By Alice Chambers |
The LSEG-Microsoft partnership began in 2023 with a shared goal: to understand the challenges facing the financial services industry and develop technology to help finance professionals overcome them. Since then, the companies have turned industry insight into practical, scalable solutions.
“We knew that financial services was a critical industry to address,” said Matt Kerner, chief technology officer and corporate vice president of worldwide sales and solutions at Microsoft. “It’s a fundamental growth driver for the global economy, but many of the tools in use, and the way data is distributed, haven’t kept pace with broader changes in enterprise workflows and technologies. That’s a big opportunity for us, and we wanted to work with a central player in capital markets with the connections, knowledge and technology to drive transformation across the industry."
Trusted by leading financial institutions, regulators, compliance teams, investment and trading firms, and some of the largest corporates by market capitalisation, LSEG is deeply embedded in mission-critical financial workflows.
AI has quickly become a central part of LSEG and Microsoft’s work.
“AI is making people more efficient in their roles, helping to unlock more creativity and driving productivity gains that we can measure,” said Kerner. “The independent investments each firm made beforehand and the investment we made together in the first years of the partnership set us up really well.”
Over the past three years, LSEG’s data and insights have been made available on Microsoft Fabric, which now serves up to 28,000 paying customers, making LSEG’s offerings more relevant for financial services firms. LSEG was also the first to build a preconfigured Model Context Protocol (MCP) to make LSEG-licensed data available in Microsoft Copilot Studio. This integration allows clients to design and deploy AI agents at scale without complex configuration, accelerating innovation in financial workflows.
“LSEG has given us continuous feedback on how we can make Copilot Studio better, so that our clients don’t need to do the integration or give us product feedback – they can focus on designing their own agents using LSEG data and deploying them at scale,” said Kerner. “I’m excited to see what our clients build with the LSEG MCP connector.”
The companies also developed LSEG’s Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI) platform together to improve private market workflows. The platform is designed to meet stringent regulatory requirements while enabling liquidity and connectivity for both traditional and digital assets.
Furthermore, LSEG and Microsoft built Open Directory, a secure network that enables financial institutions to share data and collaborate directly within Microsoft Teams. With over 320 million monthly active users on Microsoft Teams, Open Directory extends this capability securely across financial institutions. LSEG manages identity and federates access to ensure seamless, compliant communication.
“It’s been an incredible partnership between our two firms, solving a clear customer problem: secure, compliant, firm-to-firm communication,” said Irfan Hussain, group chief information officer at LSEG. “No need to switch between platforms or systems. Teams and Workspace is all in one place, in the Teams environment.”
Teams also supports Federation, which allows a firm to facilitate communication between their internal users and users at other companies.
“We have a federation enabled between Microsoft and LSEG, so I can chat with people working at LSEG as I would with someone in my own team,” said Kerner. “But when you think about extending that across the financial services industry it gets more complicated – for compliance or regulatory reasons, financial institutions need tight oversight and restrictions on their external communications. Open Directory solves that problem. LSEG acts as a trusted central coordinator performing know-your-customer checks on each institution that joins the network, and once approved, LSEG orchestrates the federation configuration with every other member of the network so all the federations are enabled, and the network can grow."
LSEG powers this through Automated Domain Management (ADM), which retrieves and applies the trusted federation configuration from the firm’s central distribution point to every participant in Open Directory.
“Once an organisation completes our onboarding and vetting process, they automatically get access rights to start communicating in Open Directory,” said Hussain.
For Kerner, the launch of these capabilities demonstrates the partnership’s full potential.
“It’s really exciting to see this come to market, after years of work to bring all the pieces together across Teams, Microsoft 365, Entra and LSEG’s ADM,” he said. “This is a great example of an outcome that is uniquely possible only through our partnership, and we’re so grateful to be able to do these big, challenging things together and see them come to fruition.”
LSEG and Microsoft have moved beyond isolated integrations to deliver end-to-end solutions that reflect how financial services professionals actually work. As AI and data reshape the industry, the partnership provides a basis for ongoing innovation, enabling firms to adopt new capabilities confidently while meeting regulatory and operational demands across global capital markets.
Discover more insights from these partners and others, in the Spring 2026 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox.