Through a 10-year collaboration, LSEG has committed a minimum cloud-related spend of $2.8bn with Microsoft

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Microsoft enters into 10-year partnership with London Stock Exchange Group. (Credit: Tyler Lahti/Wikimedia Commons)

Microsoft has agreed to acquire a 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) through the purchase of shares from the Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium.

The shares will be bought by Microsoft from York Holdings II and York Holdings III, which are owned by certain investment funds related to Blackstone, an affiliate of GIC Special Investments, an affiliate of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and from Thomson Reuters.

The acquisition of stake is part of a cloud infrastructure partnership announced between the tech major and LSEG.

Under a 10-year collaboration deal, the stock exchange group has committed a minimum cloud-related spend of $2.8bn with Microsoft.

As part of the partnership, LSEG will move its data platform and other important technology infrastructure to Microsoft Azure cloud environment.

LSEG’s data and analytics workflow solution, Workspace, will become interoperable with some Microsoft applications.

The parties plan to roll out advanced cloud-based analytics services as well.

With an aim to change the engagement of market participants with capital markets across a wide range of asset classes, Microsoft and LSEG have agreed to explore the development of digital market infrastructure based on cloud technology.

LSEG will employ Azure Purview and Azure Synapse to develop its cloud-based data architecture that integrates the group’s datasets into a single, flexible infrastructure.

The infrastructure created with privacy, security, and compliance is expected to be responsive, efficient, and easy.

LSEG plans to advance its strategy of developing an effective and scalable platform for its data and analytics business with Microsoft Cloud and its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said: “Advances in the cloud and AI will fundamentally transform how financial institutions research, interact, and transact across asset classes, and adapt to changing market conditions.

“Our partnership will bring together the industry leadership of the London Stock Exchange Group with the trust and breadth of the Microsoft Cloud — spanning Azure, AI, and Teams — to build next-generation services that will empower our customers to generate business insights, automate complex and time-consuming processes, and ultimately, do more with less.”

The companies plan to co-invest in the product development roadmap for the data platform, analytics initiatives, and Workspace.