LSEG everywhere: Trusted data for AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers transformative opportunities to the financial services sector. The use of Large Language Models (LLMs), AI agents, and other tools can dramatically simplify workflows, drive operational efficiency, and enhance access to actionable insights to inform decisions.

But the success of AI in financial services is entirely dependent on trusted and reliable data. Whatever the use case, AI needs vast quantities of data – but to be used effectively in finance, it needs high quality data. Financial services professionals, often operating in a highly regulated environment, cannot act confidently without pinpoint accuracy. In the world of financial data, anything less is simply not acceptable.

While LLMs that scrape data from the internet might seemingly pose a disruptive challenge to proven and reliable financial data providers, these public source inputs cannot produce the outcomes that the financial sector demands. An LLM might surface recent financial data points from publicly available sources, but financial institutions base decisions on historical, private and proprietary data as well. In a complex landscape of data rights and restrictions, they also need access to complete and reliable metadata – to trace the origins of data and understand how it can be used. The data requirements of the financial sector go far beyond what an LLM relying on publicly available sources alone can offer.

LSEG delivers the trusted data to scale AI in financial services. The depth, breadth and quality of our data is unmatched. Through our open, LLM-agnostic, and infrastructure-oriented partnership approach, we are ready to provide the accurate, reliable and timely data that enables our customers to deploy AI – wherever and whenever they choose. In sum: LSEG everywhere.

There are many use cases for AI in financial services. Some are well-established: algorithmic trading, for example, has been commonplace in the financial sector for some time. But the rapid development of LLMs and AI agents is creating new opportunities and helping to solve problems where older technologies failed. If deployed effectively, these tools can transform the way financial services professionals work, collaborate, and make decisions, bringing new levels of speed and new depths of insight to the sector.

Realising the promise of AI in financial services is dependent on accuracy. Financial institutions will not be able to use agents at scale to execute day-to-day tasks without the confidence that they will not make errors; analysts and traders will not be able to act upon AI insights without knowing that they are based on verifiable facts. Leveraging the full capabilities of AI in financial services requires a high degree of trust. 

At their core, these use cases for AI in financial services are all about the consumption and utilisation of data. Markets are fuelled by data, and AI is transforming the ‘pipes’ of the financial system to enable more rapid and direct extraction of insight.

For example, a portfolio manager might use an agent to speed up an everyday task like portfolio rebalancing – the agent could run simulations, suggest asset allocations, and highlight underperforming holdings. These functions save the portfolio manager time and enable them to focus on more complex tasks that require human intelligence. What is critical though, is that the portfolio manager is confident in acting based on the agent’s insights, and that the data it has used to produce them is accurate, reliable and relevant – the insights produced by the agent need to be replicable from one day to the next.

The same applies across countless other use cases for AI in financial services – risk monitoring, market sentiment tracking, economic forecasting and many more. AI has huge potential to enable more efficient workflows, deeper insights, and faster decisions – but without trusted data, it will not be fulfilled.

LSEG is an established, trusted data partner to the global financial sector. We deliver financial data, analytics, news and index products to more than 44,000 institutional customers in over 170 countries. Our data is integral to critical processes and decision-making in many of the world’s largest regulated financial institutions – and meets the highest standards for precision and accuracy that these customers demand. We are building on our position at the centre of the global financial system to deliver the trusted data that is needed for our customers to deploy AI at scale.

Effective AI requires vast amounts of data, and LSEG is unmatched on both depth and breadth. We offer the financial sector’s largest portfolio of real-time, pricing, reference, time series, and machine-readable content, as well as company, research, news and ESG data. Not only do we license data from hundreds of varied sources – both public and private – and work with expert partners worldwide, but more than half of our data is proprietary. We legally own the data content, the models and the methodologies, and we have a proprietary taxonomy that is embedded in customer applications.

All our datasets are enriched. From proprietary symbology and identifiers to standardisation and normalisation, tagging, sentiment analysis, point-in-time and analytics, we create added value for our customers throughout their workflows. Our real-time data is deeply integrated in our customers’ workflows and delivered over a dedicated network, and we carry unique datasets which are not replicable, like Tick History – going back 30 years across more than 90 million securities. LSEG offers customers far more decision-useful data, and far more value, than merely accessing data from publicly available sources.

At LSEG, we pride ourselves on data quality. With our data as the input, our customers can trust the outputs that AI produces. LSEG data is scanned and cleansed for quality at each stage of the data management process from source to database, both before it reaches our customers, and again after it is available on our products. Around 650,000 automated checks are in place across all our content sets to ensure quality and consistency.

Using LSEG-built technology, we track and report on data quality issues in real-time. As part of our commitment to data trust, we ensure that LSEG datasets have a dedicated and identifiable owner, so our customers know whom to contact if they have any questions about our data. We hold ourselves to account for the quality of our data and provide the services our customers need to use it with confidence in AI.

LSEG provides the data to deploy AI, wherever and whenever our customers choose. For example, through our Workspace platform, we give our customers a curated experience, where they can use AI-enabled tools to access trusted data and actionable insights designed to meet their needs. With integration in Microsoft Teams and Office365, our customers can generate insights and collaborate with more ease than ever before.

But we also deliver our data directly. Our open, LLM-agnostic, and infrastructure-oriented partnership approach enables workflows through MCP servers and AI-ready APIs [Note1]. Microsoft, Google, and Databricks partner with us because our data is already structured for AI consumption, and because the financial sector trusts it. We are taking our deep partnerships with the world’s largest financial institutions to the next level, enabling them to use our data in new ways and scale AI across their organisations.

LSEG empowers our customers to adopt AI responsibly in an increasingly complex landscape of data rights and regulation – from privacy and data localisation rules to licensing and IP. Users of our data can trace its lineage back to the source, with transparency on how it is processed, aggregated and enriched. We provide clear guidance on the sensitivity and privacy implications of our data and specify how each of our datasets can – and cannot – be used. In the context of AI, understanding data licensing is critical: customers need to know whether an AI use case infringes on their current agreement, for example if they’re using the data to develop a new product for sale. LSEG helps our customers to understand the boundaries of agreements so they can deploy AI without legal concerns.

Operating and serving customers across more than 170 countries, LSEG complies with laws and regulations all over the world, and we are committed to helping our customers do so too. We work with partners and industry bodies to shape the latest industry standards and promote the adoption of best practices through our market-leading data governance framework. Financial institutions are right to be cautious about how they access and use data, but with LSEG as a partner, our customers can be confident that they are meeting their obligations, minimising regulatory risks, and avoiding reputational damage.

The financial sector has a long history of adopting and deploying new technologies. It is constantly evolving to drive efficiency, foster collaboration, and unlock new opportunities for growth. AI is rare in its transformative potential, promising to reshape financial services in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. But as with any technological breakthrough, scaling it across the industry is dependent on trust.

With LSEG as a partner, our customers can embed AI in their processes and decision-making with confidence that the outcomes it produces are underpinned by accurate and reliable data. The depth, breadth and quality of our data go far beyond what is available in public sources, and we deliver it flexibly and with clarity on the associated rights, restrictions and regulations. We are building on our deep partnerships across the financial sector to accelerate AI adoption at scale – delivering trusted data, everywhere our customers choose.