David Schwimmer, chief executive of London Stock Exchange Group, stressed that the growth of artificial intelligence will benefit the group amid concerns that its data and analytics business will be disadvantaged.

On the results call on 26 February 2026 Schwimmer said LSEG does not agree with the market’s view on the impact of AI on its business. He continued that last November’s Innovation Forum provided an insight into innovation across LSEG as the group delivers on its AI strategy. He added: “We are already seeing the fruits of that innovation.

Schwimmer claimed that the LSEG Everywhere data strategy positions the group as the partner of choice to provide licensed, trusted data that is AI-ready for institutions to use in their decision-making processes. Alongside its proprietary data sources and exclusive licenses,LSEG also has a network of more than 40,000 contributors.

“Heavily regulated and risk-averse customers are not going to rely on outputs compiled from the public internet,” he added. “More importantly, 98% of group revenues do not come from public data.”

In addition, Schwimmer argued that customers need to justify decisions they made about counterparties going back decades and AI cannot create that past record for customers. In the markets business, schwimmer described AI as a tailwind.

“More data consumption drives more insights, leading to more trading volumes and ever growing demand for risk management,” said Schwimmer. “Our positioning is strong and our strategy is working.”

Schwimmer highlighted that in the fourth quarter of last year financial institutions signed £1.9bn worth of long-term contracts of up to seven years to access LSEG’s data and workflow, and these contracts step up in value over time. In the data & analytics business, 16% of subscription revenues come from multi-year agreements.

For example, Citi is using LSEG data for front-to-back workflows and Bank of America is integrating LSEG solutions including Workspace and risk intelligence.

“We meet their needs, and they are confident we will continue to do so across workflows, data and feeds, risk intelligence and index business FTSE Russell,” said Schwimmer. “Only LSEG has this breadth of offering.”

He gave the example of LSEG’s real-time data feed exceeding 15 million new data points per second in December via direct connections to nearly 600 exchanges and venues. Schwimmer argued that AI cannot  does not, and cannot, replicate or replace this data. He said: “In fact, AI creates more demand.”

LSEG’s proprietary tick history data spans 100 million instruments over 30 years, and links current price moves to those of the past, and receives over five million customer requests a month.

“People don’t get that this data is valuable because it ties 30 years of market moves to the present day, and without constant updating this tick history becomes less useful,” added Schwimmer. “Value is created because no one else has the past like us, and we are the leading provider of the present.”

Customer demand for data that is accurate, up to date, comprehensive, verified, and auditable is significant, according to Schwimmer.  Therefore, LSEG is making it easier for customers to access and consume data through new cloud distribution channels or AI partnerships.

“We’re likely to sell much more of it, and we are only at the beginning of that journey,” said Schwimmer.

The LSEG Everywhere strategy delivers AI-ready data to any environment in which customers want to work. The group has formed partnerships with platforms including Anthropic, Databricks, Microsoft, Open AI, Rogo and Snowflake, based on MCP (Model Context Protocol) infrastructure. MCP is an open-source standard introduced by Anthropic in 2024 to solve the fragmentation  in connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external data and tools.

“We’ve added a new partnership with Open AI, becoming the first financial data provider to enable customers to access their data through ChatGPT,” added Schwimmer. “You should expect us to enter into further partnerships in 2026 and beyond where there is customer demand and strategic logic.”

Over 60 financial institutions have connected to LSEG’s MCP servers directly or via one of the AI partners. Schwimmer said hundreds of users have connected, and there is a “strong” pipeline of customers waiting to connect. Since no one can access LSEG’s data without a license, this is creating valuable sales leads to users, who may be human, a model or an agent.

Schwimmer continued that the successful migration to Workspace means LSEG customers are on a modern, modular, customizable platform that provides a strong foundation from which to launch transformative AI-enabled products. Investment management and trading users are accessing approximately 25% more applications than a year ago.

He highlighted that the workflows business has been moving from a per-seat model towards one focused on data consumption or enterprise agreements. In the scenario of human traders being replaced by AI agents, each agent will effectively be a licensed customer.

“The whole premise of LSEG in financial markets is that data has become infrastructure,” said Schwimmer. “Access to data is just as essential as access to trading infrastructure.”

Markets

LSEG’S transactional businesses have delivered a five-year compound annual growth rate of over 13%, according to Schwimmer. He continued that the markets business had double-digit growth in 2025 across interest rate swaps, foreign exchange and repos.

“Tradeweb also extended its leadership in trading of interest rate swaps, increasing its share by 180 basis points,” Schwimmer said. “Our FX venues saw their strongest volumes ever.”

Schwimmer said LSEG is innovating to capitalize on the accelerating pace of change in capital markets, including building new platforms for growth in digital assets. The digital markets platform launched last year, and at the start of this year LSEG took part in a pilot to use tokenized cash for settlement via the new digital settlement house, which is due to go live in the first half of this year. The Digital Securities Depository is slated to go live in the second half of 2026.

In October last year, 11 global banks invested in LSEG’s Post Trade Solutions business and took a 20% stake.

“The strategic partnership is accelerating growth and helping us unlock the multi-year opportunity in post-trade solutions,” added Schwimmer. “In partnership with 11 global banks, we are going after the opportunity in uncleared derivatives.”

Financials

Schwimmer said: “We have delivered another year of strong performance and rapid strategic transformation for the group.”

Revenues grew 7.6% with all businesses contributing positively, and data and analytics accelerating the focus on driving efficient and scalable growth.

In 2025 LSEG bought back £2.1bn of its shares and grew the dividend by 15%. The group announced a plan to execute a further £3bn of share buybacks over the next 12 months.