London Stock Exchange Group → Refinitiv

An all-share purchase of the former Thomson Reuters financial and risk business from a Blackstone-led consortium and Thomson Reuters, at $27bn including debt, that turned an exchange operator into a data company with an exchange attached.

An all-share purchase from a Blackstone-led consortium and Thomson Reuters that shifted LSEG's revenue towards data and analytics.

Value

$27B

Announced

August 2019

Completed

January 2021

Sector

Fintech

Deal type

acquisition

Acquirer

London Stock Exchange Group (United Kingdom)

Target

Refinitiv (United Kingdom)

Why it mattered

Blackstone had bought 55% of Refinitiv from Thomson Reuters a year earlier at a $20bn valuation; selling it to LSEG for shares, eighteen months later, gave the consortium and Thomson Reuters 37% of the enlarged group and a large gain on a business that had been thought hard to grow. For LSEG the logic was recurring revenue: exchange fees rise and fall with trading, data subscriptions do not, and Refinitiv's Eikon terminals, its foreign-exchange trading venues and its benchmark businesses — the WM/Reuters fixes among them — would make data and analytics two-thirds of group revenue.

The European Commission's approval, after a year, required LSEG to sell Borsa Italiana, which went to Euronext for €4.3bn, and to keep providing Refinitiv's data to competing venues on fair terms. The deal completed in January 2021, and the integration of Refinitiv's platforms — the reason the business had been thought hard — became the group's story for the next three years, alongside a data partnership with Microsoft announced in 2022.

What it left behind

A London exchange group whose value is in data, and whose largest shareholders for a period were a US private equity firm and a Canadian media company. It is the reference for buying a data business with shares at the top of a market and for the divestiture — Borsa Italiana — that clearance can require.