LSEG unveils Workspace Teams, other products of Microsoft deal

London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) CEO David Schwimmer, speaking on the exchange’s Q2 earnings call today, laid out a range of use cases stemming from its partnership with Microsoft. 

The 10-year deal with the tech giant was announced in late December 2022 with the goal of allowing LSEG to build out its data architecture with access to “next-generation productivity, data and analytics and modelling solutions with Microsoft Azure, AI, and Microsoft Teams.” Alongside migrating LSEG’s data platform to Microsoft Azure, one of the promises of the deal was that it would allow the exchange to enhance Microsoft’s ubiquitous Teams videoconferencing platform with access to LSEG’s Workspace platform.

Our new AI-based question-and-answer tool is helping us answer customer queries up to 70% more quickly and can be applied to 60% of all incoming queries

David Schwimmer, London Stock Exchange Group

During the call, Schwimmer played a video of the new Workspace—originally developed by Refinitiv, which LSEG acquired in 2020 and closed a year later—in which a version of the application called Workspace Teams is accessible from within the Teams application. 

In the example video, Teams included a chat tab, reminiscent of ChatGPT’s natural language interface, which Schwimmer said is powered by LSEG AI Insights. Two prompts were visible from a question about stock performance—one standard and one premium—and clicking the standard tab prompted a response within Workspace Teams, while clicking the premium prompt opened Workspace’s standalone platform. When inside Workspace, the video showed that clicking financial data, such as ratings from individual analysts, opened a share option, where the data can be pasted into a Teams message.

“Our new AI-based question-and-answer tool is helping us answer customer queries up to 70% more quickly and can be applied to 60% of all incoming queries,” Schwimmer said. “As we train it on the almost 3,000 queries a day that we receive, it will continue to get better.”

Partnership projections

There are ambitious goals for the LSEG–Microsoft collaboration. Last year Holden Sibley, head of strategy for LSEG’s trading and banking solutions business, told WatersTechnology that he hoped that integrating LSEG’s brand with the ubiquity of Microsoft would give the exchange an advantage over its competitors.

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

Last October, Schwimmer said the exchange was on track for product delivery from the partnership in 2024, aligning with the timeframe the exchange and tech provider set out in 2022. Hope and hype around the Microsoft partnership has buoyed the exchange during a period where it also announced plans to sunset its Eikon terminal and its Redi execution management system.

Schwimmer said the migration to Workspace has gone well, and that LSEG is on track to be “substantially complete” going into 2025, with the team making “maybe an improvement a day.”

“We’re putting more and more into the Workspace interface. ... We are now integrating FXall access into Workspace,” he said. “It’s improvement in the data, it’s improvement in the interface, and our price is appropriate, so you put all those together, and we’re having really good traction.”

DaaS capital

Alongside the Workspace Teams preview, Schwimmer announced a new endeavor for the exchange, which will aim to make accessing datasets easier for LSEG clients. LSEG’s data-as-a-service (DaaS) platform will host key datasets in a single, cloud-based platform. Customers will be able to use the data on LSEG’s platform or export it to their own data lakes.

“There are multiple datasets and multiple distribution channels, often based on complex underlying technology, and this is true across the industry,” Schwimmer said. “This can make it hard to isolate the data you need or combine it with other data. Sometimes you might not even know what data is available. Those are the issues we are addressing with the data-as-a-service platform, where DaaS products will be rolling out from the second half [of 2024].”

Schwimmer said the initial launch of the exchange’s DaaS offering will cover eight LSEG datasets, including company fundamentals and ESG data, but by the end of next year, he expects the service will include the most popular datasets. He said that once the eight datasets being moved to Azure and Fabric have been made available as a DaaS offering, it will be the first time they’ve been under one roof. Beyond DaaS, Schwimmer added that the exchange will address gaps in coverage elsewhere.

“Over the last three-and-a-half years, we’ve expanded our fixed-income corporate action data tenfold,” he said. “Since acquiring Refinitiv, we’ve doubled the number of companies covered by our ESG data and increased the number of metrics fourfold, and we have expanded our private markets coverage by 80%. At the same time, we are growing the breadth of our data and have also improved its quality, cutting in half the number of data corrections over the last 18 months.”

Another area Schwimmer covered on the call concerned the private markets. Responding to an analyst question about rumors that LSEG had been vying to buy Preqin before its eventual purchase by BlackRock, Schwimmer said that while the exchange has increased its private markets coverage, there is more work to be done.

“We have increased our coverage of private companies by about 80% or so—this was a gap when we acquired the Refinitiv business—and we’ve made really good progress with it,” he said. “We’re never really satisfied, so you should expect to see us continuing to invest in this dataset. You should assume we look at everything. We do know the team at Preqin. I think they’re a great team, a great business, and certainly wish them very well.”

In response to a question about Microsoft’s operational resiliency following the CrowdStrike outage last month and how that could affect LSEG’s users, Schwimmer clarified that while the partnership with Microsoft is valuable, it is not exclusive.

“We’re very pleased the partnership with Microsoft is going very well, but just to be really clear, we do not have an exclusive relationship with Microsoft in terms of where we provide our data or how we provide our workflow. We work with other cloud providers,” he said, adding that CrowdStrike had prompted an important industry-wide conversation about operational resiliency.

“I think there will be lessons learned by us, but also many others—including CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and probably many people on this call—in terms of making sure that when there’s a new update rolled out, it’s rolled out in phases as opposed to immediately on a global basis, but that’s just one example,” Schwimmer said. “I think there’s some good risk management lessons to be learned from that, and I think it’ll make the broader system stronger.”