MSCI (MSCI) FY2025 results: revenue $3.1 billion, up 9.7% on the year

MSCI sells research-based data, analytics and indexes to investors. Its clients use them to define an investment universe, make asset allocation decisions, build and analyse portfolios, measure and manage the drivers of investment risk and performance, design and run indexed products such as exchange-traded funds, and produce regulatory and client reports. As of 31 December 2025 it served approximately 6,800 clients in more than 100 countries. Clients buy primarily through recurring fixed and variable fee arrangements, the variable part moving with market levels and client activity. Its largest client organisation by revenue in 2025 was BlackRock, at 10.8% of consolidated operating revenues, and 96.5% of what BlackRock paid came from fees based on the assets held in BlackRock funds that track MSCI indexes.

Who buys it

Asset managers, including managers of institutional funds and accounts, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and private-markets general partners; banks and brokerages, including broker-dealers, custodians, proprietary market makers and fund administrators; asset owners, including pension funds, endowments, foundations, investment consultants, central banks, sovereign wealth funds and single family offices; hedge fund managers; wealth managers; insurers and reinsurers; and others including exchanges, vendors, real estate professionals, academic institutions and companies themselves.

How it is organised

There were five operating segments in 2025, presented as three reportable ones: Index, Analytics, and Sustainability and Climate, with Real Assets and Private Capital Solutions combined and shown as All Other, Private Assets, because neither met the threshold for separate disclosure. The Sustainability and Climate segment was retitled from ESG and Climate in the first quarter of 2025, without any change to what sits inside it.

Index

Clients use the indexes to build indexed products such as exchange-traded funds, mutual funds, annuities, futures, options, structured products and over-the-counter derivatives, and to benchmark performance, construct and rebalance portfolios, allocate assets and create custom indexes. The market cap indexes measure the performance of global equity markets; at the end of 2025 MSCI calculated indexes covering more than 80 developed, emerging, frontier and standalone equity markets, plus global, regional, sector and industry indexes built from them. Factor indexes track the performance characteristics of investment styles such as momentum or value. The segment also licenses GICS Direct, the global industry classification standard developed and maintained jointly with S&P Dow Jones Indices, which classifies companies and securities by sector, industry group, industry and sub-industry. Clients reach the index data directly or through third-party vendors.

Analytics

Risk management, performance attribution and portfolio management content, applications and services, giving an integrated view of risk and return and tools for analysing market, credit, liquidity, counterparty and climate risk across public and private securities over short, medium and long horizons. The toolkit includes the Barra equity models and fixed income and multi-asset class models, pricing models and single security analytics, stress testing, performance attribution, portfolio optimisation and liquidity risk analytics, together with inputs such as interest rate and credit curves. Clients reach it through MSCI's own applications and programming interfaces, third-party applications, or their own platforms. The segment also runs managed services, consolidating a client's portfolio data from several sources and reconciling inputs and results, and the RiskMetrics HedgePlatform service lets funds of funds, pension funds and endowments monitor the risk of their hedge fund investments.

Sustainability and Climate

This segment was 11.3% of revenues in 2025. Its research team analyses entities worldwide and sells to asset managers, asset owners, wealth managers, banks, insurers, consultants, advisers, regulators, central banks and corporates. The offerings are ESG ratings, which score a company's resilience to long-term environmental, social and governance risks on an industry-relative scale; Business Involvement Screening Research, a screening service reached through the MSCI ONE platform or a data feed; climate data and tools for measuring climate risk exposure and implementing low-carbon strategies; Geospatial Asset Intelligence, which examines location-specific physical and nature-related exposures for individual real assets; and regulatory solutions for sustainability disclosure. The same data feeds the company's sustainability and climate equity and fixed income indexes.

Private assets

Data and analytics for evaluating and comparing private equity, private credit, real estate, infrastructure and other private markets: datasets on companies, funds and transactions, standardised classifications, benchmarks, portfolio analytics for performance measurement, attribution, scenario analysis and risk, and tools for limited partner and general partner reporting. On the real assets side, Real Capital Analytics aggregates transaction data on market pricing, capital flows and investment trends in more than 170 countries; Index Intel is a private real estate database used to drive allocation decisions; and Property Intel analyses commercial real estate in the Nordics, covering rental levels, holdings, transactions, ownership, occupiers, footfall and lease data. Private Capital Portfolio Management gives investment, risk and operations teams the tools to monitor private capital portfolios.

From MSCI's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 6 February 2026: read the full 10-K.