London Stock Exchange Group plc: Q1 2026 Trading Update
Record performance: strong trading volumes, good momentum in subscription businesses, high pace of new product innovation; full-year revenue growth expected to be in the upper half of 6.5-7.5% guidance range
David Schwimmer, CEO said:
“We have had a great start to 2026 across the board: our leading, multi-asset class trading venues have been critical sources of liquidity, price discovery and risk management for customers, while engagement with our trusted data to inform decision-making has been at record levels.
“We have continued to execute on our LSEG Everywhere strategy for the distribution of AI-ready data. Over 150 customers have connected or are onboarding to our MCP server, and our new AI tools within Workspace are generating very positive feedback. Our focus through 2026 will be on roll-out and adoption of these services.
“We are delivering this high rate of innovation across the whole of LSEG: during the quarter we drove strong adoption of our digital asset indices, launched TradeAgent to broaden our Post Trade Solutions platform, executed the first transaction on the Private Securities Market and announced the launch of LSEG DiSH, which enables real-time settlement in commercial bank money across payment networks. We are confident in the outlook and the delivery of all of our financial targets for the year.”
Q1 2026 highlights
(All growth rates on an organic constant currency basis unless otherwise stated)
- Record revenue: Total income (excl. recoveries) +9.8%. Data & Analytics +5.1%, FTSE Russell +8.8%, Risk Intelligence +10.5%, Markets +15.5%
- Continued strong subscription growth: combined growth of +6.3% in our subscription businesses1, with all three divisions accelerating over Q4 2025
- Exceptional growth across Markets: driving very strong growth in trading volumes across multiple asset classes as customers look to manage risk in a more volatile environment
- Further strong progress with LSEG Everywhere: over 150 customers connected or onboarding to our MCP server; Workspace AI tools now rolling out
- Significant product innovation: strong demand for digital asset indices, launch of TradeAgent, first transaction for Private Securities Market
- Dynamic capital allocation: completed £1.1 billion of share buybacks in Q1; well on track executing on £3 billion buyback by February 2027
This release contains revenues, cost of sales and key performance indicators (KPIs) for the three months ended 31 March 2026 (Q1). Constant currency variances are calculated on the basis of consistent FX rates applied across the current and prior year period (GBP:USD 1.318 GBP:EUR 1.168).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. Combined total income (excl. recoveries) of Data & Analytics, FTSE Russell and Risk Intelligence
Q1 2026: a record quarter
LSEG serves its customers through the whole of the trade lifecycle and the data value chain, across multiple asset classes. As market participants consume growing volumes of data to make trading and risk management decisions, these two threads are becoming more intertwined, reinforcing our strategy and strengthening our position as our customers increasingly turn to us for our trusted solutions. The adoption of AI and agentic solutions is accentuating this, as access to the deepest data sets that are constantly refreshed is essential for accurate decision-making. The multiple levers of growth for LSEG reflect the significant progress we have made both in transforming individual businesses and in combining them to create additional opportunities.
This is becoming increasingly evident in our financial and operational performance, as we delivered record revenue in Q1, with strong performances from all divisions, and increased the cadence of product development across the whole of LSEG.
Our customers recognise that our solutions are more valuable in an AI world. With our unmatched data, infrastructure and partnerships, we are uniquely positioned to partner with customers to seize new growth opportunities, significantly enhancing our products and opening up powerful new distribution channels for our data and analytics.
LSEG Everywhere
In 2025 we launched our LSEG Everywhere strategy, to make our unmatched, AI-ready data available to use wherever our customers are working. We made further significant progress in Q1 2026 as we drive adoption across our customer base.
In our Data & Feeds business, we have made our data available to licensed customers through a wide range of foundational models and cloud environments, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Open AI, Databricks and Snowflake. Since launch in December 2025, 90 customers have connected via our Model Context Protocol (‘MCP’) server, which delivers context, accuracy, control and measurability for data consumption. A further 64 customers are in the process of onboarding. The feedback has been very encouraging and we are refining our commercial strategy for this channel.
We continue to add data sets to our MCP server, with significant additions this week including estimates, corporate actions and company fundamentals. Over half of our non real-time data is now available via MCP, and in the coming months we will add transcripts, Lipper funds and FTSE Russell indices data. Through foundational work on our data estate over the last three years, in partnership with Microsoft, we have accelerated our speed of delivery significantly.
In Workflows, we are making very strong progress with the development and roll-out of AI functionality within Workspace. Our Workspace AI Search tool is in pilot with a wider launch planned in the coming months. This will become increasingly powerful as we introduce additional data sets. Our Workspace AI Deep Research tool, which combines our data with a number of leading foundational models, has tested very well with customers and generated strong feedback when compared with the equivalent tools of our competitors. This is now available through Microsoft Teams, as well as through the main Workspace platform.
We believe that, both through Workspace and our broader distribution channels, we can drive meaningful upsell and displacements over time.
Innovation across LSEG
In FTSE Russell, we launched 28 new ETFs in Q1, up from 24 in Q1 2025. In new growth areas, we drove a number of displacements with our digital asset indices, and made our first sales of our new private markets indices developed in partnership with StepStone.
Risk Intelligence launched its new Sanctioned Securities Data File, a granular, instrument-level dataset engineered to help financial institutions identify and manage exposure to securities with direct or indirect links to sanctioned entities. The data set links global sanctions designations and ownership and control relationships directly to financial securities.
We continue to build out our suite of services within Post Trade Solutions, working hand-in-hand with our industry partners. In March, we launched TradeAgent, a new post trade processing platform. TradeAgent helps industry participants reduce costs and risks associated with cleared and bilateral derivative processing by standardising the full post trade lifecycle.
During the quarter we also announced the H1 launch of a new digital settlement service, Digital Settlement House (LSEG DiSH), an open-access platform which enables real-time settlement in commercial bank money between independent payment networks, both on and off chain. Instantaneous settlement of cash means that LSEG DiSH can offer dynamic management of intraday liquidity and funding, as well as 24/7 management of settlements and margin.
In our Equities business we executed the first trade on the Private Securities Market. This new secondary market provides for the first time private companies with access to intermittent liquidity auctions using the London Stock Exchange’s public markets infrastructure.
Tradeweb continued its track record of innovation by entering into a strategic partnership with Kalshi, the largest regulated prediction market. The companies will collaborate with the goal of expanding institutional access to Kalshi’s prediction market data and analytics and advanced market infrastructure for prediction markets trading to institutional investors through Tradeweb’s global electronic trading platform. Tradeweb has also made a minority investment in Kalshi.
Capital allocation
We continued to execute our buyback programme in Q1, returning £1.1 billion to shareholders through the purchase of 12.8 million shares at an average price of £84.59. We are well on track to meet our plans to return £3 billion in total between our 2025 results announcement and our 2026 results in February 2027. We expect leverage to be around the middle of our 1.5-2.5x operating net debt to EBITDA target range at the end of 2026.
Financial guidance
We are confident of further growth and improvement to our EBITDA margin in 2026, leading to strong growth in equity free cash flow. We have started the year very strongly, and are therefore improving our guidance for 2026 as follows:
- Organic constant currency growth in total income excluding recoveries of 6.5-7.5%, including an acceleration in our subscription businesses’ organic growth. We expect growth to be in the upper half of the guidance range.
- An improvement in constant currency EBITDA margin of 80-100 basis points
- Capex intensity of c. 9.5% of total income excluding recoveries
- Equity free cash flow of at least £2.7 billion, based on foreign exchange rates of £1 = $1.32 and €1.17
- Underlying effective tax rate of 24-25%
Q1 investor and analyst conference call:
LSEG will host a conference call for its Q1 Trading Update for analysts and investors today at 08.30am (UK time). On the call will be David Schwimmer (Chief Executive Officer) and Michel-Alain Proch (Chief Financial Officer).
To access the webcast or telephone conference call please register in advance using the following link:
To ask a question live you will need to register for the telephone conference call here: