SPGIS&P Global Inc.

S&P Global is a ratings agency and index owner: it charges for assessing debt and for the use of its indices.

The ratings business assesses the credit quality of issuers and issues. Income depends on bond issuance volume: when money is expensive, companies borrow less and revenue falls. It is a cyclical business but with a high barrier to entry — the market is divided among a few agencies.

The index business owns the S&P 500 and its associated families. Fund managers pay for the right to build products on them, and the fee scales with fund assets. That revenue grows with the popularity of passive investing and requires almost no cost — it is essentially intellectual-property licensing.

The third part is market data, analytics and commodity market information following the IHS Markit merger. Together these make the company market infrastructure rather than a market participant: it earns from the fact that trading exists at all. The dividend has risen for many consecutive years.