LSEG and Microsoft have a simple but ambitious goal: to reshape the future of global finance – together

I recently sat down with Matthew Kerner, Corporate Vice President & CTO. Matt oversees technology partnerships within the Worldwide Sales and Solutions organisation, collaborating closely across global commercial and enterprise customers and partners. We discussed how our partnership has moved forward and evolved since 2023, and where we’re heading next.

Irfan Hussain: Matt, let’s reflect for a minute. I know how important our partnership is to LSEG – it’s critical to the solutions we’re building for our customers. Microsoft has a shareholding in LSEG, and of course Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s AI + Cloud Group joined our Board in 2023. What was so compelling about the partnership for Microsoft?

Matt Kerner: We knew that financial services was a critical industry to address. It’s a fundamental growth driver for the global economy, but many of the tools in use, and the way data is distributed, haven’t kept pace with broader changes in enterprise workflows and technologies. That’s a big opportunity for us, and we wanted to work with a central player in capital markets with the connections, knowledge and technology to drive transformation across the industry. LSEG is uniquely positioned – you’ve earned the trust of the largest global financial institutions over many years, and you’re deeply embedded in critical financial services workflows worldwide. It’s a unique combination of leading expertise and technology supporting enterprise workflows and financial workflows. Microsoft and LSEG’s partnership is a game changer for both companies.

Irfan Hussain: One thing that’s striking when we look back is that, when we agreed to embark on this partnership together, AI wasn’t a big part of the equation. The financial industry was already using forms of AI, but there’s been such an acceleration of development and adoption.

Matt Kerner: AI is reshaping everything we do at Microsoft. It’s changing how we build software, serve customers, and go to market. AI is making people more efficient in their roles, helping to unlock more creativity, and driving productivity gains that we can measure. LSEG is really positioned well in the AI space, with the unique breadth, depth and quality of data that you offer. You’re right that AI wasn’t on our agenda in 2023, but the independent investments that each firm made beforehand and the investments that we made together in the first years of the partnership set us up really well.

Irfan Hussain: So, fast forward two years. What are your reflections and what are you most excited about today?

Matt Kerner: It’s been really energizing to see how we’re learning, building and improving our products for our clients together. Take Microsoft Fabric – with 28,000 paying customers two years after general availability, it’s the fastest growing analytics product in the market and LSEG has helped us make it even more differentiated. We’ve worked closely together to bring LSEG’s data and insights to Fabric, and with feedback we’ve gotten from your team throughout that process we’ve improved Fabric and made it more relevant for financial services firms. What’s happening with LSEG data and Copilot Studio is also a good example. LSEG is one of, if not the very first company to build a preconfigured MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector to expose data in Copilot Studio with zero configuration required by the customer. LSEG has given us continuous feedback on how we can make Copilot Studio better, so that your clients don’t need to do the integration or give us product feedback – they can focus on designing their own agents using LSEG data and deploying them at scale. I’m excited to see what our clients build with the LSEG MCP connector.

Irfan Hussain: That’s what partnerships are about – we work together and we help each other improve, and we’re seeing the results. We haven’t touched on DMI (Digital Markets Infrastructure) yet – do you want to share any perspectives on that?

Matt Kerner: Absolutely. I think DMI really shows what we mean by “reshaping global finance.” It’s a modern platform to manage the lifecycle of a digital asset from cradle to grave, in compliance with all the complex regulation that applies to securities in the markets where DMI operates. When LSEG announced DMI, there was an outpouring of interest from potential participants who were interested to either onboard securities or transact on top. Microsoft could help on the technology side, and LSEG uniquely brought perspective on which jurisdictions, which asset classes, and which market participants they would prioritise to bring DMI to life. This is where the unique combination of LSEG and Microsoft, informed by clients, can identify a precise growth vector for a new product line that optimizes across time to market, regulatory complexity, proof of value, and client onboarding. By combining LSEG’s domain knowledge and connections with Microsoft’s platforms, we’re breaking new ground for clients and the industry.

Irfan Hussain: And there’s much more to come. Let’s talk about Open Directory. It’s been an incredible partnership between our two firms, solving a clear customer problem: secure, compliant, firm-to-firm communication. No need to switch between platforms or systems. Teams and Workspace is all in one place, in the Teams environment.

Matt Kerner: That’s right. A lot of people are familiar with using Teams to collaborate with their colleagues – we counted more than 320 million monthly active users as of 2024. What many people don’t know is that Teams also supports something called Federation, where a firm can enable communication between their internal users and users at other companies. We have a federation enabled between Microsoft and LSEG, so I can – and do – chat with you as I would with someone in my own team. 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 (KYC) 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.

Irfan Hussain: We’re doing this through a solution we call Automated Domain Management or ADM. ADM automatically retrieves and applies the trusted federation configuration from LSEG’s central distribution point to every participant in the Open Directory network. This is what makes it seamless for users – once an organisation completes our onboarding and vetting process, they automatically get access rights to start communicating in Open Directory.

Matt Kerner: 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. 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.