Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your MSCI Third Quarter 2014 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to now introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Edings Thibault, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, Roland, and good day, to everyone, and welcome to the MSCI Third Quarter 2014 Earnings Conference Call. Please note that earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our results for the third quarter and first 9 months of 2014. A copy of that release may be viewed at msci.com under the Investor Relations tab. You'll also find on our website a slide presentation that we have prepared for this call. This call may contain forward-looking statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date on which they're made, which reflect management's current estimates, projections, expectations or beliefs and which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. For a discussion of additional risks and uncertainties that may affect MSCI's future results, please see the description of risk factors and forward-looking statements in our Form 10-K for our fiscal year ended December 31, 2013, today's earnings release and our other filings with the SEC. Today's earnings call may also include a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA expenses and adjusted EPS. Adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS exclude the following: restructuring costs, the lease exit charge, the amortization of intangible assets, and nonrecurring stock-based expense. Adjusted EBITDA also excludes depreciation and amortization of property, equipment and leasehold improvements, while adjusted EPS also excludes debt repayment and refinancing expenses, and the income tax effect of any excluded items. Adjusted EBITDA expense is total operating expenses less depreciation and amortization of property, plant and equipment and the lease exit charge. Please refer to today's earnings release and Pages 15 to 19 of the investor presentation for the required reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and other related disclosures. We will be referring to run rate, as we always do, frequently in our discussion this morning. So let me remind you that our run rate is an approximation at a given point in time of the forward-looking revenues for subscriptions and product licenses that we will record over the next 12 months, assuming no cancellations, new sales, changes in the assets and EPS licensed to our indices or changes in foreign currency rates. Please refer to Table 10 in our press release for a detailed explanation. With that, let me now turn the call over to Mr. Henry Fernandez. Henry?

Thank you, Edings. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We're very pleased with our third quarter performance. We posted a strong financial results, especially with regards to revenues, which grew 10%. Adjusted EBITDA rose 1%, even as we invested in product development, sales and marketing and client service. And adjusted EPS increased 6%. We also had a strong operating quarter. Run rate grew 10%, sales rose 4%, and retention rates strengthened to an exceptional 95%. Most importantly, we're starting to see the early benefits of our stepped-up level of investment on new and existing products. Lastly, as a testament to our commitment to put excess work -- excess capital to work for shareholders, we announced last month our plan to return $1 billion to shareholders by the end of 2016. The strength of our operating performance this quarter is the most exciting point for me because we're starting to tie our progress directly to some of the investments we have made. Our innovation engine is picking up, and we can see it making a difference. Let me first provide some specific examples of how the increased pace of innovation is having an impact on the growth of our equity investment tools. A key driver of our equity index subscription sales is our relationships with pension funds and other asset owners. These clients use our indices to help them with asset allocation and performance measurement. Over the last year, we have expanded our sales force and our applied research teams, so that we can engage with these clients more frequently. That is paying off. As an example, during the third quarter, one of the largest corporate pension plans in the U.S. opted to use a full suite of MSCI indices, including our domestic U.S. indices, as the benchmark…

Thanks, Henry. Good morning to all of you on the phone. You can follow my comments with the slides that are available on our website, and we'll start on Page 4. On that note, you'll see third quarter 2014 revenues rose 10% to $252 million. That growth was roughly split between the subscription revenues, which grew by 6% and asset-based fees, which grew by 27%. Nonrecurring revenues also contributed modestly to our growth. By product, index and ESG product revenues rose 15%. Risk management analytics revenues rose by 6% and portfolio management analytics revenues were flat versus third quarter 2015 -- '13, excuse me. Details on our operating results are on Page 5, showing MSCI's total run rate grew 10% to $1 billion. Our total subscription fees grew by 8% to $823 million, driven by a 13% increase in index and ESG subscriptions, 3% growth in RMA and a 2% growth in PMA. Changes in FX had a big impact on our run rate in the third quarter, especially on our analytic product lines. Total changes in FX lowered our run rate by $10 million relative to the second quarter and by $8 million year-over-year. The acquisition of GMI added $7.5 million to the index and ESG product line. Excluding the impact of changes in FX and the acquisition of GMI, total subscription run rate grew by 8%, comprised of 11% growth in index subscriptions; 5% growth in risk management analytics; and 3% growth in portfolio management analytics. Turning to Page 6. Total sales rose 4% to $31 million. As Henry noted, MSCI's aggregate retention rates rose to 95% for the third quarter, rising across all 3 major product lines. Year-to-date retention was 94%. Now let's turn -- let's now review the performance of our 3 major product lines, beginning…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of George Mihalos from Crédit Suisse. Georgios Mihalos - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Maybe for starters, just to pick up on that point around the expense outlook for '15 and even beyond that. I think the commentary was, significant reduction in the rate of spend, something more similar although higher than the rate of revenue growth for '15. I was just wondering if you can parse that out a little bit more. Sounds like maybe we're looking at somewhere around 11% to 13% growth in expenses for '15. And then maybe the thinking around long-term margins even going beyond '16. I mean, should we be constantly looking for revenue growth and EBITDA growth to sort of be aligned?

George, Bob here. And, as you can see from our operating, our key metric for revenues is currently 10%. So that's a benchmark for a lot of our conversations. The growth rate in 2014 was significant, based on our projections, 17% to 19%. As we indicated, we'll bring that down significantly. And it's not until 2016, as Henry outlined, we expect to see that converge. Georgios Mihalos - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Okay. Is the longer-term thinking also, that revenue and margin should be converging, that you're just going to be driving higher -- excuse me, faster top line growth through more investment?

Our investments, as I said, will take 2 to 3 years to have the significant payback that we're looking at. And our focus is on profit. Our focus is on profit growth and growing meaningful profit growth, George.

I think, George, it's also -- it's just too early to tell at the moment where do we end up at 2017 and beyond. Clearly, if a lot of our plan come to fruition of a significant payoff of the investment that we have made into much higher revenues and the operating environment is very positive, we may see a bit of an operating leverage in the business. But that's too early to tell, right? The environment is -- goes up and down, as you know. And in the last 2 years, we really are focused no longer on margin. We're focused always on what's the maximum amount of profitability that we can extract from this business going forward on absolute dollars per share. So that's our visibility at the moment and, therefore, it's early -- it's too early to tell how it all pans out in '17 and '18. Georgios Mihalos - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Okay. Appreciate that. Speaking about the environment, just wanted an update as to how that feels for you in terms of global sales. Were there any sort of pushouts of sales given some of the dislocation to the equity markets in the -- particularly at the end of the third quarter?

Fortunately for us, we haven't really seen any impact of the volatility in the equity markets in our pipelines, in our sales. Obviously, you do see it in the market value of the ETFs, but that has been equally offset by the inflows of funds into MSCI-linked ETFs, so that has been a wash. So we don't see an impact. And maybe the temporary decline and the rapid uptick in the equity values has no impact [ph] at all. Obviously, it's early days to tell, but so far, so good for us. Georgios Mihalos - Crédit Suisse AG, Research Division: Okay, that's great to hear. And just last question for me. Nice to hear about the demand for more of the index launches. Wondering if you're looking at demand for more ETFs, if you can parse that out between domestic, here in the U.S., and international, what the demand trends might be there?

Yes, the demand for our licenses of our indices for ETFs is really all over the world. It's from the U.S, from Europe and, to some extent, from Asia. Asia is, as we all know, is a little bit behind in terms of the growth of the ETF market. But we're making some progress there in Hong Kong and in China and in other places, in Australia, as an example. So the bulk of the demand right now in terms of numbers and dollar amounts and the numbers of ETF launches, the dollar amounts are in the U.S. and Europe. And in Europe, we recently launched a number of factor indices lines and factor indices to launch of a number of ETFs there a couple of weeks ago. So we are -- we're very, very bullish. I'm very positive about this business and that is as a direct result over the last 2 years, we really have revamped significantly the way we attack this business, the conversation we have with clients, the support that we give ETF providers, with direct clients and also with marketing support, we have a significant outreach program to financial advisors. We have staffed up in our product manager teams. We've staffed up our new product teams in research. So all in, it's been quite a satisfaction to see the great progress we have made, and the results show in terms of the market shares of new launches and the market shares of new fund flows, given our overall aggregate market share.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Bill Warmington from Wells Fargo Securities.

This is Bill DiJohnson for Bill Warmington. I just have a few questions. You said you launched 83 new ETFs in the quarter using MSCI indices. How many were market weighted or factor-based products?

I think the -- my recollection is that many of them were factor indices and, therefore, no [ph]. But we -- I think it'll be best if we follow up with you directly to give you the exact stats.

Yes. We'll get back to you. That was year-to-date. So we'll get back to you, okay?

Yes, that will be great. And then also -- so 13 new market models for Portfolio Management Analytics to date. How many were there launched in 2012 and 2013 for comparison?

Significantly less. I don't have the count in front of me, but we really -- the focus this year, as we talked about, was to commit to a cadence of -- I think we talked about 10 models this year. We're exceeding that performance, and we talked about a continued upgrades in our PPM software, and we fulfilled on that. So this is really -- we have BPM releases last year, but these are the ones that were more significant that we could drive a lot more sales through the BPM platform. So that's really the point that we're trying to make, that we're starting to see the efforts of our investments coming through at a greater cadence this year.

And also satisfying has been that the sales of BPM this quarter exceeded the sales of pretty much every other product line. So that bodes really well for a continuation of the -- not only the content in terms of the models of the data, but also the software application that helps people run the data. As you know, we sell data directly to clients in the form of data, and we also sell it packaged with our software. So that's -- we feel very good about this business, and we'll hear from clients and the prospects and the pace of innovation.

Our next question comes from the line of Toni Kaplan from Morgan Stanley.

In risk management analytics, have you been disappointed that the segment hasn't been growing faster by now? I know this quarter was impacted by FX. But I think even organically, excluding FX, it was still only about 5% growth.

The quarter -- Toni, the quarter-by-quarter sort of look at this business, as you know, it's chunky, right? There are some quarters that we do significantly better, other quarters that we do less. So we tend not to focus on the quarter-by-quarter sales, we tend to focus on what's happening in the pipeline. Are we adding things to the pipeline? Are we closing? Is the pipeline expanding? Or are things getting delayed? Or anything like that. So that's the major focus. We -- in the pipeline, the health of the business is very good. In terms of the number of clients around the world, the type of clients and all of that. Yes, I believe, and all of us believe that this business can do much better than it is doing right now. And that is what we're trying to -- what we're expecting for the next quarters and the next few years, that the rate of growth of this business should accelerate.

Okay, great. And then when you think about fixed income indices, assuming that you're going to build them yourselves as opposed to making an acquisition, would you expect that -- like is there, I guess, something earmarked in your current investment plan to cover that? Or would that be incremental? And is it more of maybe a multi-year investment? And how long could that take to roll out the products out there?

Yes. Definitely, our plans are to selectively look at parts of the fixed income market, and see where we can add value on a differentiated basis as opposed to launch with little growth [ph]. So going into next year and the year after, we will be allocating a part of the budget, not a very large part of the budget, but a small part of the budget to see how we can look at opportunities in the fixed income markets, but in areas that we add our own expertise, our own value, and that we can also create and also differentiate it.

Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with Macquarie.

I wonder if you could give a sense, Bob or Henry, how we're thinking about the step-up in organic growth over the course of '15? And then just with those expenses, how should those kind of layer in over '15 as well? Is it more front-end loaded on '15 and then it gradually steps down? Or just -- any thoughts as we think about the model into '15?

Well, as Henry indicated, we're going to maximize the value of the spend that we've already committed and that we've already seen in our numbers. As we pointed out, the rate of growth on the year-over-year quarter basis is declining. We gave you a pretty good idea of what we're looking at. What I would focus in on and we've been talking about is the new models, the new software, the indexes that are going up. And yes, we're going to see investments that are going to pay off in our sales. And as Henry talked about, putting people on in different locations. As we go back to Investor Day, we talked about what are the products we're going to put out, what sales are we going to generate off of those and the run rate that we build, and you get to the significant revenue growth that we talked about from the Investor Day side [ph]. I'll turn you back to Barra Portfolio Manager. We talked about that as now because now it's really paying off in our business, but that started 3 years ago and it's really come through quite a journey. So you've seen us doing it before, we're doing it now and just keep an eye, we'll be very public on the new products, the AUMS that we're putting out there for you to see.

And then also, Kevin, looking also at the, we ramped up the pace of investment in 2013. We ramped it up in 2014 as well. And when we go area by area in our company from geographic areas to product areas, to functional areas, we -- I think we all feel that we have done a lot. We are very comfortable with the investments that we have made and it's now time to focus or continue to focus on how do we make those as efficient as possible and as payback -- and the payback as large as possible before we entertain any kind of additional levels of investments. And that is a process that we've gone through in the company that we feel very comfortable with, and that we feel that what we've done will pay off. So therefore, there is already clearly an embedded run rate of expenses associated with all of that, that takes you into the future -- the near-term future. But what we're trying to do is now layer on top of that in order to maximize what we've already done. And therefore -- I think you're just going to see a gradual decline quarter-by-quarter of significance in order to converge to the pace of growth of revenues at some point in 2016.

That's helpful. And then, Henry, any thoughts on -- obviously, there's been some M&A activity in this sector. Any sense of -- from a competitive perspective, has that helped capture some incremental share and how you're positioning relative to that?

It's -- in terms of a relative competitive landscape, it's too early to tell on significant numbers. We continue to gather market share, especially in the U.S. domestic benchmark market. If you think about, clearly, the largest market share that we have is American money in terms of the U.S. or it's American money invested overseas and a benchmark to MSCI. We continue to make significant inroads in U.S. money invested in U.S. equities and using MSCI as the benchmark. Well, it's a gradual process that takes place. So we're seeing that and we expect to continue to see that in the context of the competitive landscape. I think on some of the other areas, it's too early to tell at this point.

And then finally, if I could. Any sense of how initial budget discussions -- is it too early in terms of how clients are thinking of '15, or just -- any preliminary indications as they start the budget process into '15?

You mean our budget process or our clients' budget?

Your clients' budgets.

It's too early to tell at the moment. But every indication that we get from clients is that their budgets are not shrinking going into '15. It doesn't mean we're starting to pull market days [ph] in which our people are expanding generously. But every indication that we have in our dialogue with clients is that they are really going back to a more business-as-usual as opposed to a bunkered down, siege mentality that they have been in the last few years. And a lot of it is because their business models -- not only the equity values are healthier, but their business model is healthier. They're beginning to -- the mutual fund complex are launching new funds. Pension plans are given different types of mandate. People are beginning to expand into other geographic areas and the like. There is not as much consolidation of the asset management industry and so on and so forth. But there are pockets of -- or significant areas of caution, right? In the European market, clearly has an economic slowdown there. So we have to see how that impacts, in China as well. U.S. is a very good market for us, obviously, given the outperformance economically and in terms of markets as well. So I think that 2015 will be an incrementally good year for us and for our clients.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Shutler from William Blair. Christopher Shutler - William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division: On the RMA business, the retention rate there looked quite a bit better than it has been. So can you talk about what drove the improvement over what were already pretty good levels? And I find it particularly interesting, since I know some of the competitors in that business have become more aggressive over the last, let's say, 9 or 12 months. So anything to read into the quarter?

We have focused really intensely on our retention rates. So if you sit back at the end [ph] and look at the totality of the environment, we have known clearly for a couple of years that making your numbers strictly on new sales to clients at a time in which the budgets are relaxing, but not expanding dramatically. Therefore, in order to get your run rate growth to levels that are acceptable, we are very much focused on what do we do to retain as much of the book as possible. And therefore, some time ago, 2 or 3 years ago, we started focusing on the renewal of a contract with the client way ahead of time, how is the client using the product, what kind of support do we give them, what experiences are they having with the client experience process that we go through, what experience are they having, are they getting their -- the processing of their portfolios in the case work turned in on time? And things like that. So in the last 1.5 years, we put a lot of effort into the performance of the processing, the stability of the processing, the servicing of the client directly, the advising to the client as to how to do all of that, and that has paid back in spades, in spades, to this exceptionally high retention levels. We have fortified enormously our technology team. We added Chris Corrado, a year or so ago. She's a real pro and a leader in technology. She's brought in a team of senior technologies that are in state-of-the-art in technology. We put a lot of effort in data quality on these client experience and the integration between the client service people all the way back to the technology people. So a lot of this has been hard work and investments. But as you can see, it's paying back in spades. Christopher Shutler - William Blair & Company L.L.C., Research Division: All right. Henry, and then you talked about a strong pipeline. I mean, it's somewhat complex with -- although, I realize the short-term data point, just the decline sequentially in the sales. Just curious if you could flesh out for us as investors, how do you qualify the pipeline? I mean, how do you measure the pipeline? And if you can't share any quantitative metrics, what is it that gives you confidence? Is it a higher number of inbound client inquiries, higher number of meetings, et cetera?

That was a very good question. And as I said before in answer to Toni's question, we feel good about where we are in terms of sales with the RMA business, but we can do a lot better than this, right? And I don't want to mince any words. We can do better than this. This is a business that, over time, should be growing much faster. And therefore, we're very focused on what are the areas of the market where growth is faster. So for example, asset owners and consultants, that's an area of the market that we're doing really well and, therefore, can we double-up on that, right? We're doing very well in Asia in risk management analytic sales. We -- our growth rate there is in the high teens, low 20s. So can we put more effort into that area? We're beginning to have a revival of sales in pensions that for some time they were very challenged. Can we put more effort there? We have areas of weaknesses. The banks have been weak. Pretty much every spending by the banks on risk management analytics has been only for regulatory agreement purposes. So we say, "Okay, why don't we -- can we slow down a lot of the push into that area?" Asset managers in Europe and in the U.S. given -- especially in Europe, given the challenging kind of view of the environment, we have -- it has been a little bit weaker for us. And Europe, in general, has been weaker for us. So I think what we're trying to focus on is, how do we look at the areas of higher growth and put a lot more efforts there? And before we were trying to -- we have been trying to cover everything. So how do we reassign our efforts? And then secondly, how do we try to integrate a lot more than we have done before between -- just like the example I gave with that pension plan, right? Between our portfolio management analytics tools, our risk management analytics tool, the content that we produce in IPD and ESG and index, how do we package it all into an integrated process and integrated platform to drive more sales? And we're very hopeful and very optimistic that, that will yield very good results.

And we have a question from the line of Joseph Foresi from Janney Montgomery Scott.

I was wondering, could you give us a rough timeframe around how long it takes for either a new software product or some change in the index or new index to pay off? Are we looking at a 3-, 6- or 12-month time frame? I'm just trying to gauge a rough idea of what we can expect from all the investments.

Yes, Joe, I will go back to the comments that I was making earlier. It's -- it was part of the near-term investments when we make investment in sales, people or coverage teams that are out there, those are nearer. But we are talking the notable new products, a really good example would be Barra Portfolio Manager. In our comments, we said, we're in our third year of that development, we're starting to see the meaningful sales and the retention rates in there. Indexes can be varied. I mean, an index, we've put them out there. It's a question of how long it takes sales of AUMs to get attracted to those indexes. And as we said in our Investor Day, that we developed these indexes, these models and these software updates in close connectivity with our clients. And so we believe going into it, there's client-correlated demand. And as we've indicated, to keep an eye on the sales of those products as they are released.

Got it. Okay. And then just on the competitive environment, in general. Have you seen any changes in either win rates or pricing, which I know is usually pretty static? And it seems like, obviously, we've had a very good run as far as passive investment is concerned. I'd like to get your overall view of where we are in the cycle, if we are in one, and where you think it's going to head over the next couple of years?

The competition has remained more or less where it was the last few quarters. The more positive news has been that on the index business, we have gained more -- even more share in competition, particularly in those areas that we are being traditionally strong, such as domestic benchmarks for countries. I gave the example of the U.S. a few minutes ago, right? So that has been pretty good. We have increased our share equated with [ph] the competition on factor indices quite dramatically. On the portfolio management analytics product line, we have won more than we have lost completely in terms of competition there. We actually have brought back clients that we have lost in the last 3 or 4 years. So that's been pretty good. On the run rate, the competition is pretty stable there from what it has been in the last few quarters. So now what's going to happen? I think that within most of the areas going forward, we will be even more competitive. We will gain more share as a whole in the company. And in all areas, we'll fight out stronger [ph], right? But it's too early to tell.

And I'm showing no more questions in the queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to management for closing remarks.

Thanks, Roland. We want to thank everyone on the call for their interest and ownership of MSCI, and we hope you have a great day.