75 FINANCIAL SERVICES LSEG’s Irfan Hussain spoke with Microsoft’s Matt Kern at the LSEG Innovation Forum in November 2025 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.
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