Helen Shan: Hi, thanks for that question. Yes, you’re right. We — as Linda had talked about, we thought a bit of the recovery would improve more quickly into the second half of the year, it’s probably a little bit later. And so what we’re hearing right now and clients are sort of finishing up their budgeting process that most budgets are probably more flat. And what — but they’re still being asked to do a lot more with what they have. And as I mentioned before, their ability to scale is still something that’s top of mind. So to your point around the six to seven figure deals, yes, certainly, some of that will depend on budgets improving. As mentioned, some of the benefit we have in our open platform is you can do things in pieces. So you don’t have to commit to the whole redo of a platform, for example. But certainly, as more dollars are being allocated to technology and GenAI, we feel we’re pretty well positioned to take advantage of that.
Ashish Sabadra: That’s very helpful color. Thanks.
Helen Shan: Welcome.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Surinder Thind from Jefferies LLC.
Surinder Thind: Hi, Linda, just a big picture question here. I guess if I’m interpreting your prepared comments correctly, it seems like you’re attributing some of the change in your outlook to kind of the market recovery taking maybe a bit longer than that — than what you guys had anticipated back in September. But I guess given how much sentiment has improved since that time or at least in the last 45 days, like can you help me understand why this is the case? Like could you not argue that from where we stand today, the outlook from a client perspective should be more positive now than when you initially gave guidance? Like — it seems like there’s a bit of a disconnect, and I’m not sure if there’s some near-term dynamics here because I know October was obviously very negative from a sentiment perspective and then we had a complete reversal.
So I’m just not sure if we’re seeing the reversal yet in people are still kind of focused on the October — the sentiment at that point in time. It just seems like there’s a bit of a disconnect here.
Linda Huber: Yes. It’s a perfectly fair question and one that I sort of wrestled with as we were getting ready for this call. So we originally gave guidance on September 21. You will recall that then we had the very tragic events of October 7, which made the macro situation even more difficult. So we gave guidance before that piece happened. And sentiment, frankly, got worse. We’re coming to the calendar year-end for a lot of our clients, budgets got thinner, they tightened their belts yet again. And then last Wednesday, we got what I think everybody considers to be a bit of a surprise from Chairman Powell. I like this expression of he shot the bears. The market has turned dramatically and hard. Is it ahead of itself? It could be.
But what I said before is really very important. The hiring in — for some of our clients is a lagging indicator. So we have to work through that, clear that, take the impact of what’s going on with the Credit Suisse situation in our second quarter in a conservative way and then get back on track, which we are looking to do. And I think, yes, the unusual combination of our fiscal year-end. And when some pretty big news events have happened — have caused what you might consider to be a bit of a disconnect, but I hope that the explanation has helped you. So we’re quite optimistic, and I’m going to turn it over to Phil to sort of bring us in for a landing here. But we very much appreciate your point of view and your question and your notes on timing, probably pretty appropriate, but we are excited about what’s coming next.
And maybe Phil can comment on that.
Phil Snow: Yes. Thanks, Linda. So yes, I mean, the sales cycles for our clients do take some time particularly for our enterprise solutions. So I really hope sentiment has turned and like we spoke about on this call that it’s just a question of timing. So to summarize, we’re very excited, obviously, about artificial intelligence. We have a lot of FactSetters out in the market, working with our clients and nothing beats sort of showing the product to the client and getting that wow back from them. So we’re all really behind this. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last year, and I feel like we’re really in good shape versus the competition based on what I’m seeing. We did take the guidance down just because the turn is taking a bit longer than we thought, which we just spoke to.
Second quarter will be a little slower than planned just to summarize. So we may be taking a bit of a conservative view there. And we did mention the — in particular, the Credit Suisse acquisition by UBS, which was well known. And then just to summarize, I’m going to give a bit of a plug for FactSet Focus. So we’re having our flagship user event in Miami this April and the beginning of May. It’s the first time we’ve done this in a number of years. We’re bringing together top thought leaders, industry experts and key decision-makers from both the finance and tech sectors. We’re really going to be focused very heavily on artificial intelligence and really demonstrating what we’ve done there. And hopefully, that will be really engaging for anyone that attends.
So that’s it. We’ll see you all next quarter. Operator, that ends today’s call.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
