FINANCIAL SERVICES INTERVIEW Building the data foundation for AI-era finance LSEG’s Dave Byrne and Microsoft’s Marc Esmiley talk about their ambitious partnership, which has seen them consolidate petabytes of fragmented data, embed AI into professional workflows and build the governance foundations that responsible innovation demands Bringing together vast volumes of financial data spread across multiple systems is a persistent challenge for financial institutions. At LSEG, this meant managing a fragmented data estate comprising petabytes of financial data across 30 systems and 1,200 datasets, driving its partnership with Microsoft to modernise data infrastructure and build a more unified, AI-ready foundation for nextgeneration data and analytics solutions. “When you need to pull data together across disparate sources that are in different formats and varying levels of modernisation and maturity, it makes it difficult to react to market demand quickly,” says Dave Byrne, group head of data platforms at LSEG. “We knew it would be far more efficient to bring everything into a single, modern platform. It would mean we could run the organisation leaner and react to market demand faster.” The decision to partner with Microsoft to achieve that consolidation was, says Byrne, as much about people as technology. “The organisation and the people you are partnering with are just as important – probably more important – than the technology you pick,” he explains. “Our decision was about finding the right collaborative partner to co-engineer solutions to business problems.” The result has been a 10-year partnership that goes far beyond a typical vendor relationship. Microsoft’s executive vice president Scott Guthrie sits on the LSEG board and hundreds of engineers from Microsoft’s commercial engineering organisation work in blended teams alongside their LSEG counterparts. “When we set out to build something, it is never simply a case of Microsoft launching a product,” says Marc Esmiley, head of product at Microsoft’s Financial Services Studio. “The starting point is always: how can Microsoft technology support the evolution of what LSEG wants to deliver to its end users? It is a co-innovation partnership, not a traditional vendor relationship where Microsoft provides the technology and LSEG takes it from there.” For Byrne, the value shows up most clearly in joint product roadmap sessions. “Some BY LINDSAY JAMES “ If I were comparing it to the personal computing revolution, we are not even at the Apple II phase yet. We are only beginning to see what’s possible” DAVE BYRNE, LSEG 85
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