London Stock Exchange agrees to acquire Refinitiv for £22bn

The London Stock Exchange has agreed to pay £22bn to acquire Refinitiv, creating a giant of global financial data and transactions.

Earlier this week, it was reported that there were talks between the stock exchange and the business previously known as Thomson Reuters financial and risk business before it was acquired by Blackstone Group in October 2018.

The stock exchange has now agreed a deal that will create a global IT giant of the financial services industry, with annual revenue of around £6bn. It will take the stock exchange into the business of financial data rather than mainly transactions. It will combine expertise in high-speed trading with data science to attract financial industry customers.

The London Stock Exchange said in a statement: “The transaction brings together two highly complementary businesses to create a leading, UK headquartered, global financial markets infrastructure provider with a leading data and analytics business, significant capital markets capabilities across multiple asset classes, and a broad post-trade offering, well-positioned for future growth in a fast evolving landscape.”

Refinitiv’s business has three elements – it has data platforms that go on trading floors providing investment firms with the latest information to help them make investment decisions, it processes large volumes of foreign exchange transactions, and its risk business supports compliance activities for big banks, such as anti-money laundering (AML).

It collects, aggregates, analyses, curates, stores and distributes huge volumes of data from a large number of sources. It collects more than one petabyte of data every day and processes more than a million unstructured documents. Its data platform provides 40 billion market updates every day.

It is a tech giant with an internal IT team made up of more than 5,000 people, and it has around 4,000 workers via suppliers or contracting. It has major tech hubs in Bangkok, Beijing, Bangalore, New York City and St Louis in the US, as well as around 600 people in the UK tech team.