Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the MSCI Third Quarter 2011 Earnings Conference Call. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will follow at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Edings Thibault, Head of Investors Relations. You may begin.

Thank you very much operator, and I’m delighted to be joined this morning by Mr. Henry Fernandez, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MSCI and Mr. David Obstler, the Chief Financial Officer. Thank you all for joining us on our third quarter 2011 earnings call. Please note that earlier this morning we issued a press release describing our results for the third quarter and nine months 2011. A copy of that release can be viewed on our website at MSCI.com under the Investor Relations tab. This presentation may contain forward-looking statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date in which they are made which reflects 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 the future results of the company, please see the description of risk factors and forward-looking statements in our Form 10-K for our fiscal year ended November 30, 2010 and on our Form 10-Q for the third quarter of 2011 that will be filed. Today’s earnings call may also include discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS. Adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS exclude the following. Third-party transaction expenses resulting from the acquisition of risk metrics, restructuring costs related to the acquisition of risk metrics and non-recurring stock-based expense. Adjusted EPS also excludes the amortization of intangibles resulting from acquisitions and debt repayment and refinancing expenses. Please refer to today’s earnings release 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 rates frequently in our discussion this morning, so…

Thank you, Edings. Good morning and thank you for joining us. This morning we reported third quarter revenues of $225 million, adjusted EBITDA of $104 million and adjusted EPS of $0.49. Year-to-date we reported revenues of $675 million, adjusted EBITDA of $315 million and adjusted EPS of $1.39. Our third quarter revenues grew by 11% versus third quarter 2010, and our adjusted EBITDA rose 19% compared to the same period last year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin rose to 46% from 43%, and our adjusted EPS rose 48% versus the third quarter of 2010. Our third quarter run rate rose by 8% year-over-year to $876 million. Total sales remain at a healthy level. Despite choppy markets our retention rates remain strong, driving continued growth in our subscription run rate. The decline in the equity markets worldwide during the quarter did impact the growth of our asset based fee run rate especially on a sequential basis. Total sales were $38 million in the third quarter. New recurring subscription sales were $32 million, down 10% from a strong third quarter 2010 but up 4% from the second quarter of this year. Our sales in Asia, especially in Japan, remain strong. The U.S. market for us was stable and Europe was surprisingly steady despite the headlines. During the quarter our sales to asset owners were strong and banks and broker dealers were surprisingly resilient. Our sales to asset managers remain stable and our hedge fund sales remain weak. Our retention rate overall remains strong. The third quarter aggregate retention rate rose to 91% from 88% a year ago, as total cancellations declined more than 20%. Our year-to-date retention rate is up 3% to 92%. The fact that our retention rate is holding in the low 90s validates the importance and mission critical nature of…

Thank you, Henry. Before we get started, I want to remind everyone that we closed the acquisition of RiskMetrics on June 1, 2010, the first day of MSCI’s 2010 fiscal third quarter. That means that all of the quarterly comparisons we are making represent the actual results of the company on a combined basis. MSCI reported revenues of $225 million in the third quarter of 2011 and $675 million for the first nine months of the year. MSCI’s third quarter revenue growth was driven by 20% growth in index and ESG product revenues and a 13% growth in risk management analytics revenues. These gains were offset by a 5% decline in governance revenues. By type of revenue, subscription revenues grew 7%, asset-based fees grew 39% and non-recurring revenues were essentially flat. By segment, performance and risk revenues grew by 14% year-over-year to a $196 million in the third quarter of 2011. Governance revenues, as I noted earlier, declined 5% to $29 million. As a result of a shift in strategy within the ISS corporate business we now have a greater percentage of sales, as Henry mentioned earlier, coming from recurring subscriptions rather than non-recurring sales, which is having a modestly negative impact on recorded revenues during the quarter prior period comparisons. Overall, adjusted EBITDA expenses, which exclude depreciation and amortization, non-recurring stock-based compensation, restructuring costs and transaction expenses rose 5% year-over-year to a $121 million. Our compensation costs rose by 5% also to $85 million. As Henry mentioned, we have been able to leverage our emerging market centers to mitigate the financial impact of our ongoing investments in our employee base. In the past 12 months we’ve grown our employee base by 10% including a 7% increase in the third quarter. The majority of this growth has come in emerging…

(Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Suzie Stein of Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Suzanne Stein – Morgan Stanley: Hi, good morning. I am just wondering if you could update us on any conversations you’ve had with ETF providers, particularly BlackRock in regard to your fee structure just given the tone of the market and given the recent filing by BlackRock to be an index provider.

Yeah, Suzie, there is absolutely no change whatsoever on our fee structure with any index, EPS provider anywhere in the world. There are no discussions or conversations about changes to our fee structure of any nature with anybody. With respect to BlackRock we have a great relationship getting stronger and we’re trying to do more things together around the world. So, no change whatsoever there. Suzanne Stein – Morgan Stanley: Okay. And then what’s been the response for the new equity models released this quarter? Are clients paying for the upgrade or is this part of the subscription? And then, is there a higher price point for new clients?

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. There are a lot of people who have been part of the beta-test of this model who have seen how robust the new model is with respect to forecasting expected returns on risk and portfolios in any market. Let me pass it on to David with respect to the fee structure.

Yeah. We are in upselling, selling through the model to clients and achieving success. It’s early days. We’re just out with it. But as Henry mentioned, the response from the clients is it’s been positive.

The other thing that I would highlight is that this model was built with a lot of new modeling methodologies, and it’s the first of a long series of models that we will be launching that have this improvement. A few of those models, for example, will be launched before the end of the year, another one will be in the first quarter and in the balance of 2012.

Thank you. Our next question is from David Togut of Evercore Partners. Your line is open. David Togut – Evercore Partners: Thank you, and good morning.

Good morning. David Togut – Evercore Partners: Could you give us an update, David, on the current rate of RiskMetrics related cost savings in the September quarter and whether you see an opportunity to achieve additional cost savings in the next 12 months?

Yeah, thanks. We reported in the last quarter that we achieved our target, $50 million, and that that had run through the financial statements and closed the book on that chapter. As far as going forward we are making investments in the business, in the risk business, in a number of different areas, as well as continuing to work as we do every quarter on our cost structure in areas of non-compensation such as market data, IP, etcetera. Those numbers are flowing through the growth rates in our cost structure, which as we said is 5% in comp and non-comp in the quarter. David Togut – Evercore Partners: I see. And then, Henry, you highlighted 27 net new ETFs that were linked to your indices in the quarter. Do you have a good sense of the pipeline of new ETFs that might link to your indices in the next 6 to 12 months?

There’s not a great deal of change on the pipeline. Clearly this is a product line that has remained resilient worldwide regarding the flows of assets, net new so to speak or net flows of assets, compared to – like for example mutual funds. I think many ETF providers, even though cautious, continue to work hard at launching new products.

Thank you. Our next question is from Robert Riggs of William Blair. Your line is now open. Robert Riggs – William Blair & Company: Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Could you just give us an update on your plans for hiring in the coming quarters? It sounded like Q2, Q3 were big hiring quarters. And then a follow up on that would be, will there be more of a focus on kind of content development or sales or both?

I think we will continue to hire new staff at a steady pace, especially staff in our emerging market centers. We believe very strongly that the secular wins for pretty much everything we do get even more reinforced and even more positive for us during periods of crisis like this, obviously from passive management to bridge management to quantitative tools to help in optimizing portfolios, to governance and so on and so forth. So therefore we are very keen on continuing to invest in our distribution channels. So, a lot of our people – a lot of the people that we’re hiring are in sales and client service and consultant and the like to work directly with clients. And we’re also very keen on continuing to invest and launch new products pretty much across the board. We’re launching new indices, we’re clearly launching a lot of new models and software in the Barra business. We’re investing also in the risk management business, in performance contribution and (inaudible) risk and liquidity risk, and as you saw non-private – as I said non-liquid assets for asset owners, and so on and so forth. And all of that is already baked into the cost structure of the company. So the additional headcount I think is not going to put an inordinate amount of pressure at all on our financials.

As we mentioned in the remarks, the net hiring is in the emerging markets and that has enabled us to add these heads but control the costs, the compensation costs related to that. Robert Riggs – William Blair & Company: Great, thank you.

(Operator Instructions) Our next question is from Michael Weisberg of Crestwood Capital. Your line is open. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: Hi, everyone. How are you?

How are you doing Michael? Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: Good. Couple of things, could you – the index business, could you give us a sense of the run rate on a sequential basis constant currency? Is there a way of doing that?

Well, there are customary numbers. Michael, the Index business is largely prized in dollars. The index subscription business, not the ETF, right, not the asset based fees, it's largely priced in dollars pretty much all over the world. There are very, very few exceptions to that. The businesses that are part of the run rate is in foreign currencies, for example, the risk management analyst business and the PMA, the Portfolio Management Analytics business, but the Index business is largely devoid of any sort of foreign exchange issues. Now, clearly, on the ETF part, the majority of the Indices that we have and the ETF linked to those Indices are non-dollar denominated Indices that get translated into dollars as listed in the U.S. for example.

Yeah. Just to follow up, Michael. The impact in the quarter on the run rate in the benchmark business was less than $400,000. As Henry mentioned, most of the contracts are denominated in dollars. Most of the run rate difference, which is a little under $6 million, was in the Risk Management Analytics business, where more of the contracts are in Euros et cetera. So, as far as the benchmark business is concerned, negligible effect on the run rate in the benchmark business from currencies. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: Well, because I guess the follow-up would be, you were flat sequentially. Now you were flat sequentially last year as well in the second and third, is that because of a decline in non-subscription business? Because you would think based on the ACV that your revenues would be up sequentially? In the Index business, I’m sorry.

Yeah. The Index business was up 2.8% sequentially in the quarter on a run rate basis. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: I’m talking about revenues. The revenues were flat.

The revenues would mainly be related to two things. One is the AUM, as we mentioned, where the average assets under management were lower, and there are small and recurring non-recurring sales, one-time sales in periods-to-periods that have that effect down into the single percentages or so. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: Okay. Again, I was talking about flatness in the index business, not the ETF business. ETF I understand. I was talking about flatness in the Index business.

And that would most likely be related to the one-time sales and the timing of those sales with a one-time sale in one period versus the other. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: I see. Okay.

The subscription business, the benchmark was up 2.8% sequentially in run rate. That is – to remind everybody that doesn’t include the non-recurring sale. So, this effect down into these percentages is related to whether you have a one-time sale in one quarter versus another. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: I see. That’s affected that.

Yeah. Michael Weisberg – Crestwood Capital: What kind of challenge do you see in the fourth quarter in the risk business? Just because I think traditionally a lot of the subscriptions come up for renewal fourth quarter. Should we expect a material jump in cancel rates in the fourth quarter?

It’s hard to say, to forecast, Michael, right now. But, what we can say is that the secular demand for risk management analytics gets even stronger in environments like this. Our pipeline remains pretty healthy, but the RMA business is lumpy. For example, in this quarter, this third quarter of 2011 compared to the third quarter of 2010, it may look unfavorable because there were very strong sales, particularly to U.S. asset managers in the third quarter of 2010. Some of that would delay purchases that people delay because of the closing of the RiskMetrics acquisition. There was a little bit of uncertainty there from the second quarter and therefore they slipped into the third quarter. Overall we’re not worried per se about the level of fundamental demand for risk management analytics among our client base worldwide. As I said, this quarter, this third quarter, it was particularly strong with asset owners, pension funds in risk management. It remains weak on hedge funds. Part of that has been the way we’ve approach the market, and we’re making changes to that and re-pricing certain products to the lower end of the market so we can also participate there. Part of it is that many hedge funds have been very negative about the market outlook during the third quarter.

Yes, Michael. As you’ve been following, there is a weighting in the fourth quarter. It’s not our most weighted. The governance business is more weighted in terms of renewals, but there is a weighting. That would mean on the same retention rate you would have more cancels than you’ve seen in previous periods. But, the weighting is not very significant in the RMA business.

Thank you. Our next question is from David Scharf of JMP Securities. Your line is now open. David Scharf – JMP Securities: Great. Thank you. Good morning. I had a question on risk as well. The new sales were I think stronger than certainly I was looking for. You mentioned in the press release strong growth particularly from BarraOne. I’m wondering, Henry, can you kind of bring us up-to-date on a year post the RiskMetrics acquisition? Just how BarraOne and RiskManager are sort of positioned side-by-side in the market. I mean I can recall when RiskMetrics was standalone and we would ask about BarraOne, and the response usually was they really didn’t cross paths in the sales cycle. Just trying to get a sense for how they’re positioned, what different types of customers perhaps they’re going after and whether there’s some integration down the road or cannibalization.

Yes. Good question. We don’t see pretty much any cannibalization between these two product lines. They are positioned differently in the sense that BarraOne is ideally suited for what we call asset owners, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations and the like. RiskManager on the other hand, is ideally suited for hedge funds, multi-strategy, large multi-strategy hedge funds. So, the overlap in between is asset managers, and within asset managers RiskManager is more well-suited for wealth managers, and that’s been a very strong market for us, although from clearly low levels. Then asset managers, not only asset managers per se, there’s some that BarraOne would be better for them and there’s some that RiskManager would be better for them, and we end up looking at what is the best approach for them. RiskManager is also fairly well-suited for banks and broker dealers on the sales side, especially in the prime brokers operations. That’s an area that this quarter, when I mentioned in the beginning that banks and broker dealers were surprisingly resilient it’s on the heels of good sales of risk management analytics or officially RiskManager per se for that segment of the market. So, I think between these two product lines covering pretty much the wide spectrum of different client segments and various use cases worldwide, we feel that we are extremely well positioned, and with a strong secular demand for risk management analytics. The issue for us clearly is to deal with the lumpiness of these sales. One quarter will be great, the next one will be less great and the like, and to continue to make sure we invest in the product line to deliver the functionality and the services that clients are demanding. David Scharf – JMP Securities: Okay. That’s a helpful distinction. Following that route of geography, I know RiskManager historically has gotten anywhere from 40% upwards of 50% of new sales from Europe. On the BarraOne side, this is a few quarters in a row where you’ve highlighted pension funds in particular, so I assume that, that’s BarraOne. Are those all U.S. based, from the asset owner standpoint and BarraOne in particular, is there a European pipeline of substance or is it primarily focused on domestic sales for the time being?

Well, the pipeline is across the world, from BarraOne sales in Japan to Europe and the U.S. Obviously the U.S., especially the U.S. public pension fund market has been a pretty sweet spot for us. In the old days, corporate pension funds – you know, if you go back 20 years or so, corporate pension funds were the ones at the leading age of best practices and risk management and other areas. Today the public pension funds are the ones that are leading the charge. So, we have been very successful with public pension plans in the U.S. and around the world, and we’re now beginning to develop quite a good pipeline of corporate pension plans. In Europe we have a few new clients that are in the 401(k), the equivalent of the design contribution space, especially in the U.K. We’ve got some good clients in Scandinavia. As I said, some of the public and private – public and corporate pension plans in Japan, the one area that we are still struggling to penetrate is asset owners in Mainland China for example. We have two or three of the salient, big clients there. China Investment Corp for example is a client of BarraOne. We made a public announcement about that a few months ago. We have just returned from China last week. One of the things we’re trying to figure out is how to sell some of these systems in a market that is a little bit cautious about using on-line ASP solutions.

Also to add another aspect of the asset owner client base has been in our hedge fund transparency business where the fund-to-fund and other asset owners have been strong. That’s been in Europe as well as in United States. So that’s been a strength for us also in the asset owner area.

That was as a result of the acquisition in July of 2010 of the Measurisk, a small company that we bought from JPMorgan. We merged it into a product called Hedge Platform that was part of RiskMetrics. It took us almost a year to re-engineer that combination and find alternative sources of data and the like. But now it’s beginning to go into high gear. That’s an area of meaningful growth for us in the next years to come. David Scharf – JMP Securities: Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I’ll turn the call back over for closing remarks.

Thank you, Latoya and thank you everyone for joining us. Have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference. You may now disconnect. Good day.