Data & Analytics Insights

Scaling trusted data for the AI Era: A Q&A with LSEG and Databricks

January 30, 2026

6 min

Financial institutions are entering a new phase of transformation, where trusted data and scalable AI platforms are essential to unlocking value. LSEG and Databricks are partnering to combine high-quality, AI-ready financial data with a modern data and AI platform, enabling customers to accelerate efficiency, ideation, and innovation.

In this Q&A, Emily Prince Group Head of Analytics & Group AI at LSEG, and Junta Nakai, Global Vice-President at Databricks, discuss how our partnership is reshaping financial analytics, why now is the right moment for AI acceleration, and how trusted data plays a critical role in building responsible, scalable AI.

Scaling AI is fundamentally about scaling trusted data, and when you combine LSEG’s trusted data with a truly scalable platform, you get something powerful. You don’t just see efficiency; you see ideation, new ways of working, and new ways of solving problems.

LSEG holds one of the most important financial datasets in the world, and Databricks is a leading data and AI platform. Together, we unlock countless use cases. Many institutions invest in AI but do not get to the full value. This partnership changes that by combining LSEG’s data with a platform built to operationalise AI across personalisation, investment analytics, and risk management.

The industry has moved from experimentation to convergence—a clearer view of what scalable, trusted AI looks like. Developments like Model Context Protocol (MCP) allow firms to safeguard quality while using data at scale. Natural-language experimentation is becoming inexpensive and accessible. We’ve been experimenting for years; now we know what works. With over 33 petabytes of trusted data, the timing is right to unleash it.

Bringing LSEG’s trusted data onto Databricks lowers the cost of curiosity. If you compare how you shop or watch a movie today versus 10 years ago, everything changed. But investing or getting a loan hasn’t changed at the same pace. Democratised data and AI now make that kind of innovation possible.

Databricks One, a workspace for business users, is expanding workflows beyond developers and into natural language. Anyone can ideate with it. When you pair that with trusted data and a scalable platform, you get something financial services has never had before. Many industry ideas were lost simply because people didn’t have the right tools to express them. Now they do.

Building on Emily’s point, AI-native workflows can transform how banks operate. Many still spend huge time on manual data work, which keeps efficiency low. By combining LSEG’s trusted data with Databricks, firms can automate routine tasks and focus on insight and innovation instead. That's how efficiency truly improves.

It means solving the core problem customers face: combining their organisational data with trusted market data. That requires:

Delta Sharing for analytics workloads
MCP connectors for agentic workflows
A strong quality seal on every number
Historical curation and consistent semantics

AI-ready data is about trust, structure, and accessibility at scale.

Technically through Delta Sharing, MCP servers on Databricks Marketplace, and Databricks One. But what elevates the partnership is shared understanding of customer problems—risk management, alpha generation, fraud detection. It’s about going beyond mechanics to turn tools into faster problem-solving.

LSEG’s datasets fuel many financial workflows—news, reference data, structured and unstructured content. Today, 95% of institutions don’t get full value from their data investments. This partnership aims to move that to 100% value realized.

It unlocks use cases firms tried to execute for years. For example, in risk management: combining machine-readable news with market data creates new signals that help firms detect and manage risk in ways they couldn’t before.

Analytics becomes dynamic. Users can evaluate news impacts on portfolios, build deterministic models, or create new signals for differentiation. Many organisations already have hundreds of strong models that sit underused. Bringing them onto Databricks unlocks a powerful combination of data and dynamic transformation layers—creating new AI and agentic experiences.

Data feels complex because the pipelines built around it became complex. Customers describe business problems, not pipelines. Making data usable means making it intuitive, not by changing the data itself but by changing how we present it in response to the question being asked.

It’s truly one of a kind. There’s tremendous excitement about delivering zero-copy access to LSEG’s data and the new use cases it enables globally.

For customers, this is a step change. They no longer need to assemble multiple products themselves—we’ve solved the integration for them. That unlocks efficiency, differentiation, and insights they’ve never had before.

Products and Services

LSEG and Databricks

Accelerate AI in financial services with native access to LSEG data in Databricks via Delta Sharing—powering analytics, risk, and trading workflows.

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LSEG and Databricks

Bringing LSEG’s AI-ready financial data natively to Databricks.

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