Kunal Kapoor’s 2025 Letter to Shareholders

Dear fellow shareholders,

2025 was a good year for Morningstar’s business. We delivered broad-based revenue growth, achieved new highs in operating and adjusted operating income, and made tangible progress on the goals we set for ourselves. We are pleased with our success in executing our strategy, the resilience of our business model, and the dedication of our teams.

In 2025, artificial intelligence dominated the headlines, with nearly every week bringing reports of new use cases. Markets rewarded companies seen as leaders in this area, as reflected in the Morningstar PitchBook GenAI 20 Index, which substantially outperformed the broader US market during the year. As always, we view such developments with interest—but also with patience and a long-term perspective.

Our focus remains on building a business that compounds value over time. I strongly believe that Morningstar is well positioned to benefit as AI tools proliferate. We are incorporating AI where it strengthens our moat, improving how we gather and organize data, enhancing the usefulness of our products, and helping our teams work more effectively.

Since our founding, Morningstar has grown by embracing change and new technologies while staying anchored to our mission of empowering investor success. Today is no different.

Morningstar has long focused on creating value by removing friction for investors— collecting and curating difficult-to-source data, applying judgment, and translating that data into actionable insights, leveraging trusted, proprietary frameworks. We believe this work and the confidence of our clients will become more important in an AI-enabled world. We expect AI models will become ubiquitous and cheap, while high-quality, structured, and verifiable data backed by human insight will become even more valuable.

We believe our competitive strength rests on four distinct but reinforcing capabilities: Data provides the foundation, research applies judgment, intellectual property creates a shared language of investing, and software allows our clients to leverage those insights to scale their workflows.

Our foundation is built on decades of human-curated financial data across public and private markets, built through sourcing and transformation methods that, on the whole, are difficult to replicate with the rigor and reliability that investors demand. We have continually evolved our use of technology, from early automation to more advanced AI-enabled capabilities, reducing repetitive tasks while maintaining high standards for quality and consistency. Today, we use human-in-the-loop methods to collect, standardize, and enrich data across public and private markets.

In the relatively opaque private markets, we work with millions of raw, unstructured data points from disparate sources that are updated at unpredictable intervals. We develop proprietary datasets through primary surveys, proprietary league tables, Freedom of Information Act responses, and journalist-led research. In the public markets, where investors face an expanding and increasingly complex universe of investment options, our data provides structure and consistency. Common data definitions help investors to more easily compare investments across vehicles and investment types such as open‑end and exchange‑traded funds. Together these efforts have produced longitudinal datasets with the depth, breadth, quality, and timeliness that we view as essential to earning and sustaining investor trust and critical to the accuracy of AI models.

As more clients use our platforms, we refine our data collection and enrichment processes based on how our data is used in practice. Our clients’ usage patterns demonstrate the value of our data: The vast majority of PitchBook user engagement, for example, occurs on company profiles that have been enriched with difficult-to-source data and IP such as valuations, financials, and financing history.

We layer research—including analyst white papers and reports, articles, and insights— on top of data to help empower investor decision-making. As of Dec. 31, 2025, our roughly 130 public equity researchers covered 1,600-plus stocks, while proprietary ratings on more than 300,000 managed investment share classes reflected at least one input from our approximately 130-person-strong manager research team.

Our research is timely, and our independent viewpoint shines through. For example, while we believe in the broad theme of public/private convergence, our manager research analysts have been unsparing in their criticism of many of the initial semiliquid funds available to retail investors. Rooted in transparency, this research also guides how we expand into new and evolving areas of the market, as analysts help identify the data points that matter most, shaping the datasets we build and the analytics we develop.

Expert human judgment matters even more today. Our clients have a lot at stake. They range from individuals who are making significant life decisions about saving and investing to financial professionals with fiduciary responsibilities managing large amounts of money. Our experienced analysts provide the expertise to help ground and add credibility to our offerings. We believe the combination of AI for scale and speed and analysts for quality and insight is essential to sustaining relevance and building long-term value. Make no mistake, though: Our analysts know that they need to constantly up their game to deliver essential insights.

We have an established record of creating a shared language of investing to help investors sort the signal from the noise. The intellectual property we build on the foundation of our data and research, enriched by thoughtful design and iconography, supports our efforts as we extend this language into growing areas of the market.

This IP includes Morningstar Categories, Medalist Ratings, Economic Moat Ratings, and Portfolio Risk Scores, as well as PitchBook’s VC Exit Predictor, Manager Performance Scores, and Valuation Estimates. Our IP is integrated into our clients’ workflows and their customer communications. For example, we offer FINRA-reviewed report templates designed to support client communications that are accurate and aligned with regulatory standards. Our IP also underpins indexes that support investable products, model portfolios leveraged by advisors for personalization and scale, and retirement managed accounts offered through plan sponsors and advisors designed to enhance participant outcomes.

Our software and AI-enabled tools further embed Morningstar’s data, research, and IP directly into the core workflows of investors across public and private markets, including investment selection and monitoring, deal sourcing, portfolio construction and analysis, risk oversight and compliance, due diligence, and benchmarking and reporting. As clients consolidate vendors, we believe our breadth makes us harder to replace. These embedded roles create switching costs.

Like us, our clients are looking to automate processes where they can. Agentic and workflow- driven experiences, such as PitchBook Navigator, connect our insights more directly to the jobs our customers do, with the goal of significantly reducing the time it takes to complete critical tasks. Beyond our own platforms, we believe that AI-enabled access through large language models and our clients’ internal tools allows our insights to flow through into more firm-specific workflows in ways that were not possible just a few years ago.

Ultimately, AI is changing how investment intelligence is delivered, not what makes it valuable. We are experimenting with updated commercial models as we continue to work closely with clients to structure solutions that meet their evolving needs and reflect the value they get from our offerings. More broadly, we believe our moat is not a single asset or technology. It is a compounding system in which data fuels research, research powers IP, and software and AI-enabled tools further embed us into our clients’ workflows.

Strength across our reportable segments, led by Morningstar Credit, supported 2025 revenue growth of 7.5% compared with the prior year, or 8.0% on an organic basis.

Organic revenue growth is a non-GAAP measure. Please see reconciliation on page 142 of Morningstar’s 2025 Annual Report.

Adjusted operating margin is a non-GAAP measure. Please see reconciliation on page 142 of Morningstar’s 2025 Annual Report.

We remain focused on increasing adjusted operating income and margins. Operating and adjusted operating income grew 8.6% and 18.0%, respectively, with a corresponding increase in margins.

Net income per diluted share increased 3.4% to $8.87, while adjusted net income per diluted share increased 25.0% to $9.86. Adjusted net income excluded the gains on the sale of US turnkey asset management platform assets in 2024 and 2025 and the gain on the sale of the commodity and energy data business in 2024.

Free cash flow is a non-GAAP measure. Please see reconciliation on page 1 of Morningstar’s 2025 Annual Report.

Cash provided by operating activities and free cash flow declined by 0.3% and 1.4%, respectively, in 2025. While we generated higher cash earnings, this was offset by increases in income taxes and bonus payments. Still, 2025 represented the second year in a row with free cash flow generation in excess of $400 million, an important milestone.

During 2025, we paid dividends of $76.9 million and, in December, announced an approximately 10% increase in our quarterly dividend to $0.50 per share. We completed three acquisitions in 2025 and early 2026: Lumonic, DealX, and the Center for Research in Security Prices.

We actively bought back our shares throughout the year, with repurchases totaling 3,276,578 shares for $787.0 million, at an average price of $240.17. While it has been painful to see the decline in our market value in 2025 and into 2026, it has also created an opportunity to increase our ownership in a business that we know as well as any and to deploy capital with high conviction. Over the course of 2025, we reduced our shares outstanding by 7.3% after taking into account buybacks and new shares issued. We continued to opportunistically repurchase shares through February 2026.

In 2025, we increased debt by $374.0 million, net. We also refinanced our prior credit agreement with a new multicurrency credit agreement with borrowing capacity of up to $1.5 billion. We continue to prioritize a strong balance sheet to provide flexibility.

Morningstar Credit revenue increased 21.7%, or 20.9% on an organic basis, in 2025. The business benefited from a robust issuance market and good execution in areas where we have focused our investment dollars. At the asset-class level, revenue from commercial mortgage-backed securities—a longstanding area of strength—was the largest driver of growth on a dollar basis.

Morningstar acquired DBRS in 2019. The graph reflects Morningstar Credit revenue beginning with the first full year following the acquisition.

We also saw strength in European corporate ratings, an area where we did not have a meaningful business four years ago, and digital infrastructure, part of our expansion in so-called esoteric asset areas. What has been particularly gratifying about our momentum in Morningstar Credit is that it has come on the back of investments we made during the last downcycle in 2022 and 2023, when others were more cautious.

We plan to keep investing in this area, acknowledging that credit rating activity can vary widely from year to year. We remain focused on the longer-term growth trendline as we develop a more balanced set of capabilities that extend beyond our traditional areas of strength. In 2025, this included the acquisition of DealX, which supports our position as a leader in CMBS analytics and expanded our reach to private credit and leveraged loan markets, and the launch of a new Morningstar DBRS office in Sydney. Morningstar DBRS has been rating international offerings of Asia-Pacific issuers for nearly 25 years, and we are excited to bring its full range of services closer to clients and investors in the area.

Finally, in January 2026, Morningstar Credit reached a significant milestone with the integration of Morningstar DBRS credit ratings into Bank of New York Mellon’s Global Collateral platform, expanding the universe of eligible Canadian and US structured fixed‑income securities and increasing liquidity for institutional investors. A big shoutout to Sean O’Connor, who leads Morningstar DBRS’ business development, for his tireless work to make this happen. For context, the team began this effort in 2012, and while things can change glacially in this corner of the investment world, when they do, investors win.

PitchBook revenue grew 8.6%, or 8.5% on an organic basis, supported by strength in the core investor and advisor client segments and a contribution from the small but growing direct data business. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the PitchBook acquisition, we are proud of what we have accomplished. Not only did the acquisition make us an early entrant into private markets, but it also brought a talented team that has executed well over time. We are very pleased with our return on this investment.

Morningstar acquired PitchBook in 2016. The graph reflects PitchBook’s revenue beginning with the first full year following the acquisition. For 2017–2020, revenue reflects PitchBook product area revenue. Starting in 2021, revenue reflects PitchBook reportable segment revenue.

As I discussed in more detail in my fourth-quarter 2025 shareholder letter, we are taking important steps to position the business for its next stage of growth. In 2025, that included product enhancements to embed PitchBook’s data, research, and AI capabilities directly into the daily workflows of private market investors, including PitchBook Navigator and PitchBook Valuation Estimates. PitchBook Valuation Estimates provide a data-informed valuation signal across thousands of venture capital-backed companies, with a model that combines PitchBook’s best-in-class private market data, public market signals, and deep capital structure insights. We are excited about the potential for this new capability.

We have also reshaped PitchBook’s commercial organization to take advantage of the most meaningful growth opportunities in its core client segments. Brett Kaluza oversees this area as chief revenue officer for PitchBook, and I am thrilled to see his remit growing. Brett has come up through the ranks at PitchBook, rising to outperform expectations with everything that has been asked of him.

Morningstar Direct Platform revenue grew 5.4%, or 5.7% on an organic basis. A key growth driver was Morningstar Data’s managed investment data product, as clients added new data to support broader global footprints and a wider range of investment vehicles, including model portfolios, separately managed accounts, collective investment trusts, and evergreen funds. We faced headwinds in Morningstar Direct, where license growth has been flat, although that area did contribute to growth, supported by increased revenue per license and expansion with existing clients in our reporting solutions business.

In early March 2026, we welcomed Scott Brown as president of Morningstar Direct Platform. Scott joins us from Experian, where he led a multibillion-dollar portfolio across the financial services and data and marketing services divisions. As we conducted the search, I was impressed by the experience he brings in scaling large global products, technology, and data organizations. I am looking forward to seeing Scott’s impact on the business.

Strength in the financial markets and rising asset values provided a tailwind to Morningstar Wealth and Morningstar Retirement in 2025, with revenue growing 1.2% (7.8% on an organic basis) and 8.3% (reported and organic), respectively, over 2024. As of Dec. 31, 2025, we had assets under management and advisement of approximately $378.0 billion across these two businesses.

The big milestone for Morningstar Wealth was its transition to profitability in 2025, as it contributed $9.6 million to adjusted operating income. We continued to streamline that business, sunsetting the US turnkey asset management platform as we completed the transition of assets to AssetMark and announcing the retirement of Morningstar Office, which we expect to complete shortly.

Morningstar Wealth is now focused on its core Investment Management business, which includes Morningstar Model Portfolios and the International Wealth Platform, and Morningstar Investor, which serves the individual market. We believe our differentiated investment propositions, built around Morningstar data and research, and strong relationships with large asset management platforms in the US will support growth in Morningstar Model Portfolios.

Meanwhile, we are seeing good traction outside the US. In Australia, our managed portfolios business continued to scale, as assets increased by roughly 40% in 2025, driven primarily by strong net flows and market gains. In that market, broker/dealers and advice practices are increasingly engaging with our new outsourced chief investment officer service. Chris Galloway, managing director of Asia-Pacific, leads our business in the region and chalked up another great year. He has been a model leader for Morningstar over the years, and I am thrilled to see his impact growing. I am also pleased with the International Wealth Platform’s success in establishing itself as an important challenger brand in the UK, with net flows of roughly $700 million during the year.

Morningstar Retirement’s success in 2025 reflected both market-driven gains and net inflows to managed accounts, helping us reach 2.3 million retirement plan participants as of Dec. 31, 2025, in this highly regulated business. During the year, we had particular success with advisor-managed accounts. As advisors increasingly engage with retirement plans, they look to solutions like ours to help them build a bridge between retirement and wealth management. We serve this market through advisor-managed accounts, which give advisory firms more control over the design of the underlying investment portfolios so they are aligned with their other investment offerings, as well as through our revamped fiduciary services product.

Morningstar Retirement also continued to advance our understanding of how to better serve retirement plan participants across the US. In January 2026, the Morningstar Center for Retirement & Policy Studies launched the Defined Contribution Outcomes Model, which enables us to run highly sophisticated research simulations powered by real data from millions of participants and thousands of plans. The first application of this model is the paper “Analyzing the Value of Managed Accounts,” which showed that the adoption of managed accounts can be effective in improving retirement outcomes across almost all participants, but especially among younger and newer employees.

In early February 2026, we closed on our acquisition of the Center for Research in Security Prices. We expect this acquisition to be a game changer in our efforts to scale up Morningstar Indexes. More than $3 trillion in US equity assets ($4.2 trillion in linked assets overall) track CRSP’s benchmarks. The acquisition positions Morningstar Indexes as the leading provider of equity benchmarks covering the entire investable US market. We believe this will be an important differentiator and will open doors with institutional consultants who were previously cautious to recommend benchmarks not tied to significant assets.

Our priorities continue to shape how we support investors navigating an ever more complex investment landscape. In 2025 and the first two months of 2026, we delivered meaningful momentum across each of our four focus areas.

One of our highest-priority initiatives is to make Morningstar the common language of public and private markets. We made good progress on this effort in the past year, and it remains an area of focus as we head into 2026

• Research: Expanded coverage on semiliquid vehicles, which included The State of Semiliquid Funds, new forward-looking Medalist Ratings, and analyst commentary on the Blue Owl saga. Introduced new Public Meets Private newsletter with highlights from across Morningstar and PitchBook.
• Morningstar Direct Platform: Enhanced private capital fund datasets and launched Investment Discovery with expanded coverage of semiliquid vehicles.
• PitchBook: Introduced product enhancements including PitchBook Valuation Estimates, the first daily valuation model for VC-backed companies.
• Morningstar Credit: Leveraged opportunities in the private credit sector with unpublished credit ratings accounting for roughly one-fourth of ratings revenue in 2025, including structured finance and fundamental ratings across multiple products and geographies.
• Morningstar Retirement: Launched Defined Contribution Outcomes Model to identify changes to plan design, savings frameworks, and investment strategies that can improve wealth at retirement.
• Morningstar Sustainalytics: Expanded climate data offering and introduced an enhanced controversies solution that separates potential financial risk from an impact signal, which assesses the severity, scope, and remediation efforts related to an incident.
• Morningstar Indexes and PitchBook: Launched new IP-enhanced indexes.

We introduced a dedicated AI goal in 2025 and made significant progress during the year in three primary areas. These include product enhancements, new large language model collaborations, and internal tools to help our teams move more efficiently and effectively. You will see examples of the impact of AI across this letter—a demonstration of how widely we are leveraging these tools to meet our broader mission of empowering investor success.

• Morningstar Direct Platform: Introduced enhanced AI-assisted workflows to Direct Advisory Suite, including Intelligent Import, natural language screening, and portfolio talking points; launched AI assistant in Morningstar Direct.
• PitchBook: Embedded AI into workflows, including PitchBook Navigator, PitchBook Valuation Estimates, profile and investor summaries, transcription summaries, and VC Exit Predictor.
• AI platform collaborations: Building on our more than 1,000 relationships with redistributors, launched new collaborations with leading AI Platforms including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude for Financial Services, Microsoft’s CoPilot Studio and Foundry, and Perplexity, among others.
• Technology: Launched Morningstar and Pitchbook AI platform connectors, utilizing the quickly evolving Model Context Protocol, to enable turnkey AI connectivity to our data, research, and other licensed software capabilities
• Internal: Applied AI-enabled tools to drive increased efficiency in data collection, shorten time to market in product development, and support operations and marketing.

We made important progress in companywide initiatives as well as segment-specific projects to drive scale across the business and support future growth.

• Morningstar Credit: Opened Sydney office; benefited from integration of Morningstar DBRS credit ratings into BNY’s Global Collateral platform.
• Morningstar Wealth: Sunsetted US TAMP and announced retirement of Morningstar Office (expected to complete by March 2026) to focus on key growth areas.
• Morningstar Sustainalytics: Streamlined product portfolio to support growth with core asset manager and asset owner client segments.

In an AI world, where human-in-the-loop efforts are key to our competitive edge, our people—10,973 permanent, full-time employees globally as of as of Dec. 31, 2025—remain one of our most important assets. Our efforts in 2025 focused on attracting, developing, and retaining the people who drive our growth.

• Training and development: Launched internal AI Academy to provide targeted AI training to our employee base.
• Training and development: Expanded reach of our Manager Academy, Leader Academy, Emerging Leaders, and High Performer programs with additional cohorts launched.

Every few years, as part of our strategic planning process, we refine our list of company goals to align them with what we think are the most important drivers of longterm value creation. We have made several updates going into 2026, which you can find on Page 36 of this annual report. I look forward to sharing more about these at our annual shareholders’ meeting in May.

Many of our colleagues across the firm and in our leadership ranks have built long careers at Morningstar. In 2025, several long-tenured and senior leaders retired or moved on to new challenges. I am grateful for the contributions they made and am also excited about what’s ahead as we welcome both new and familiar faces to key leadership roles. I have covered many of these in my quarterly updates, so I won’t repeat myself here. I would also like to acknowledge Scott Mackenzie, president and CEO of Morningstar Canada, and Davide Pelusi, managing director of Morningstar South EMEA, who departed after multidecade careers at Morningstar in 2025. I am grateful for Scott’s and Davide’s lasting impact on Morningstar and wish them the very best.

In January 2026, we welcomed Anne Bramman to our board of directors. She brings significant financial and strategic leadership experience, having served as chief financial officer for several global companies. Most recently, Anne was CFO and chief growth officer at Circana, a leading consumer analytics platform, and she currently serves as a director and audit committee chair at McCormick.

I would also like to extend my thanks to Gail Landis, who is concluding her service on our board upon reaching the mandatory retirement age. We are grateful for Gail’s many contributions and wish her the very best as she embarks on her next chapter. There have been many times when I have picked up the phone to get Gail’s opinion on a matter, and she has always responded in a timely and thoughtful manner. And she is unafraid to push and seek out nonconsensus views. I plan to keep calling, Gail!

I look forward to welcoming you to our annual shareholders’ meeting on May 7 in Chicago, where we take live questions from shareholders and have the opportunity to engage with you. You will hear from leaders across the business as they provide deep dives into our companywide AI strategy and how we are helping investors navigate the convergence of public and private markets. We are also introducing additional time in the agenda for product demonstrations over lunch this year. And we will leave plenty of time to take your questions—always my favorite part of the day. I do hope you can make it!

Best regards,

Kunal

This annual report includes forward-looking information within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Please see Item 7 of Morningstar’s 2025 Annual Report on Form 10-K for additional information.

* Free cash flow, which we define as cash provided by operating activities less capital expenditures, is considered a non-GAAP financial measure.