LSEG and Microsoft Integrate Financial Data Into AI Agents
London Stock Exchange Group and Microsoft are connecting LSEG's market data directly to Microsoft's AI tools, letting financial professionals build custom AI agents without engineering expertise. The integration makes data from LSEG's 33 petabytes of financial information accessible within Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams, Excel, and other applications.
More than 350,000 users across 1,000 applications already access LSEG Workspace, the customizable financial platform at the center of the partnership. Microsoft AI is now built into this environment, combining real-time data, news, and analytics with natural language capabilities.
Data Governance Built Into Every Query
The partnership goes beyond simply adding AI to existing tools. LSEG embedded governance and permissions information into the data itself, so Copilot understands which users can access which datasets and in what context.
Nej D'Jelal, LSEG group head of Workspace, said the technical work required more than overlaying data with natural language processing. "In financial services, trust and accuracy - underpinned by robust data governance - are critical. Data used to make decisions needs to be linked to its underlying provenance."
Queries surface different datasets depending on user type: traders see one view, wealth managers another, investment managers a third. The governance rules travel with the data.
Reducing Context Switching
Financial professionals spend most of their day in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Users can now discover LSEG data within these applications through MCP connectors, delegate tasks to Copilot for execution in Workspace, and pull results back into Excel or PowerPoint for further analysis.
Sahana Prabhakar, Microsoft principal software engineer, said Copilot's understanding of client relationships and internal context guides discovery and optimizes workflow. "This drives faster insight," she said.
Building AI Agents Without Engineers
Through MCP connectors, financial professionals can now build AI agents directly in Copilot Studio using LSEG-licensed data. Previously, good ideas would stall at implementation because teams either lacked data access or couldn't get time with engineering staff.
Emily Prince, LSEG group head of analytics and group head of AI, said the connectors surface data for specific use cases and surface historical data users might not know existed. "This makes it much easier to bring AI agents into production, and to truly innovate," she said.
Niall Archibald, Microsoft senior director of financial services industry for the LSEG partnership, described the work as customer-led co-engineering across different user types, job roles, and daily workflows.
Next Phase: Proprietary Data Integration
The partnership's next step will let firms integrate their own proprietary datasets alongside LSEG's data and Microsoft's AI infrastructure. Prince said this will enable more personalized insights and sophisticated automation.
For more on AI for Finance, see our coverage of AI applications in financial services.
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