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

Microsoft is to 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 financial market data company Refinitiv which LSEG acquired from a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium in the last year for 27 billion dollars.

Microsoft’s stake, which it bought out of the same Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium, is part of a larger 10-year partnership, which includes a contractual commitment for LSEG to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion on 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 Refinitiv acquisition last year. latest will be integrated with core Microsoft applications, including Teams and the widest 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 workers.

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 seems 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.

It is therefore a win-win for both companies: a huge cloud contract for Microsoft which opens it to 40,000 Refinitiv customers, as well as an equity stake in a major challenger from Bloomberg. And for LSEG, it now has the technological and financial backing 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 attractive revenue growth opportunities for both companies,” said the CEO of Microsoft. LSEG, David Schwimmer, in a press release.