Microsoft has agreed a deal to take a 4 per cent equity stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) as part of a wider deal between the Windows maker and the stock exchange.

The 10-year commercial deal will see Microsoft migrate LSEG’s tech infrastructure and Refinitiv platforms to the Microsoft Cloud. The stock exchange has made a contractual commitment for minimum cloud-related spend with Microsoft of $2.8 billion over the decade.

Refinitiv was acquired by LSEG in early 2021 for $27 billion from a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters Consortium in a move which turned the exchange into the world’s second-largest financial data company (after Bloomberg LP). The Refinitiv platform powers over 40,000 financial institutions in 190 countries with data, analytics and insights across millions of active time series databases, daily evaluations, exchange trades and derivatives, equity quotes and significant research on public and private companies.

David Schwimmer, CEO of London Stock Exchange Group, said: “This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG’s journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business and will transform the experience for our customers. Bringing together our leading data sets, analytics and global customer base with Microsoft’s comprehensive and trusted cloud services and global reach creates attractive revenue growth opportunities for both companies.”

Microsoft said that the pair will "co-create an open, centralised, financial data platform enabling seamless data democratisation, collaboration and new monetisation opportunities across the financial services ecosystem."

The company also said that its initial focus "will be on delivering interoperability between LSEG Workspace and Microsoft Teams, Excel and PowerPoint with other Microsoft applications and a new version of LSEG’s Workspace, accessed entirely within the Microsoft 365 suite, to be added in the future."

The purchase of approximately 4 per cent of LSEG through the acquisition of shares from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters Consortium is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2023.

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