Microsoft acquires a minor stake in London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG)
This will involve LSEG migrating its data platform to Azure
Microsoft will buy a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which owns the London Stock Exchange and a number of other businesses, including the financial market data provider Refinitiv, for which LSE paid a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters partnership $27 billion last year.
Microsoft’s investment is part of a bigger 10 year agreement that includes a contractual commitment for LSEG to spend at least $2.8 billion on cloud computing services.
The LSEG data platform and other essential technical infrastructure will need to be moved to Azure, and its data and analytics offering will need to be integrated with other Microsoft products (Teams, Microsoft 365).
Through this partnership, LSEG may be able to challenge Bloomberg as the preferred platform for finance and investment professionals by creating a single product that integrates data, analytics and collaboration.
By connecting LSEG content to Excel, all LSEG users would be able to collaborate via Teams and construct models and visualisations. The partnership’s ambitions appear to be rather broad with plans to co-develop a new portfolio of solutions for financial institutions, by fusing LSEG’s analytics and modelling with Microsoft’s cloud-based machine learning expertise.
It should be a win-win situation for both companies: an equity investment in a major Bloomberg competitor and a substantial cloud contract for Microsoft that enables it to serve Refinitv’s 40,000 clients. Additionally, LSEG now has the technical and financial backing of a global public cloud provider.
