Finance professionals, particularly in banking and wealth management roles, spend most of their days tracking markets and searching for news to understand what’s driving price changes. The ability to quickly chart data trends and annotate them with relevant insights is often the foundation of client updates and critical investment decisions.
“A fundamental task is turning company data into a chart to tell a compelling story,” says Nej D’Jelal, global head of Workspace and interim co-head of Workflows at LSEG. “To do this, bankers need to incorporate news and understand the context behind data movements. It may sound simple, but it can take hours, or even days, to get right.”
However, the LSEG Workspace Add-in for Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint can automate and refine this once time-consuming task, allowing it to be completed within minutes instead. Powered by LSEG’s data, Workspace helps financial services professionals quickly find the insights, news and analytics they need, based on their workflow. Available across different devices, it delivers AI-powered recommendations to support market monitoring and decision-making. The new add-in makes it easier for users to turn raw data into charts and slides, complete with insights from trusted news sources.
“One of the prominent banker workflows is to use Excel and an add-in from a data provider to discover, visualise, analyse and action financial data,” says D’Jelal. “This is a very important set of tasks, but at the same time, it’s very hard to comprehend. We worked with customers to target pain points like this in their workflow experiences. We crystallised how complex and cumbersome it is to collect data, analyse it and prepare the information for a client meeting by transferring data from a spreadsheet to a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. By reimagining this experience, we can help bankers be more productive by delivering smarter, faster and more confident information to their clients.”
LSEG’s focus on solving real-world challenges has shaped how LSEG approaches solution development.
“Traditionally, stakeholders drive how solutions are built, but we work with our customers directly to understand the problems they’re facing,” says D’Jela. “We then build solutions that address those specific challenges, rather than just meeting a set of predefined requirements. This approach leads to more effective, user-focused outcomes.”
This collaborative, customer-first approach is central to LSEG’s strategic partnership with Microsoft. The teams work together to build specialised financial services solutions directly within the Microsoft tools customers already rely on.
“We have access to Microsoft 365 engineers,” explains D’Jelal. “This means we can meet customers where they are in their chosen workflow. That’s the anchoring point: our ecosystem offering adapts to whichever platform best fits the customer’s needs.”
LSEG is playing a crucial role in helping Microsoft to bridge the gap between general productivity tools and the specialised needs of financial services industry, says Niall Archibald, senior director of financial services at Microsoft: “The LSEG partnership comes back to Microsoft’s mission to empower every user and organisation to achieve more. We offer a powerful productivity suite that supports a wide range of users. But we can’t tailor to the specific needs of every industry without integrations from partners like LSEG.”
For instance, LSEG’s Workspace solution has created a more user-friendly experience in Excel and PowerPoint. Now, instead of using a complex method to retrieve data, users can simply use a “dot function”, which is a development of the Excel custom data types feature, to pull in LSEG data as easy-to-read entity cards.
“Finance professionals shouldn’t have to work in two separate environments – one for productivity, like organising their day and collaborating with colleagues, and another for carrying out business processes and accessing industry-specific data,” says Archibald. “What excites me is how the interoperability between Microsoft 365 and Workspace brings these two solutions together into one seamless experience. It creates a whole new way of working.
“Users can start in Microsoft Teams, discover more data in LSEG Workspace, then seamlessly switch back to their Microsoft environment to conduct analysis and create actionable insights in Microsoft Excel. This reduces operational risk, with less manual transfer of data and content from one application paradigm to another. That’s really important in an industry that has very little appetite for error and risk, and has regulatory constraints around that.”
Currently, LSEG Workspace Add-in provides M&A data but it will be expanded in future. “This is the very beginning – more datasets will be added to Workspace as part of our partnership with Microsoft to make things even better than they are now,” says D’Jelal.
Looking ahead, both executives agree that AI will play a key role in transforming how financial professionals work. D’Jelal believes AI should be seen as an enabler that supports organisations in solving real customer problems and achieving better outcomes. “It’s ultimately about facilitating confident, actionable decision-making done more quickly than ever before,” he says.
Natural language interfaces, personalised insights and contextual push notifications are just some of the AI-driving capabilities that will reshape workflows. “AI expands the art of what’s possible, but it also changes how we design and build solutions, and what roles are needed to do that,” says D’Jelal. “At its core, AI helps accelerate our mission to empower our customers.”
Archibald agrees, predicting that LSEG’s data and workflows will continue to enrich every layer of Microsoft’s comprehensive AI stack. “At the top of the stack is Microsoft Copilot, the UI for AI,” he explains. “Underneath that, we’ve got tools for low-code and professional developers, data platforms like Microsoft Fabric, and all of it is underpinned by trusted, secure and resilient cloud infrastructure.
“We already have a rich integration of LSEG through this stack, but we now have the opportunity to go even further by embedding AI more deeply across the solutions we offer to financial firms, which will contribute to improving the user experience and result in a better customer experience.”
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