Microsoft to acquire 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group in 10-year cloud partnership

Microsoft will acquire a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), the company that owns the London Stock Exchange as well as several other businesses, including the market data company financials Refinitiv which LSEG acquired last year from a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium for $27 billion.

Microsoft's stake, which it purchased from the same Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium, is part of a broader 10-year partnership, which includes a contractual commitment for LSEG to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion dollars in cloud computing services. This will involve LSEG migrating its data platform and "other key technology infrastructure" to Azure, while the Workspace data and analytics product it purchased as part of its acquisition of Refinitiv last year The latter will be integrated with core Microsoft apps, including Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 software suite.

This initial partnership will create a single product spanning data, analytics, and collaboration, and could help LSEG challenge Bloomberg as the go-to platform for finance and investment professionals.

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The integration will allow all LSEG customers to collaborate with each other via Teams and generate models and graphs by connecting LSEG and Excel content, for example. But the scope of the partnership appears quite extensive, with plans to combine Microsoft's cloud-based machine learning intelligence with LSEG's analytics and modeling to "co-develop a new suite of solutions" for institutions. financial, the companies said.

So it's a win-win for both companies: a huge cloud deal for Microsoft that opens it up to Refinitiv's 40,000 customers, as well as a stake in a major Bloomberg challenger. And for LSEG, it now has the technological and financial support of one of the largest public cloud companies in the world.

“Bringing together our core datasets, analytics, and global customer base with Microsoft's comprehensive and trusted cloud services and global reach creates exciting revenue growth opportunities for both companies,” said LSEG CEO David Schwimmer in a press release.