Thanks for your question, Craig. I mean, as Rob said, we definitely see private credit as a tailwind. It's a rapidly evolving space across all those asset classes. And it's very important when you think about the originator, the transparency around the credit quality.
They're looking to move on to the buyer. And then many of the buyers, again, want to know the credit quality and an independent view of that credit quality because many of these buyers are sensitive with regard to regulation and their own capital allocation. So again, there's many trends that support why independent opinion is very important in a growing asset class. And the way that we've organized ourselves is because it's across all of these different franchises that the various highest level, we have to organize around leadership so we can engage with all these players that may be touching in these different franchises. And therefore, we have dedicated commercial people, dedicated analytical teams, but the very good thing is that we have depth and we have experience in each of our lines of business and the appropriate methodologies.
So as they start to develop as individual areas of asset class, we are able and available to discuss at a very early stage, and that's what's very important when you have an evolving market like this. So I feel very good about going into '25 and over the medium term.

Operator

Jeff Meuler, Baird.

Jeff Meuler

The medium-term growth guidance, obviously really good. But as Rob said, a lot's updating for performance already achieved. I think mathematically, it implies lower growth in '26 and '27 relative to what I'd consider your longer-term structural growth, especially in MIS. Are there any specific call-outs there or should we just not read too much into that? I think Rob said there's kind of blue-sky assumptions for issuance in '25, but '25 MIS doesn't look overly inflated by any means relative to the long-term trend, and Mike sounded positive on structural growth.
So if you could just help us reconcile what's implied for '26-'27.

Robert Fauber

Maybe the fundamental takeaway for me is we're not downgrading our growth assumption for Ratings. And hopefully, what you're hearing is some real confidence about the medium-term drivers of issuance. So that may be the math. Remember, we've got ranges and other things in here that we're expressing it in ranges. But I don't want you to take away that we think somehow the growth outlook has been dampened for the Ratings business.

Noemie Heuland

Yes. One other thing I would add is if you look at the overall picture is really reflecting the MA growth rates that we've observed across our different businesses, as Steve talked about the nuances between mature franchises in decision and -- Data & Information, Research & Insights and the faster-growing businesses in Decision Solutions. So that's one element. And the other piece that I really want to point out is we are focusing on increased profitability, especially in MA. And that's something that's driving increased profitability going forward, and that's what's behind partially the increase in the adjusted diluted EPS range.

Operator

Andrew Steinerman, JPMorgan.

Andrew Steinerman

I just wanted to talk about the contribution of M&A in the quarter for both MA and MIS. And also going forward, is the Cape acquisition in the guide? I'm not sure if that closed.

Noemie Heuland

Yes. So it was really small for the fiscal 2024, Andrew, maybe 25 bps of revenue growth for MA. And then for the full year 2025, what's embedded in our guide? You have a little bit of tailwind from M&A, but you also have some FX headwinds. So net-net, the net of 2 is really not material to our first quarter 2025 guidance.

Robert Fauber

And Cape is in there.

Noemie Heuland

Cape is in it, yes.

Operator

Russell Quelch, Redburn Atlantic.

Russell Quelch

In respect of ARR growth, with -- in KYC, sorry, there had been some expectations that, that would mature after the booms post the pandemic and the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. Can you talk about what's driving a re-acceleration of growth in that area? And how sustainable it is in the high teens range? And then separately, MSCI said on its conference call, it was having further conversations with you about expanding your partnership, which is currently in ESG, into perhaps other areas, including private credit. Can you provide an update perhaps on that from your perspective?

Stephen Tulenko

The KYC?

Robert Fauber

Yes.

Stephen Tulenko

So we are believers that we have a better mousetrap when it comes to KYC and third-party risk management and whether you're talking about knowing who you're doing business with as a customer or a supplier. And we've made investments across the board really in terms of data, in terms of models that would help you make decisions on whether or not you should do business with this customer as well as software to organize and coordinate your thoughts and remember what you -- why you decided to work with that customer. So we're releasing those features and those products literally all the time. Those investments, we think, are going to be very worthwhile and they contribute to this growth rate. So this has been a good grower for us, and we expect it to continue.
And I would say the other thing I'd note here is that we are increasingly helping people with the labor associated with doing this work, so not just the databases, but helping and -- maybe coordinating and helping make things more efficient in that respect. But once they identify someone they want to investigate and learn more about, we're helping to do that much more quickly. So the number of people required to do this work can go down when they become a customer of ours.

Robert Fauber

And to be clear, it's not by us providing bodies to do that. It's providing software, data and analytics and AI enablement. Just a couple of things I'd add to what Steve said. We had some nice growth in the quarter. We had some very large expansions of our relationships with several of the largest banks in the world.
And I think that really is validation of the value of the Orbis data set and the other analytics that go along with it. The other thing is, and we talked about this on last year's call, that we were developing a platform to address a variety of use cases for corporates, all drawing on this massive company data and then other data sets to support things like customer onboarding and monitoring supplier risk and so on. Well, we've now launched that. And so we're excited about that because we think that's going to give us a good entree into the large corporate market and provide support for the growth in our KYC segment.

Noemie Heuland

Before we go to the next question, I just want to go back to Craig's question on incentive comp. I realize we have that. So on the -- for 2024, incentives comp was $507 million, Craig, with $133 million in Q4. And we're projecting around $420 million to $440 million for 2025.

Operator

Shlomo Rosenbaum, Stifel.

Shlomo Rosenbaum

So Rob, it seems like some of the early slowness that we saw in adoption in Research Assistant has to round, and it looks like things are really starting to pick up well there. I was wondering if you can update us on some of the other capabilities that you added, like the automated credit memo, the early warning system. What are you seeing over there in terms of traction? And do you expect a similar type of adoption path is what you're seeing for Research Assistant? Or do you think that those things could take a little bit longer because the customers might need to do a little bit more on their side in terms of process?

Robert Fauber

Yes. Maybe a couple of things, and I'm also going to ask Steve to add on here. First, we have GenAI enabled a number of our products now through the course of the year. I think we talked about last year, this concept of Navigators, which helps our customers use AI as an interface and get more out of our applications. So we've done that across eight primary solutions.
And that is not an a la carte offering that we've sold. That's included in the solution. But that's going to go to really helping with the overall value prop and retention and pricing opportunity for us. And we know that to be true because we have some really encouraging data points from Research Assistant customers where we see the customer satisfaction is considerably higher. We see the usage on the platform is considerably higher.
So that gives us confidence there. And you're right, we have launched several other what we call a la carte products. They're early days and anything that, again, is selling into the banks. So there's lots of really good conversation, particularly about early warning. But like Research Assistant this takes -- these sales cycles take time with the bank.
Steve, anything you want to add to that?

Stephen Tulenko

Well, number one, we have people meeting with some of your colleagues, not you, Shlomo, but some of the people on this call literally today talking about these things. I would say, the big institutions are increasingly talking about this as a transformational moment. And we're starting to hear quotes like, Steve, can you help us save 1 million hours work by leveraging your tools, right? Is there a way for us to -- and we literally have a proposal that is literally intended to displace a knowledge-based outsourcer by using some of these more refined workflows and persona-based GenAI tools. So the prompt engineering that we're able to do now is progressing to the level where we're able to help people literally do their job and replace some of the labor.
And we're starting to see that in the pipeline, starting to see the adoption curve change in tenor from, I need to meet regulations to I'm starting to get confidence that we can, and let's see if we can develop a business case to do that. So I think there's some pretty exciting green shoots in that respect.

Operator

Jason Haas, Wells Fargo.

Jason Haas

I wanted to follow up on the MIS revenue growth in 4Q. It looks like -- I was looking particularly at the MIS transaction revenue growth. It was up 29% in 4Q, but the issuance growth was up 42%. So just curious what drove that delta. It looks like it was maybe on the corporate find side, but yes, maybe you can help explain a little bit better why the revenue is weaker relative to issuance.

Robert Fauber

Yes. It really relates to bank loans. So there was very robust bank loan issuance. By our definition, we include repricings as issuance volume. And so in the fourth quarter, something like 55% of bank of loan volume was repricings, and that's the highest that we've seen in any quarter for a long time.
And the economics on repricings are much different for us. So actually, if you strip out bank loan, essentially, if you just take out bank loans out of issuance and take bank loans out of transaction revenues, we would have had, by our definition, issuance of something like mid-teens percent growth. But we would have had, call it, 30% transaction revenue growth. So I think that's primarily what was going on there. One other thing I'd add is we do see a lot of repricing activity in January.
So strong loan volume but repricing activities. So keep that in mind.

Operator

And I will now turn the call back to Rob for any closing remarks.

Robert Fauber

Okay. Well, thanks, everybody, for your time and your questions, and we look forward to talking to you in the first quarter. Goodbye.

Operator

This concludes Moody's Corporation fourth-quarter 2024 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 the Moody's IR website. Thank you.