Lance Uggla
Analyst · Anj Singh with Credit Suisse. Your line is now open
Yes. Well, so we did a lot of detailed work on the revenue side building up our models, but the $100 million for us that we are committing in the first 3 years, this is our low hanging fruit. It doesn’t include any of our transformative, bigger things that we will work on and we see providing long-term growth, but if you really want to take it down to what’s easy to do? What can people get off the ground running immediately? So, Markit has nearly $100 billion of AUM against its indices built up over the last several years. So, we are an active player in the index market. Passive investment, as you know, is increasing. In equities, it’s about 3.5% of the market. But in fixed income, it’s less than 1%. I think it’s a 0.25%. So, passive investment strategies are growing. Markit’s position, but the way you make money in the index space is having unique content. And Markit’s unique content is generally around our credit market expertise. Now, our unique content as IHS Markit is across multiple content sets, energy, automotive, defense, aerospace, chemicals, all of economic and country risk, political risk. These are all very interesting what you would call index overlays. So, that’s going to easily drive a 1% organic growth as a kind of a low hanging fruit that we will go after over the next 3 years. Second one that we see is very low hanging fruit. IHS has created some great products that they already sell into the finance area. But guess what, they only have 25 salespeople selling into finance. Now, we have ’ve got several hundred sales people selling into finance and we are going to sell IHS Vantage, Mint, global view and the products of IHS that are actually ready for financial market participants. And we will expand the content in them to be even more valuable. So, that be the second, so throw another 1% down to the IHS products coming across. The third 1% building up into this $100 million is Markit is positioned to lead, win and execute in Know Your Customer and Know Your Third Party. We are 1 of 1, 1 of 2, maximum 1 of 3 players that has invested tens of millions in building out the platforms to deliver transformational change and help the industry reduce costs. You have to realize the big financial market participants in the future like payroll was in the late 80s, no institution does payroll anymore. And guess what? No institution will collect corporate and financial documents to make a KYC decision. They need those, but they don’t all need to collect them individually. Not everybody is going to do a due diligence on their supply chain individually. Everybody needs to do it. So, these are managed services where together, 50,000 customers gives us an unparalleled competitive advantage, low hanging fruit to accelerate the growth of those two platforms. We also have a tax utility that we sell into the financial markets that’s growing with the global need for U.S. for FACTA, but also 200 countries now signing up to common reporting standards to collect tax. We have the world’s leading tax utility, tax service led out of our offices in Andover near Boston. And guess what, we are already moving into that corporate space, but in a challenging way, but guess what, we don’t have any sales force covering corporates. Now we have hundreds. So coming up with $100 million was not a tall order. That’s a defensible, achievable, identifiable number that we hang our hats on. But our future gains in revenue will come from taking some of our free cash flow and any additional savings that we can create and investing them back into our future. And our future will be platforms for delivery allowing us to leverage the cloud for storage, processing and delivery and distribution to put us on an unparalleled path relative to our peers. And secondly, which will also continue to feed into improved margins relative to the installed and the CapEx required in the old business models. And then secondly, taking our combined content and creating new products. That’s what’s excited for our team. When we look in the eyes of our colleagues and we say this is what our combined asset set is, that’s when it gets exciting. It’s not just about doing what we do today. It’s about looking forward and doing things new for tomorrow that’s going to motivate and excite our employees, because we are people-based companies. And when your employees are excited, your customers are excited and you make money and that’s what we plan to do.