Microsoft to acquire 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group as part of 10-year cloud partnership • TechCrunch

Microsoft is to get 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which owns the London Stock Exchange as well as several other businesses including financial market data firm Refinitiv, which LSEG bought from Blackstone/Thomson Reuters last year for 27 billion USD.

Shares of Microsoft, purchased from the same Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium, constitutes part of a larger 10-year partnership that includes a contractual commitment for LSEG to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion on cloud computing services. This will involve LSEG moving its data platform and “other critical technology infrastructure” to Azure, while the analytics and data product Workspace that LSEG purchased as part of the acquisition Refinitiv last year will be integrated with core Microsoft applications, including Team and wider Microsoft 365 software suite.

This initial partnership will create a single product that includes data, analytics, and collaboration, and can help LSEG challenge rivals like Bloomberg as an access platform for professionals. in finance and investment.

The integration will allow all LSEG customers to collaborate with each other through Teams, and create models and graphs through, for example, connecting LSEG and Excel content. The scope of the partnership appears to be quite far-reaching, however, with plans to combine Microsoft’s cloud-based intelligent machine learning with LSEG’s analytics and modeling to “co-develop a solution for new solution” for financial institutions, the companies said.

So it’s a win-win for both companies: a huge cloud contract for Microsoft that opens up to 40,000 Refinitiv customers, as well as an equity investment in a major competitor. by Bloomberg. And for LSEG, it now has the technological and financial backing of one of the largest public cloud company in the world.

LSEG CEO David Schwimmer said in a press release: “Our leading global data set, analytics and customer base brings together comprehensive and reliable cloud services. Microsoft’s reliability and global reach create compelling revenue growth opportunities for both companies.