99 Emily Prince of LSEG and Nick Parker, Microsoft’s chief business officer and president of worldwide sales and solutions, on stage at Microsoft Ignite 2025 discussing their companies’ partnership FINANCIAL SERVICES What makes this especially valuable is the ability to surface the output in whichever tool the end user prefers. Whether the agent is generating a report in Microsoft PowerPoint or pulling data directly into Microsoft Excel, the experience feels embedded rather than detached from real work. “Tools like Excel and PowerPoint are well-designed for solving particular problems,” says Prince. “By working within those environments, we stay accountable to the problem being solved.” Organisations can also scale their agent strategy more reliably with LSEG’s MCP, which standardises how models discover and access data. MCP also helps uphold licensing and compliance standards, reducing governance risks while enabling rapid data access. “Originally introduced by Anthropic about 18 months ago, MCP was developed as a standard protocol so we can use the same connector across multiple places,” says Prince. “It enables models to discover underlying tools safely, while upholding standards, licensing and controls.” For many financial services firms, this level of enablement arrives at exactly the right time. Despite years of investment in data strategy and AI experimentation, many organisations have struggled to translate pilots into scalable, repeatable value. “A lot of customers have had the building blocks for AI but been unable to scale it,” says Prince. “So, this announcement comes at a very good moment. It’s the first ever MCP integration within Copilot Studio – a landmark that gives customers access to great, rich historical content and lets them create agents in a safe, secure way.” The combination of democratised tooling, high-quality data and standardised access is beginning to reshape how financial institutions think about innovation. “What used to be a linear, engineering-driven process is becoming a fluid, iterative practice that empowers domain experts directly,” says Prince. “And while agent sophistication will continue to grow, the barrier to getting started is already lower than it ever was.”
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