The London Stock Exchange Group just partnered with Microsoft to modernize its financial market infrastructure and data services and the net result could be a $5 billion revenue gain for Azure.
Earlier this week the LSEG and Microsoft announced a strategic 10-year partnership where the world leading markets data provider will be bolstered by Azure cloud services providing end-to-end solutions for trading, execution, data and analytics.
This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG’s journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business and will transform the experience for our customers.” -David Schwimmer, CEO of London Stock Exchange Group.
As for the specifics, Microsoft will be tasked with moving over the LSEG’s legacy platforms from over 40,000 financial institutions in 190 countries supported by the Refinitiv platform alone, co-create an open and centralized financial data platform, and creating an open all-in-one data and analytics funnel for better client experiences.
To start, Microsoft plans to deliver an update to the LSEG Workspace on Microsoft Teams aimed at richer in-app experiences for faster analysis of trends and complying with stricter security and privacy requirements as well as providing enhanced Excel integration supporting greater data visualizations and interoperability between other Microsoft 365 solutions.
The initial focus will be on delivering interoperability between LSEG Workspace and Microsoft Teams, Excel and PowerPoint with other Microsoft applications and a new version of LSEG’s Workspace, accessed entirely within the Microsoft 365 suite, to be added in the future.
Beyond achieving interoperability, Microsoft is hoping the LSEG will make use of Azure AI, Synapse, Power BI, Microsoft Purview, Excel, and Teams to create next generation analytics and modeling capabilities that will save investment bankers, traders’ wealth, risk, compliance, strategy, asset, and advisory managers time and costs.
As for the details of the deal, Microsoft has estimated that over the length of the partnership it could generate up to $5 billion in additional revenue with a $2.8 billion minimum spend commitment from LSEG for its cloud services and support as the baseline.
Perhaps, as a show of confidence in its competency to help build a new financial data and analysis infrastructure for LSEG, Microsoft will also purchase a 4% equity stake in the group via share acquisitions from BlackStone/Thomson Reuters Consortium.
