London Stock Exchange Group plc: Q3 2025 Trading Update

Delivering strong growth, raising margin guidance, increasing share buyback

LSEG Everywhere delivering trusted licensed data to scale AI in financial services

David Schwimmer, CEO said:

"We continued our strong momentum in Q3, driving growth across all business lines. We are also improving profitability and are now expecting EBITDA margin at the top of guidance for 2025. We have significantly accelerated our strategic progress in the last few months, driving the long-term growth potential of the business: we have launched a series of innovative new products for customers positioning LSEG as the partner of choice in AI with the likes of Microsoft and Databricks.

"In addition, we are deploying capital effectively. Today we are announcing a significant transaction in our post trade business: a group of leading banks is acquiring a 20% stake in Post Trade Solutions, and in parallel we have amended and extended the revenue share arrangements within SwapClear. This deal strengthens our partnership and strategic alignment with key customers, while delivering attractive margin and earnings enhancement. In addition, having returned nearly £1 billion to shareholders through share buybacks in the last three months, we are committing to a further £1 billion by February 2026."

^{This release contains revenues, cost of sales and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the three months ended 30 September 2025 (Q3). Constant currency variances are calculated on the basis of consistent FX rates applied across the current and prior year period (GBP:USD 1.278 GBP:EUR 1.181).Organic variance is calculated on a constant currency basis, adjusting the results to remove disposals from the entirety of the current and prior year periods, and including acquisitions from the date of acquisition with a comparable adjustment to the prior year. Certain columns and rows may not add due to the use of rounded numbers for disclosure purposes.}

^{1. Total Income of Data & Analytics, FTSE Russell and Risk Intelligence}

Q3 2025: Strong delivery against key strategic priorities

We have aligned our businesses with strong fundamental growth drivers, including: the customer need for more seamless end-to-end solutions across asset classes and along the full length of the investment trade lifecycle; greater digitisation and data-driven decision-making across financial markets; and the critical customer requirement for integrated risk and performance measurement capabilities.

Within these, we expect the rapid rise of AI to simplify workflows and drive value-added insights to generate significant and sustained growth in demand for trusted, industry-standard data. With our unmatched data, infrastructure and partnerships, we are uniquely positioned to partner with customers to seize these opportunities, significantly enhancing our own products and opening up powerful new distribution channels for our data and analytics. Our strategy to deliver on this opportunity centres on three pillars:

We continued to execute against this strategy strongly and at pace in Q3:

Further disclosure on Workflows and Data & Feeds revenue

In the webcast this morning, we will present an analysis of revenue by user type for Workflows and by data type for Data & Feeds, to further aid understanding of our business and to demonstrate how our end-to-end workflows and trusted data are essential to our customers. These disclosures are summarised below.

Workflows: Traders, accounting for c.50% of Workflows revenue, are benefiting from the deep integration of exclusive, LSEG-enriched and industry-standard content into their pre-trade, at-trade and post-trade tools, networks including Messenger and Advanced Dealing, and access to proprietary analytics and trading venues. A further c.20% of Workflows revenue comes from Trading functionality, including trade routing and order and execution management services.

Investment Banking represents c.15% of Workflows revenue, where practitioners benefit from proprietary, enriched and industry-standard data across deals, corporate actions and research.

Investment Management and Wealth users account for c.15% of Workflows revenue. For these customers, our data leadership including Reuters and Dow Jones news, research and IBES consensus estimates, as well as tools like FTSE benchmark creation and portfolio analytics, are key differentiating features.

For all Workspace customers, the integration of AI over the coming months, and the launch of Open Directory, will further enhance collaboration, surface powerful insights from trusted data and streamline workflows.

Data & Feeds: Our accurate, auditable and trusted data is either infrastructure-based, proprietary, exclusive, enhanced or, in the case of public data, benefiting from our extensive processes to validate, normalise and structure it into consistent and easy-to-use datasets. Around 90% of our Data & Feeds revenue comes from activities where we have built a deep intellectual property, technology or infrastructure advantage.

Around 45% of our Data & Feeds revenue comes from real-time data distributed via our proprietary physical network. Another c.25% of revenue comes from specialised data sources (proprietary, contributed or exclusive) like fixed income evaluated pricing, deals league tables and publications, which we have further enriched with our own analysis. 10% comes from other specialised data from exclusive and aggregated non-public sources like Reuters news and contributed fund data. A further 10% comes from public data that we enrich with our own analysis - like IBES earnings estimates or SentiMine analysis.

The remaining 10% of Data & Feeds revenue is from purely public sources, but that data too goes through our extensive data transformation and standardisation processes, and is rarely sold in isolation.

Creating shareholder value through active capital allocation

Our long-term approach to capital allocation is to prioritise the organic investment needs of the group, to pursue 'bolt-on' inorganic growth subject to stringent financial and strategic criteria, and to return surplus capital to shareholders subject to leverage and other considerations. Overall, we expect to deploy approximately £3.5 billion to M&A and shareholder returns in 2025, as follows:

Ordinary dividend - £0.72 billion

We have paid £0.72 billion in ordinary dividends, comprising the 2024 final dividend and the 2025 interim dividend.

Post Trade Solutions and SwapClear - £0.75 billion net

In a separate release today, we have announced that 11 leading global banks have agreed to invest in Post Trade Solutions ("PTS"), acquiring a 20% stake for an aggregate cash consideration of £170 million, and valuing the whole of PTS at £850 million. As a result of this transaction, PTS will benefit from the partnership with a number of major customers, and these banks will benefit from strategic input into PTS and its future growth. 

In addition, LSEG will acquire an increased proportion of the revenue surplus in the SwapClear business, for a total cash consideration of £1.15 billion, of which £0.9 billion is payable in 2025 and £0.25 billion in 2026. This transaction is effective retroactively from the start of 2025. It will also extend the remaining revenue share arrangements out to 2045, extending the very successful partnership on which SwapClear has continued to grow.

This transaction improves the EBITDA margin of the Markets division by c.250 bps and the EBITDA margin of the Group by c.100 bps from 2025, and is 2-3% accretive to Adjusted EPS in the current year.

Share buybacks - £2.0 billion

We completed a £500 million share buyback in H1. In recent weeks we have accelerated the pace of the £1 billion share buyback announced on 31 July 2025. As at 22 October 2025, we have completed £938 million of this buyback, repurchasing 10.5 million shares at an average price of £88.95.

This opportunity for significant shareholder value creation has persisted. Consistent with our capital allocation framework we intend to deploy a further £1 billion in share buybacks by the time of the Group's 2025 full year results on 26 February 2026, of which we expect to complete around half during 2025. Taking into account the expected run rate of this new buyback and the Post Trade transactions, we expect Group leverage to be around 1.9x net debt to EBITDA at the end of 2025, below the middle of our target range of 1.5-2.5x.

Raising margin guidance; reconfirming all other financial targets

Excluding the impact of the Post Trade transaction announced today, we now expect constant currency EBITDA margins to increase by c.100 bps in FY2025, at the top of our guidance range, reflecting strong execution and realisation of operating leverage. In addition, the changes to the revenue share agreement in SwapClear have a retroactive effect across 2025, further enhancing Group EBITDA margins by c.100 bps.

Our other guidance for FY2025 remains as follows:

Guidance on EBITDA margin, capex and free cash flow is inclusive of all investments in our AI initiatives.

Q3 2025 summary

(Commentary on performance is on an organic constant currency basis, unless otherwise stated)

Total Income (excluding recoveries) was up 6.7% including M&A, and 6.4% on an organic basis.

Q3 investor and analyst conference call:

LSEG will host a conference call for its Q3 Trading Update for analysts and investors today at 10:00am (UK time). On the call will be David Schwimmer (Chief Executive Officer), Michel-Alain Proch (Chief Financial Officer) and Daniel Maguire (Head of Markets).

To access the webcast or telephone conference call please register in advance using the following link:

https://www.lsegissuerservices.com/spark-insights/LondonStockExchangeGroup/events/84cecf1e-6de9-46b6-8467-f6cfa478757e/lseg-s-q3-2025-trading-update

To ask a question live you will need to register for the telephone conference call here:

https://registrations.events/direct/LON40340394

Innovation Forum - 10 November 2025

LSEG will be hosting an Innovation Forum, with a number of presentations as well as in-depth demonstrations of new products across the Group, on 10 November 2025 at our offices in Paternoster Square in London. Please register your interest at ir@lseg.com.

Additional information can be found at www.lseg.com.

Divisional non-financial KPIs

Subscriptions¹

 ^{1 Organic, constant currency variance}

^{2 Subscription revenues primarily across Data & Analytics, FTSE Russell and Risk Intelligence, but also including some data solutions with Markets}

^{3 12-month rolling}

^{4 Total revenues of Data & Analytics, FTSE Russell and Risk Intelligence, including revenue items not included in ASV and subscription growth}

FTSE Russell

Markets

Foreign Exchange

The majority of LSEG revenues are in US dollars followed by sterling, euro and other currencies.

^{1 Total income includes recoveries}

^{2 Percentage splits based on Q3 YTD 2025}

^{Due to rounding, income percentages may not add to 100%.}

Spot / Average Rates

For definitions of technical terms - refer to the Glossary contained in the 2024 Annual Report, page 252.

Total income and gross profit by quarter

Organic, constant-currency revenue growth by quarter