LSEG-Microsoft products on track for 2024 release

It is full steam ahead for the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), as it plans to release products it’s been building with Microsoft in the second half of 2024.

David Schwimmer, chief executive officer at LSEG, who spoke on the exchange’s third-quarter earnings call on October 19, said he’s pleased with the partnership’s progress and that LSEG is on track for product delivery in the second half of 2024. He added that this aligns with the initial timeframe LSEG laid out during the partnership announcement in December 2022.

“You should expect to see products in the different areas that we have talked about, i.e., the embedding of our data and analytics and workflow in the Microsoft Teams and productivity suite; the usage of our data and the movement of our data into the Microsoft Azure environment; and the usage of Fabric, which will make a much more attractive, integrated environment for the usage of our data,” he said.

This includes new analytics and modeling-as-a-service, which will provide LSEG customers a cloud-based engine to access LSEG analytical tools and modeling frameworks through Workspace, Excel, API, and other customer-defined front ends.

“Very consistent and good progress is being made, and we look forward to rolling that out,” he said.

In December 2022, LSEG announced its 10-year partnership and investment with Microsoft, where it plans to migrate its data platform and other key technology infrastructure into the Microsoft Azure cloud environment.

A part of that includes integrating LSEG’s Workspace platform with Microsoft’s Office suite, which aims to optimize client workflows by minimizing copying-and-pasting between applications.

Holden Sibley, head of strategy for LSEG’s trading and banking solutions business, indicated to WatersTechnology in July that it will give LSEG an advantage if integrated successfully.

“We have a large penetration that pales in comparison to something like Teams, but we have the credibility and capability. With Microsoft, that makes a pretty powerful combination,” Sibley said.

During the quarter, LSEG recorded a 7.2% growth to £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) for its Data & Analytics business, due to improving sales, rising retention, and a higher annual price increase. The exchange group saw income for the quarter grow 8% to £1.97 billion ($2.4 billion), which chief financial officer Anna Manz believes puts it on course to deliver full-year growth on the upper end of its 6-8% guidance.

Schwimmer highlighted during the call that the rollout of Workspace is progressing well, with over 50% of Eikon users already migrated, while the remainder is on track for the end of 2024. He reiterated that the exchange will sunset Eikon by the end of 2025.

“That is still the plan, and everything is moving along there as we continue to work with our customers on the migration from Eikon to Workspace for a number of those customers,” he said.

On LSEG’s shift to the cloud, Schwimmer explained that it “fundamentally” changes how customers use some of its services.

For example, in the past, to access real-time data from LSEG, customers would need to have LSEG’s hardware and servers on the trading floor. Now that some of its real-time data is available in the cloud, it is accessible to other customers, too.

“Corporates, for example, who might not even have a trading floor but want to track a complex supply chain, or something along those lines. Similarly, in our customer and third-party risk business, the cloud availability has just made our workflows easier to embed in our customers’ daily activity,” he said.

The consumption and distribution of market data in the cloud has been, for the most part, a pipe dream until recently. In particular, exchanges that have announced major cloud partnerships, including Nasdaq and CME Group, need to replicate multicast—a timely and efficient market data distribution model—in the cloud.

In June, Colt Technology Services and Amazon Web Services announced the global availability of Colt Market Data in the Cloud, its multicast data service for capital markets. This follows the proof-of-concept the two firms worked on in October 2022, which saw them build virtual points of presence in the AWS Cloud.