Microsoft buys 4 percent of London Stock Exchange Group

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), which is responsible for the London Stock Exchange, wants to invest massively in modernizing its technical infrastructure and is relying on cloud solutions from Microsoft. The latter, in turn, is buying 4 percent of the group, securing major contracts for the next 10 years.

Microsoft buys shares in London Stock Exchange

Microsoft is buying about four percent of the London Stock Exchange Group as part of a strategic partnership over the next 10 years to modernize the London Stock Exchange’s technology infrastructure and secure major contracts. The tech giant has now confirmed this in an official announcement.

According to the statement, Microsoft has invested 1.6 billion U.S. dollars, which will, however, pay off. LSEG is committed to purchasing cloud services and solutions from Microsoft for at least 2.8 billion US dollars over the next ten years.

Microsoft will have a seat on LSEG’s board of directors. Accordingly, a further USD 2.2 billion is to follow over the same period through service providers who also use the offerings of the Microsoft Azure platform through LSEG.

The US exchange Nasdaq has entered into a very similar partnership with Amazon. Microsoft is buying the shares of the consortium, which is made up of U.S. investment firm Blackstone, British-Canadian media group Thomson Reuters and subsidiaries of Canada and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund managers.

• Cloud expansion: Microsoft builds three cloud data centers in Austria, invests €1 billion

Develop products together

Together, Microsoft wants to further develop the products in the future with LSEG, he said. Customers should ultimately benefit through better workflow and faster access. To this end, Microsoft’s Teams and Microsoft 365 solutions are also to be integrated into the LSEG Workspace. Overall, the aim is to offer an all-in-one solution for customers in the financial sector.

For this purpose, Azure Machine Learning and the analytics functions of LSEG will also be used, which should bring some advantages and be fully integrated into the Workspace and developer-friendly APIs.

In the future, the two companies also plan to work together to build a new generation of data infrastructure and potentially develop new services together, he said. For London Stock Exchange Group, the collaboration is an “important milestone on the way to becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data company,” CEO David Schwimmer is quoted as saying.