Earnings call transcript: London Stock Exchange Q3 2025 sees 6.4% growth

London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), with a market capitalization of $64.4 billion, reported a solid performance for the third quarter of 2025, with organic growth reaching 6.4%. The company has raised its margin guidance and is expecting significant free cash flow, building on its impressive last twelve months’ free cash flow of $4.88 billion. Despite these positive developments, LSEG’s stock saw a slight decline of 0.51% in recent trading, reflecting broader market trends and investor sentiment. According to InvestingPro analysis, the stock appears undervalued based on its Fair Value calculations.

Key Takeaways

• LSEG reported 6.4% organic growth in Q3, with year-to-date growth at 7.3%.
• The company raised its margin guidance, expecting a 100 basis points improvement.
• Free cash flow is projected to reach at least 2.4 billion dollars.
• New partnerships with Microsoft, Rogo, and Databricks were announced.
• Stock price decreased by 0.51% after the earnings release.

Company Performance

London Stock Exchange Group demonstrated robust performance in Q3 2025, with organic growth at 6.4% and a year-to-date increase of 7.3%. This growth is supported by strategic partnerships and product innovations, positioning the company strongly in the competitive financial services market. LSEG’s movement from the sixth to the third position in pricing and reference services highlights its competitive edge.

Financial Highlights

• Organic growth: 6.4% in Q3
• Year-to-date organic growth: 7.3%
• Free cash flow forecast: At least 2.4 billion dollars
• Margin improvement: 100 basis points

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, LSEG anticipates a pricing yield of 3.5% in 2026 and expects its subscription business to grow by approximately 6.5%. The company is committed to investing in AI and new products, with two additional Workspace releases planned. Revenue forecasts for FY2025 and FY2026 are 12.46 billion and 13.19 billion dollars, respectively.

Executive Commentary

CEO David Schwimmer emphasized the company’s unique data capabilities, stating, "90% of our data and feeds revenue is from data that is non-replicable by an LLM." He also highlighted LSEG’s strong market position, saying, "We are the partner of choice for financial markets data." Schwimmer underscored the company’s financial strength, noting, "Our strong cash generation gives us the firepower and flexibility to invest organically."

Risks and Challenges

• Market competition remains intense, requiring continuous innovation.
• Economic uncertainties could impact financial markets and trading volumes.
• Technological advancements necessitate ongoing investment in infrastructure.
• Regulatory changes may affect operational strategies.
• Dependence on strategic partnerships for growth and innovation.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about LSEG’s post-trade solutions and partnerships with 11 banks, as well as its data distribution strategy. The company confirmed strong engagement with Microsoft and discussed pricing strategies for new AI-enabled products. These discussions highlighted LSEG’s focus on expanding its market influence and enhancing product offerings.

Full transcript - London Stock Exchange Group PLC (LSEG) Q3 2025:

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Good morning and welcome to the investor and analyst call for London Stock Exchange Group’s third quarter 2025 trading update. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to David Schwimmer, CEO of London Stock Exchange Group, to open the presentation. Please go ahead.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. I’m here with MAP and Peregrine as usual, and we are also joined by Daniel Maguire, our Head of Markets, to talk about the post-trade transaction that we announced this morning. For this quarter, we’re going to take a slightly different approach from a normal Q3, given the intense debate in recent months around our business and AI. I’ll cover some key aspects of our AI strategy and the excitement we have about the current opportunities before MAP goes through the Q3 numbers and Dan covers the post-trade transaction. Of course, we’ll be happy to take your questions. It has been a really busy quarter with great progress on several fronts. Group organic growth continues to be very healthy at 6.4%, with D&A growing at 4.9%, similar to the first half.

ASB growth came in at 5.6%, a little better than expected, and we anticipate it being better again in Q4. We’re raising our margin guidance to the top of the original range at around 100 basis points of improvement, reflecting strong operating leverage and cost control. As you may have seen, we’ve launched a number of AI-related partnerships involving our data, which is valued and relied on by partners old and new as industry standard. We’ve announced an important transaction today that creates a strong partnership and aligned incentives for the adoption of post-trade solutions, while also increasing our revenue share from SwapClear and extending the profit-sharing arrangement with our partner banks by 10 years. More on this in a few minutes.

On the share buyback that we announced at our half-year results, the original intention was to complete that by mid-December, but we’ve taken advantage of a lower share price and accelerated the £1 billion buyback to finish by the end of this month. We’re today announcing a further £1 billion buyback to be completed by our full-year results in February of next year. Our strong cash generation gives us the firepower and the flexibility to invest organically, to make important strategic moves, and to be active in returning cash to our shareholders. On the next slide, we have summarized our ELSEG Everywhere AI strategy under three key pillars: trusted data, transformative products, and intelligent enterprise. We’ll talk more about those second two at the Innovation Forum in November.

Let me take a minute or two to dive into our data and the critical and valuable role it plays now and will play in an AI-rich world. The easiest way to think about our data is that the content itself and access to it is effectively financial markets infrastructure, something we know a lot about. It is industry standard, deeply trusted, embedded in highly regulated customer workflows, and supported by processes and infrastructure that are extremely hard to replicate. We are and always have been open. We deliver data to wherever our customers want it: their screens, their servers, their cloud, and of course, through third-party providers. Let’s unpack this over the next few slides. Data and feeds account for a little over one-fifth of group revenues. On this slide, we’ve broken down these by data type.

Before we get into that, I want to remind you of the scale of our data. It is the largest pool in the industry, both in terms of breadth and depth. We have over 33 petabytes of data. That is over three times the so-called common crawl, the dataset formed from the public internet, which is used to train many LLMs. Let’s begin with the 45% of our data and feeds revenue derived from real-time. This is a business built on physics, not probability. We’ve built connections to 575 exchanges and execution venues globally with our own infrastructure. In the blink of an eye, we standardize and translate the exchange outputs into a single common language and deliver them directly into the world’s financial institutions. Millions of hard facts per second, not probabilistic algorithms. In a nutshell, AI cannot replicate or replace our real-time data.

We have 25% of our data and feeds revenue, which is specialized and enhanced by our own enrichment. By specialized, we mean proprietary. Think Tradeweb fixed income pricing or exclusive, like the Reuters News Agreement, or contributed, like our deals database. An LLM could not access these datasets through public sources. On top of that, we are enriching this data with value-added enhancements and augmentation by our data experts. That is our additional value add. That all comes with the LSEG curation standards: accuracy, normalization, and tagging. Think of this data as protected by three modes. It is either proprietary or exclusive. It is enriched by our own intellectual property, and it is curated, applying the LSEG standards, which have often become the industry standard. Let me give you an example to bring this to life. Our deals league tables are highly valuable to banks, advisors, and law firms.

These league tables are widely considered the industry standard, with LSEG data obtained daily from thousands of sources commingled with data sourced from nearly 2,000 financial and legal advisors actively contributing their deal flow. We get up to 25,000 of these contributions per month. This input, which is from humans, is crucial to the quality, accuracy, and completeness of this data. These contributions clarify and correct deal details that appear in the press. They also add additional information to public deals and supply information on other deals that are not reported anywhere. A dataset built solely on public disclosures would be both inaccurate and incomplete. We further enrich this data with our proprietary calculation of rank value, which sets the standard for deal comps, market share, and pitch books around the world. We refine this methodology each year through roundtables with advisory firms.

In case anyone is missing the point, no LLM can gather this data from public sources. Three modes: LSEG proprietary or exclusive data, enriched by LSEG IP, and curated by LSEG, applying the LSEG standards. Let’s move on to the next bucket, representing 10% of data and feeds revenues. It is almost exactly identical to the previous bucket. It is specialized data, proprietary, exclusive, or contributed, with LSEG standards applied. Not accessible by an LLM through public sources, our aftermarket research, for example. To carry on the analogy with the modes, this is data protected by two powerful modes. Next is another 10% of revenue from data that is indeed public, but to which we apply our enrichment and analysis, similar to what I was talking about with customer contributions on the league tables. We also apply the LSEG curation standards.

Examples here would be earnings estimates and sentiment analytics applied to earnings calls and other sources. Can an LLM access it? Yes, but the data will be incomplete. Here it is two modes applied on public data. 90% of our revenue is from data that is non-replicable by an LLM. That leaves us with the last 10% of data and feeds revenue, which represents the data derived from public sources for which we apply LSEG curation standards, data like company filings or economic metrics. This data is rarely sold on a standalone basis. There is still one mode, a powerful and important one, and that is our standards, which I will cover on the next slide.

Now that we’ve established that 90% of data and feeds revenue is from data that is simply out of reach or inaccessible to an AI model trawling for public data, let me take a minute to explain very concretely what I mean by the third mode, the LSEG data curation standards. There are five major processes in the curation of LSEG’s high-quality trusted data, which are simply non-negotiable for our customers in regulated activities. These five processes are the foundations of what we call the LSEG standards. Let’s look at them in a little bit more detail. We do not build our datasets on probabilistic models. We have constructed them from decades of hard data, much of which is no longer retrievable. We source them from our customer community, with over 40,000 customers contributing regularly. In many cases, our own analysts and experts generate them internally. That is sourcing.

We then extensively cleanse and validate this data to ensure quality, for example, verifying its accuracy and completeness. Publicly sourced data is not reliable without this step. The third step, normalizing and mastering, means creating a single source of the truth, consistent from year to year and from security to security, factoring in corporate actions, for example, or restatements or perimeter changes. Concordance and tagging is a critical and differentiated step. This is where the universal symbology of the RIC, or Reuters instrument codes, and our use of perm IDs to tag each piece of data are so powerful. They allow full interoperability across the data estate and create logical semantic relationships between related data, for example, between a company and its directors or a bond it has issued. The fifth step is distribution.

Irrespective of technology platform, data format, or channel, the data we distribute to customers is consistent and authoritative. I’ll talk more about our distribution strategy in a couple of minutes. To summarize, for those who think AI models can scoop up so-called public data from the internet and displace us, that just does not reflect how this industry works and fundamentally ignores the non-replicable nature of the vast majority of our data. There has also been a lot of focus on our workflows business. We have driven a lot of change here over the last four years and now have our customers on a modern, modular, customizable platform where we enhance functionality week in and week out. We are doing more and more. As we said at H1, it is not AI or a desktop. It is AI in the desktop, fully embedded in financial markets workflow.

Workspace is now integrated with Microsoft Teams. We will be launching Open Directory in the coming weeks and the full Workspace AI platform in the first half of 2026, with agentic tools coming as well. You will see all of this at the Innovation Forum in a couple of weeks. Let’s look at our workflows revenue the same way we did for data and feeds. 50% of workflows revenue comes from traders who are deeply engaged with the platform to execute their roles. They need real-time data, a network community, and integration with a range of pre- and post-trade tools. A further 20% of workflows revenue comes from ancillary trading services, such as trade routing and order execution and management. Another 15% comes from investment banking, where we have specialized content across deals, corporate actions, and research, as well as integrated productivity tools.

That leaves 5% of workflows revenue from wealth and 10% from investment management. These customers benefit from our unrivaled data, exclusive Reuters news, and portfolio analytics. In these groups, there are lighter users who are mainly doing desktop research and basic charting, perhaps like many people on this call. Whether someone is a power user deep in trading workflow or a lighter user, all Workspace users will benefit from the significant AI and collaboration enhancements coming over the next few months. They will have the full functionality of some of the newer applications out there, but embedded in their existing workflow and based on data they can trust. Over the last couple of months, you can see the pace of execution on ELSEG Everywhere AI, delivering our data to where our customers are working as the partner of choice for financial markets data. This is no change in strategy.

We have long provided data to and distributed data through our competitors and partners. For example, we are the number one data provider to Aladdin. The industry now has new entrants building new applications and functionality, which we believe can expand our reach and drive additional consumption of our trusted high-quality data. The economics of these deals support our growth aspirations through data licensing, new channels, and the potential for usage-based revenue over time. Rogo is a specialist provider of applications to investment banking and private equity. Customers with Workspace licenses can access certain LSEG datasets through Rogo. The construct with Databricks is similar. These are attractive new distribution channels for our data. Just last week, we took a major step forward in our partnership with Microsoft, introducing certain datasets into Copilot for any Copilot subscriber and more valuable datasets both into Copilot and Copilot Studio for LSEG licensees.

This will allow customers to build their own agents working with our data. You should expect the list of partners to continue to grow as we look to distribute our data through other major channels. That’s the fundamental premise of LSEG Everywhere. A key part of many of these partnerships has been our ongoing build-out of MCP servers as we make more and more datasets available over time. Before I hand over to MAP, it has also been a very busy quarter in other parts of our business. Just to highlight a couple of significant developments, with Microsoft, we have fully re-platformed our trade routing network, AUTEX, in Azure, with AUTEX now connecting 1,600 brokers and asset managers via the cloud. As a result, it’s faster, has much greater capacity, and is even more resilient.

We have executed the first transaction on our digital markets infrastructure, which is positioned to become an important new capability for trading and settlements. We’re preparing to launch our private securities market. More on that at the Innovation Forum. In Risk Intelligence, we have launched WorldCheck On Demand, with all our critical data and insight now updated in real time. That takes me appropriately to our Innovation Forum in a couple of weeks. In the first part of the event, MAP and I will cover our unique positioning, our end markets, and execution to date. Irfan Hussain, our Chief Information Officer, and Emily Prince, our Head of AI, will cover our AI strategy and engineering transformation. Ron Lefferts and Gianluca Biagini will talk about product strategy and monetization in D&A. We’ll then have specific product walkthroughs and demos across the group.

We’re looking forward to showing you both the present and the future. Just to be clear, this is not a traditional Capital Markets day. Don’t expect any new guidance or anything along those lines. With that, let me hand it over to MAP to talk about our Q3 performance in more detail.

MAP (Anna Olive Manz), CFO, LSEG: Thanks, David. Just a few words on our financial performance. We have delivered another quarter of strong growth across the group. Organic growth for the quarter was 6.4%, with all divisions contributing well. We had a benefit of 30 bps from the ICD acquisition of last year and a headwind of 190 bps from FX, which together translate into our reported growth of 4.8%. Within D&A, growth of 4.9%, workflows and data and feeds saw very similar growth to Q2, with only a slight impact from the new UBS contract that I mentioned at the H1 results. Analytics continue to grow strongly. The competitive environment is stable, and we are excited about the product pipeline. Our expectation for pricing into 2026 is for the yield to be similar to the last three years in the 3.5% range.

FTSE Russell, as I indicated at H1, saw slightly slower growth in subscriptions, with fewer account reviews in the period. On the other hand, asset-based fee growth was strong as we lap the loss of a contract last year. Risk Intelligence had another strong quarter, driven by both WorldCheck and Digital Identity and Fraud. Overall, these subscription businesses delivered 6.5% growth in Q3, ahead of our expectation of 6% for the second half of the year. ASB growth came in at 5.6%, a bit ahead of the 5.4% we had anticipated. Good sales momentum partially offsets the expected impact of the final Credit Suisse impact wrapped into the new long-term partnership with UBS. As I have said before, I expect this to pick up again to 5.8% as we exit the year.

The Markets business continued to grow well, though at a slightly slower pace than H1, as volatility was lower and comps got tougher. Looking at the two main lines, OTC derivative was up 9.2%, driven by continued strength in client clearing volumes in SwapClear, and fixed income was up 9.9% as Tradeweb continued to drive growth through its innovative trading protocols and an uncertain macroeconomic outlook. Elsewhere, we have seen the IPO pipeline pick up in the equities business, with more to come heading into 2026. We are seeing the final headwinds to growth in securities and reporting from the Euronext exit. Moving now to our delivery against guidance, we are absolutely on track and in some respects ahead of our original plan. Year-to-date organic growth is 7.3%, comfortably within our guidance range, and this remains unchanged.

On margin, the natural operating leverage in our business gives us confidence to raise our margin guidance to the top of the range at around 100 bps improvement year on year. This is a big step up for a $9 billion revenue business, and it factors significant ongoing investment in AI and new products. We are very confident of hitting our 2026 guidance of 250 bps over three years, taking us to 50% plus, obviously before the impact of the post-trade transaction, which I will cover in a moment. On CapEx, we will invest at a rate of 10% of revenue this year as planned and expect that intensity to come down in future years. One or two in the market have asked whether we will need to invest more in an AI future. The answer is clearly no.

We have been investing at a double-digit CapEx intensity for several years, and we are now switching the mix over time from technology debt payback towards more investment for growth, obviously including AI. Finally, we have good visibility of hitting our free cash flow guidance of at least $2.4 billion. Let’s look at how we are allocating this cash flow. Overall, we are deploying more this year than what we are generating. That reflects the opportunities we see in front of us. We expect to spend around $3.5 billion versus free cash flow of $2.4 billion. We are financing the difference with new borrowings of $1.1 billion. Total dividends for the year are just over $700 million, representing a 35% payout of adjusted earnings. In addition, we are deploying $700 million net on the post-trade transaction announced today, where we expect returns to be very attractive.

As David mentioned, you may have noticed that over recent weeks, we significantly accelerated the $1 billion buyback announced with the H1 results, and we have nearly completed it. Given our strong cash generation, low leverage, and the enhanced returns we believe we will generate at this share price level, we are today committing to a further $1 billion. This will start shortly and complete by the full year result in February 2026. We plan to execute $500 million of this billion in a year. This is a further demonstration of the flexibility and optionality our strong cash flow generation gives us and our very active capital allocation decision-making. Taking all this together, our leverage at the end of this year shall be around 1.9 times EBITDA, so in the middle of our 1.5 to 2.5 times net debt to EBITDA range.

Let’s now look at the rationale of the transaction in our post-trade business that we announced this morning. First, a group of 11 leading global banks is taking a 20% stake in our post-trade solutions business. The perimeter of PTS includes a recent acquisition, Quantile and Arcadia, plus businesses we have grown organically, mainly SwapAgent. This transaction deepens our partnership with institutions that can benefit significantly from PTS services and allows them to help share its future and share in its growth. Second, we have agreed to alter the terms of the revenue share paid to the partner banks from SwapClear. Historically, and up to 2024, this sat at 30%, reflected in our cost of sales. We are taking this down to 15% for 2025, applied across the whole year, and 10% for 2026 and beyond. Finally, we are extending it from 2035 to 2045.

Again, this is strategically important, and it improves our economics at a fair valuation and extends a deep relationship with our partner banks into the long term. Daniel will cover the strategic value in more detail in a moment. The financial effects of this transaction are very positive. The impact of reducing the revenue share from 30% to 15%, which again is retroactive across the whole of 2025, will add around 250 bps to the Markets divisional EBITDA margin and 100 bps to the group margin this year. While obviously there are some financing costs, overall, this transaction is 2% to 3% accretive to EPS this year onwards. Beyond these financials, and even more importantly, we expect this transaction to accelerate the long-term growth in PTS. Let me hand over to Daniel to recap on the playbook that has been so successful.

Daniel Maguire, Head of Markets, LSEG: Thank you, MAP. I just want to take a couple of minutes now to highlight how and why SwapClear has grown over the last 15 years and touch on the opportunity we see forward in post-trade solutions. Through partnership, both through the shareholdings a number of our key members have held in LCH and the revenue share in SwapClear that continues, we have built a deep and wide global network that delivers significant value to all of its constituents. The scale shift in 15 years is extraordinary. The number of members, i.e., the banks, has increased by 3.5 times, and the number of clients, i.e., the buy-side firms, has increased by 200-fold, clearly demonstrating the network effect. Notional value registered per annum is up 10x at nearly $2,000 trillion, and we have become the global destination of choice for interest rate swaps in all currencies for clearing.

This is why we are now inviting our partners into post-trade solutions, because we believe we can do the same again, but for the uncleared markets. We built a near £1 billion annual revenue business based on cleared OTC instruments across SwapClear, ForexClear, and CDS Clear, all of which are leaders in their markets and all of which are built on the strong foundations and the model of industry partnership. The uncleared opportunity is basically the same size as the cleared space. Our members and our clients want to manage their whole book in one place, bringing efficiency to their capital, the margin requirements, and materially simplifying and standardizing processes. We are uniquely placed to do that, given the assets that we’ve built and brought together under one roof and with our proven track record of delivering real value through long-term partnership.

Arcadia and Quantile give us collateral and margin workflow tools and compression tools, respectively, and SwapAgent and TradeAgent, both developed in-house, complete the current suite of services we call post-trade solutions. We have very good momentum to build on. Revenue in PTS is growing at double-digit pace. Volumes are up 70%, and the network is expanding at pace. Bringing these 11 major partners closer and giving them a role in shaping the business as well as a share in its growth sets us up for long-term success. I’ll now hand back to David.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Thanks, Dan. Just to recap, we have had another strong quarter of growth with year-to-date organic growth at 7.3% and all of our businesses performing well. We’re executing at pace on our AI strategy of ELSEG Everywhere AI as the AI partner of choice for financial markets data, and we are allocating capital effectively and proactively with an attractive strategic deal in post-trade and a further big step up in our buyback program. MAP, Dan, and I are happy to take your questions. Peregrine?

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Thanks, David. As usual, please can you limit yourself to one question and a follow-up after the answer? With that, I’ll hand over to Polly to manage the queue. Thank you.

Analyst, Various: Thank you, Peregrine. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. If you are called upon to ask your question, please use your handset and ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Your first question comes from the line of Anu Jubla of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning. Could I start with the post-trade solutions? Banks are paying over 50 times EBITDA, nine times sales for their stake. Clearly, as you said, that comes with a significant commitment to put more business through that division. I’m just wondering, you gave a bit of detail, but if you could flesh out a bit more what sort of commitments, the time frames, what specific milestones we should be looking at for that business to grow, and perhaps give us an indication of the potential size of that business in the medium term from a revenue perspective. My second follow-up would be on the distribution agreements with third-party providers. Quite a lot going on there. I’m just wondering how we should think about this because clearly there is a bit of a usage model you’ve talked about. Probably this increases significantly usage and therefore gives revenue upside.

At the same time, if clients are accessing your data through a third-party vendor, then how does pricing in the long term look like if you’re being, I mean, if the interface is somebody else? Thank you.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Thanks, Arno. Let me turn it over to Dan to answer the aspects of your first question. We’re not going to get into a lot of detail on what the revenue looks like over the medium or longer term, but you can talk a little bit about how we’re thinking about the construct, and then I’m happy to talk about the distribution agreements.

Daniel Maguire, Head of Markets, LSEG: Okay, yeah. Thanks, Arno. Look, we’re very strong believers in the industry partnership model, as you know. We’ve been using that, building that for a number of years on different services, and I think you can see the outcomes of that. Ultimately, we build core critical infrastructure for our major customers here over a long-term basis and around the basis of trust. We’re very, very pleased that we’ve got our major partners around the table with us and aligned not just on economics, but also on the product roadmap, the governance, and the product adoption, of which we have a pretty high rate of adoption for all the products we build because of this model. I can’t really be drawn on revenues.

What I can point to is when you look at the, which was shared in the slide, that the gross market values, which essentially is a proxy for the scale of market risk in derivatives, if you look at these numbers come from the BIS independent annual surveys, the gross market value is about $17.6 billion, and just over half of that is in the cleared space, but over half of that is in the uncleared space. If you think about the level of risk of derivatives being transacted and risk transferred, they are of a very similar size. We see the size of this opportunity very similarly as a result of that.

In terms of milestones, we’ve got, as you can see from the press release, 11 major firms and important people at those firms making clear commitments to work with us to build out and deliver and adopt those services. I can’t be drawn on specific roadmaps and revenues today, but very confident that we’ve got the right support from the right firms and the right people, and the network is much bigger than those 11, and we’ve already got very good momentum in that. Pretty confident on that.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: On your question around these partnerships or distribution arrangements, the first point to make is that we’ve been doing this for years, and we have been providing our data through partners and in some cases, as I mentioned, competitors, for many, many years. It is key when we do that, and this is a practice that we will, of course, maintain, that we protect our own relationships with our customers. In these kinds of partnerships, basically the way they work is that although the initial origination of the relationship might come through one of the partners, the customer is then directed to us to establish the direct customer relationship with us. We do that in a number of different situations and circumstances. That protects us from being disintermediated through these kinds of arrangements.

The other really important aspect that we’re very focused on in these kinds of partnerships and distribution arrangements is protecting our data and making sure that our rights, our IP, are protected even through any of these distribution channels. Obviously, the AI world is a little bit different, but we’re still in a position to protect our data. Let me just give you one specific, I’ll say technical, example. When we’re distributing our data through an MCP server, because of that construct, we can control and monitor the access to our data. In that construct, we’re not at risk of a customer downloading all of our data, training their models on our data, and then not needing us anymore. This MCP server construct allows us to control that in a very successful manner.

Maintaining the relationship, protecting our data and data integrity, these are the kinds of relationships that we have managed very successfully for a long time. It is great to see these new entrants and these new ecosystems because we think it will actually expand the market and the customer base that will be able to access our data. We are really looking forward to this and excited about it.

Great, that makes sense. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Lowe at Citi. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. Thanks very much for the color on the revenue split by product in workflow and feeds. My question is on the Data & Analytics and feeds business. Specifically, how much of the historical revenue growth has been driven by pricing versus volume? Could you please also comment on historical pricing trends across these different groups? For example, it’d be great to know how pricing growth in real-time data compares to the other segments, including the 10% from public data sources. It’d be great if we could hear a bit more about how much visibility you have on future pricing. I’ve got a follow-up, but I’ll wait until you’ve answered.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Yeah, thanks, Andrew. I’m not going to break it down product by product, but as we’ve been pretty clear over the last few years, you’ve seen our pricing yield on an annual basis be in that sort of 3% to 3.5% zone. You’ve seen our data and feeds business grow usually more than twice that. That gives you a sense of what’s going on here in terms of pricing relative to just volume growth. We’ve been doing a lot of innovation in this area as well in terms of new products and new distribution channels as well. Hopefully, that gives you a sense on that.

Great, okay. As a sort of maybe a follow-up to that, are you seeing a pickup in demand for your tick history now that you’ve got sort of LLMs which are cheaper and more widespread? How important is that when you’re sort of selling your forward-looking real-time pricing data?

Interesting question. Tick history, for everyone’s benefit, is a great data set that we have that goes back to the 1990s and has tick-by-tick history for millions and millions of securities, and no one else has it. It was all public data when it was released by the exchanges, but we are the only ones who have stored it, maintained it, and made it easily consumable. I would say the technological changes make it easier to consume and access now than it has been over the last 20-plus years. We certainly expect to continue to see it being a very valuable content set. Historically, it has been mostly used by quant shops backtesting their algorithms.

Your question is a good one in terms of recognizing that with these models, you could see a lot more potential users accessing this huge data set to look for historical correlations and help that inform their trading on a go-forward basis.

Great, thanks very much.

Thank you.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Russell Quelch of Rothschild, please go ahead.

Good morning. I’d also like to focus these questions on the Data & Analytics business. Thanks for the extra disclosure on the revenue breakdown. You disclosed that 55% of the data and feeds revenues come from pricing and reference services. I believe you’ve gone from number six player there to number three player in the last couple of years, just behind ICE and Bloomberg. My questions are, firstly, number one, how have you done that? What’s your view on the main points of differentiation in your offering, which is helping you to take share? My second question is, do you believe you can be a number two player here? If so, how? The third question is a bit of a follow-on from Arno’s question, but asked in a bit more of a direct way.

Can you talk to your expectations of the size and cadence of the growth uplift from the recent and future data distribution partnerships that you mentioned relating to LSEG Everywhere AI?

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Sorry, can you say that last, the third part again?

Sorry, a bit of a mouthful. I was thinking about the data distribution partnerships relating to ELSEG Everywhere, both the current ones you disclosed, and then you said about future partnerships. I was wondering how we should think about the size and the cadence of the growth uplift that comes from those partnerships, both the ones that have been announced and potential future ones.

Got it, okay. Your first question, how have we moved from number six to number three? It is investing in our content and investing in our distribution. You have seen us over the last few years do a number of, I would say, pretty significant steps in a number of different areas. For example, when we took on the Refinitiv business several years ago, it was very clear to us that, for example, talking to customers, they made it clear fixed income evaluated pricing was a weak area. Corporate actions was a weak area. We have invested meaningfully in both of those areas and addressed those gaps, and we’re now highly competitive in those areas. That has helped us move up the ranks.

We have added new content in terms of a number of different areas ranging from, I guess a good example is our inclusion of Dow Jones content alongside our exclusive Reuters news, alongside thousands of other news sources. We are constantly investing in content in a number of different areas. On the distribution side, over the last few years, we have made our content available through a number of different distribution channels. Whether that’s in different cloud providers, whether that is, there are some of our data sets, for example, they were only available in the U.S. for technology reasons, and we have now made those available on a global basis. It is a number of things like that, but really, if I boil it down, content and distribution. Could we be number two? Sure. We aim not to stop there. We’re continuing to invest in this business.

We have great data, great content, adding to that content, expanding our distribution capabilities. In terms of, I’m not in a position to give you any specific guidance on the growth uplift. What I can say is that we’re not done yet in terms of the different partnership arrangements. We think this is a really exciting time in terms of new ecosystems, new AI functionality that will provide lots of distribution opportunities for us. As I mentioned earlier, into customer segments that might not have otherwise accessed our data. For those customers that have historically accessed our data, this AI functionality enables them to access it in a, I’ll say, a much deeper way. I mentioned earlier the 33 petabytes of data that we have. Historically, our customers have really only scratched the surface of the data and the content that we have.

The AI functionality is much more powerful in really consuming substantial amounts of our data. As we shift further down this road, we’ve talked in the past about evolving our model more towards usage-based and consumption-based pricing. You put all that together, we are excited about what this opportunity holds.

Okay, maybe just as a follow-up to that, you’ve just seen S&P buy With Intelligence, you’ve seen BlackRock buy Preqin, you’ve seen MSCI buy Burgiss. I’m just wondering how you’re thinking about your competitive position in private markets data, and is this something that you might look to add inorganically to the offering?

Yeah, we already have a lot of private market data, and that includes what we have ingested organically. It includes what we provide from Dun & Bradstreet. The Dun & Bradstreet data, by the way, is currently available on the Workspace platform, but soon will be available through a feed, which I think is unique in the industry. We have our partnership with Stepstone, which is enabling us to create, again, unique private asset product in our index business. Maybe the last thing I would say is we are not done in this space, and there’s more to come in terms of our ability to provide incremental value add and, in some cases, unique private markets data. I can comfortably say watch this space.

Very good. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Ian White of Autonomous Research. Please go ahead.

There has been a lot of discussion around the accuracy of general intelligence LLMs in financial services applications. I guess, put bluntly, what advantage can you derive here from your privileged access to your own data when it comes to the training and development of more accurate models? Or, put differently, is it realistic that a general intelligence tool can match a model that has been trained on your specific data set when it comes to generating accurate results derived from your data? That’s essentially my main question. Just as a follow-up, on the Workspace rollout, which is now complete, what’s the latest evidence you have regarding levels of customer satisfaction with Workspace versus the legacy desktop products, please? Thank you.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Yeah, thanks, Ian. On the accuracy question, there has been a lot of discussion in the industry about a bunch of the product that is out there really maybe having some nice user interface, but not being remotely close to what this industry demands in terms of accuracy. I think that’s probably right at this point for a bunch of the products that are out there that we have seen. We expect them to get better over time. I think in terms of our own approach, the advantage that we have is that we have the data. We have the highest quality and broadest data set that allows us to do the necessary training. It is scrubbed data. We’re not training our capabilities on the internet. We avoid the garbage in, garbage out problem that you see with a lot of these other models.

This gets back to the point I was making earlier that through the MCP server construct, we are able to control the access to our data. We sometimes get questions from people worried about the fact that our data will be made too available and others will be able to, without compensating us, train their models on our data. That’s not the case in terms of the way that we make this data available for AI usage or AI consumption. In terms of the Workspace rollout, we are very pleased with the outcome there. This was a big exercise over the past couple of years. We are seeing really good views on the simplicity, on the kind of change in the user interface, on the speed. There are some aspects in terms of making some of the charting even better.

There are a few different things that we’re continuing to work on, as I mentioned earlier, sort of week in, week out. This is going to continue. It’s one of the advantages of this product and the technology stack that we have moved on to. We’ve talked about how we’ve implemented 500 or so changes in each of the last two years, and that pace is continuing. Even though we have basically completed the migration, we still have more releases coming. I think we have two more releases coming, big broad releases coming this year.

This year.

Yeah, more coming early next year. It is a continuous improvement exercise, which I think is a great opportunity to continue serving our customers better and better and better.

Got it. Thank you. If I could just play back and make sure I’m understood on the first point, if anybody wants to train a model on your data, that’s a licensable activity that you can control through MCP. A model that’s not trained on your data specifically probably won’t be very effective or will be less effective than something that’s been specifically curated for that purpose. Is that a fair reflection?

I think that’s fair. I don’t want to claim that we have exclusive financial sector. In other words, I don’t want to claim that in the financial markets, we’re the only ones who have financial markets data. There is other data available out there. Ours is the broadest, the deepest, the highest quality, and we are in an advantaged position. You’ve seen companies train their models on public data coming off the internet. That’s on the other end of the spectrum in terms of quality and accuracy. There are other data sets out there that you can use. They’re just not as extensive and high quality as ours.

Got it. Thank you.

Yep.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Mike Werner of UBS. Your line is open.

Thank you, guys. Just two questions here, one main one and then one follow-up, please. I was just wondering, I mean, you talked a lot today and very helpfully about the new partnerships and LSEG Everywhere AI. Just stepping back, and when we think about the partnership with Microsoft and OpenAI and what you guys are doing there, what’s the level of that engagement today versus 12 months ago? I think you used to talk about the number of software engineers that were operating on site on LSEG’s premises that came from Microsoft. I was just wondering if you can give us an update there. As a follow-on to a couple of my colleagues’ questions, when we think about these partnerships, particularly with the new ones with the AI engines and AI partners, is there any delta or any difference in how you think about the pricing?

I know you said you protect the IP, but when you’re thinking about these new partnerships, is there any change in the way that users who want to consume that data, would they see any difference in pricing than your traditional customers? Thank you.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Yeah, got it. Thanks, Mike. In terms of our partnership with Microsoft, if anything, the level of engagement is higher, and I would say meaningfully higher today relative to where we were a year ago. I know what you’re referring to. We’ve talked in the past about having hundreds of our people embedded with their teams and vice versa. That continues, and if anything, a higher level of engagement. We talked today about a few other things that the market hasn’t really focused on, but that we’re building with Microsoft. Our AUTEX routing network, our digital market infrastructure, these are not the areas that the market has really focused on, but we are actively building them with Microsoft. Of course, our data as a service, our analytics, Workspace being embedded in Teams, all the interoperability with Excel and PowerPoint.

We have lots of teams working across a lot of different areas with the Microsoft team. Couldn’t be happier about the level of engagement there. Just with respect to the pricing, in some cases, it’s really simple. For example, we talked about the partnership with Rogo. If you want to access our data in Rogo, you have a Workspace license. It’s very straightforward. It can be a little less straightforward if we are providing our data sets, our data and feeds data sets through some of these channels, but we have standard pricing for a lot of these. There may always be some negotiations around particular data sets or things like that, but we have standard contractual arrangements for these and standardized pricing for these.

Thanks, David.

Yep.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Before we move on to the next question, a reminder, if you would like to join the queue, please press star one on your telephone keypad to raise your hand. Your next question comes from the line of Hubert Lam from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. I’ve got a couple of questions. Firstly, on D&A, how should we think about revenue acceleration in the next year? Just given the upward momentum on ASB, should we think 6% or more could be achievable for revenue growth in D&A next year? Second question is, I guess last results, there were concerns about intensifying pricing competition from a couple of your biggest competitors. Just wondering if you’ve seen any normalization in terms of pricing or was the competition we saw a few months ago a bit of a one-off? Thank you.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Anna Olive Manz, why don’t you take the first question? I’m happy to take the second one.

Yeah, sure. On D&A, we indeed forecast revenue acceleration next year. We haven’t given precise numbers, but we have given one precise number, which is for our subscription business altogether, reaching 6.5%, circa 6.5% next year. D&A in this number is playing its part, and it will be accelerating 26% on 25%.

On your second question, Hubert, first, just to remind people, when we talked about some of the competition dynamics that they have here, that was a very small number of cases, a couple in each of the different business areas. I would say where we are today, we’re not seeing that kind of dynamic. It feels like a very stable market environment at this point from a competition perspective.

Great, thank you.

Thanks a lot.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Ben Baptist of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Good morning. My question’s on post-trade. Firstly, could you help us better understand how interrelated the two transactions announced this morning are, if at all? For instance, how different is the list of the founding members of SwapClear from the investing banks in post-trade solutions? Secondly, how significant is the decision to extend the revenue surplus share from 2035 to 2045? Was there always a presumption that that would be extended, or was that kind of an incremental sweetness in the deal? Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, in terms of the construct of the overall deal, there are 13 banks involved in the SwapClear business today. In the investment in PTS, there are 11 investing banks, just to be clear around that. Decisions to invest in the new business ventures are very much down to individual circumstances of each of the banks there. It is not really appropriate to speak on behalf of those in the 13 that aren’t in the 11. What I’ll say is there is super strong engagement across the industry. The level of participation in this and interest is very material from all the material players there. We are very, very happy with that.

In terms of the extension that you ask about, I think maybe there are different opinions on whether that would have been extended or not, but the fundamental point is this is something that’s been in place since 2001. We are here in 2025. It was rolling to 2035. As part of the overall structure, those 11 banks that are investing in PTS will be extended for a further 10 years at 2045. This is a 44-year enduring partnership between the major players in the OTC derivatives space on the sell side with ourselves there. I think it’s part of the overall construct rather than breaking it down into the exact elements of the negotiation.

Okay, great. If I understand it rightly, it’s just those that are participating in post-trade solutions that will have the extension to 2035 to 2045.

That’s correct.

Thank you.

To be clear, 25 to 35 remains all the existing 13. Existing 13 till the maturity of the existing arrangement, and the extension of 10 years is to the 11 that are also investing in the post-trade solutions franchising business.

Great. That’s very clear. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Ben.

Your next question is from the line of Julian Dobrowolski of ABN AMRO. Please go ahead.

Good morning, gentlemen, and thanks for taking my questions. I have two. Maybe the first one regarding the Microsoft product development, such as Open Directory and Analytics API and some other things that they’re trying to roll out together with Microsoft. Just wondering, are these offered broadly across all the tiers or restricted to premium users and as such, use an upsell vector? The follow-up, it’s on ASB growth. Just wondering, how confident are you regarding the, let’s say, reacceleration of this in the Q4? I think you’ve been hitting towards 5.8%. Can you please elaborate on the impact of the UBS multi-year contract and the Credit Suisse revenue crystallization? Perhaps, you know, if you can see some leading indicators suggesting a bit of a rebound in ASB growth in the Q4. Thanks.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Thanks, Julian. I’ll take your first question, and MAP can touch on your question on ASB. On each of these different products, some of them, the different products that we have built in partnership with Microsoft, some of them are separate products that have separate pricing, separate licenses, separate arrangements. Some of them are embedded in existing products. If we talk about Open Directory and we talk about what’s coming in Workspace, you’ll see us charge for that over time, really through price realization in the core product. I think in some of the products that we have rolled out in analytics, the Analytics API, for example, that’s a new product, and there’s separate charging for that. We’ve seen some of that in the uptick in the growth rates in analytics, for example. I’ll mention one other example where you can see this very clearly.

The arrangement that we announced with Microsoft, a week and a half, two weeks or so ago, where we are making our data, we are making some of our data sets available to all users of Microsoft Copilot. If you have a Copilot license, you can be outside the financial services sector. If you have a Copilot license and you’re doing something in Copilot, you will get access to certain of our data sets. That’s an arrangement that we have with Microsoft. We have other data sets that you can license directly with LSEG and then have access to them through Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Studio if you are building, for example, agents using our data. That gives you an example where some of them are embedded in, some of the pricing arrangements are embedded in existing products. Some of them are new, and we are charging incrementally for them.

Let me turn it over to you, MAP.

Yeah, sure. First of all, before addressing your question, I’d like to point out that we have outperformed our previous guidance on ASB. Remember in H1, we were expecting that the Q3 ASB would fall to 5.4% with 40 bps of impact of UBS. Excluding UBS, 5.8%, so comparable to Q2, and we posted 5.8% in Q2. 5.4% was what we were expecting for Q3. We actually outperformed this to 5.6%, so ex-UBS 6%, thus an acceleration from the 5.8% we were at the end of Q2. When I look forward towards the end of this year, we’re very confident into accelerating again to 5.8%. Here it’s the same thing. It’s 5.8%, including the 40 bps for UBS, so actually excluding it 6.2%. 5.8%, 6%, 6.2%. That’s basically the message today.

Understood. Thanks.

Thanks, Julian.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Enrico Bonzoni of JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask you, you now revised your EBITDA guidance a couple of times, even excluding the newly announced deal. I just wanted to ask you, what are you doing? Particularly

well or better than you expected, which basically drove the consecutive revision in guidance. That’s my first question. Partially related to that, just some small clarification. You are clearly now spending just over £1 billion to insource this additional revenue from SwapClear. Can you clarify whether this will be capitalized and whether the amortization of that will be above or below the line? That’s one question. Another related question to numbers. You’re clearly showing some depth. You’re guiding for EPS accretion in 2025. What about 2026? I know you talked about margin expansion for EBITDA in 2026. Can we say that we will also see a similar EPS uplift for next year? Thanks.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: All right. I begin with EBITDA margin. Yes, just to remember for maybe those of you who didn’t see it, we began with 50 to 100 bps of EBITDA margin guidance for this year. We reduced it, then improved it to 75 to 100. Finally, we are now confident to reach 100. It’s really an acceleration. What we have implemented in the last two years at LSEG is a full cockpit of cost discipline addressing all the different components of our cost base. Mostly people, we’re talking a lot about people, obviously, but it’s true too for cloud costs, on-premise costs, travel expense, and so forth and so on. Basically, this acceleration is coming from the fact that what we have put in place is more efficient and is producing more results and quicker, if you want, than what I expected at the beginning of the year.

The second reason, which is maybe an acceleration. The second reason, which is more structural, is, and maybe you remember what I was telling you at the earnings of 2024, the different automation solutions that we have put in place at different places in the company. In QAS, meaning our customer service, in our content ingestion, we were putting it in place. I was expecting to see the first materialization into savings next year. Actually, it’s happening as early as this year. That’s the combination of the two. Now, to answer your second question about the £1.15 billion that represents the alteration of the SwapClear revenue share, we’re considering this as an acquisition. We are creating an intangible asset exactly as we would do as a traditional acquisition. We are going to amortize it over 10 years below the line as the rest of our acquisition.

Then your final question, which is the accretion. Accretion of 2 to 3% in 2025, because I want to be clear on the fact, I hope I was clear in my script, that this revenue share alteration is retrospective to the 1st of January of 2025. It means that we benefit from the full accretion in terms of EBITDA margin that I have mentioned of 100%. In terms of EPS, taking into account the financing cost, we said 2 to 3% in 2025, and we’ll have pretty much the same thing, 2 to 3% in 2026.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Thank you.

MAP (Anna Olive Manz), CFO, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Tom Mills of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

Daniel Maguire, Head of Markets, LSEG: Good morning, guys. Thanks for the helpful call. I think we’ve skirted around it a few times on the call. I just wanted to clarify that you are sort of reiterating you’re expecting to deliver around 3.5% price increase on the 1st of January as kind of had been suggested in.

David Schwimmer, CEO, LSEG: Absolutely. Yeah. We’ve just sent the price letter was sent in September. We are, on the basis of the first reaction from this price letter and our experience, confident we will derive the same type of yield around 3.5% in 2026 as the one we had this year in 2025.

Daniel Maguire, Head of Markets, LSEG: Excellent. Thanks very much.

Conference Moderator, LSEG: Thank you.

MAP (Anna Olive Manz), CFO, LSEG: Your next question is from the line of Oliver Carothers of Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Analyst, Various: Thanks a lot for the presentation and thanks for a lot of the incremental KPIs around D&A. I just have one quick modeling question on the FTSE Russell subscription revenues. I think you’re calling out the more modest growth in subscription growth here in Q3 was to do with this mandate renewal cycle that you think is going to normalize next year. Just what’s reasonable to assume in terms of the pickup in growth rate? I think you’re running at around 5% on a constant currency basis year over year for Q3. The reason I ask is if we go back to 2024 levels of around 10%, on my math, this adds something like 70 basis points to your ASB. Just any parameterizing of that would be very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah. Thanks, Oliver. You’re right. This year, a much quieter period in terms of renewals during which we would typically see incremental revenue associated with either regular price rises or bigger, broader business relationships and broader engagement. I think hard to give you specific numbers as to what that’s going to look like in 2026 and beyond. You’ve seen how this business has performed in years past in that kind of higher than mid-single-digit zone. I think I’m probably pretty comfortable in that. Feel free to weigh in here as well. I think we’re pretty comfortable in that zone, but I don’t want to be giving you any sort of specific guidance on what that looks like at this point.

MAP (Anna Olive Manz), CFO, LSEG: There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand the presentation back to David Schwimmer, CEO of LSEG, for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you all. Thanks for joining us today. As I said up front, a little bit more substance in this one rather than a typical Q3 update. We hope you all have found it useful. If you have any questions, you certainly know where we are. We’d be happy to take any further questions through Peregrine and the team. Thanks again.

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