The LSE Directory / Data providers
LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) operates a global market data and analytics business built around its 2021 acquisition of Refinitiv. The unit sells two related product lines: real-time market data feeds (Ultra Direct, Direct, Optimised, Delayed Optimised and Full Tick) and Tick History, a historical archive of intraday time and sales, quotes and market-depth data dating back to January 1996. Tick History spans more than 90 million instruments across 500 plus global exchanges and OTC venues and holds over 45 petabytes of data, including a 20 plus petabyte PCAP repository of Level 1, 2 and 3 data captured directly inside exchange data centres. The real-time feeds process roughly 9 million price updates per second and about 2.5 terabytes of pricing data daily across more than 575 venues and markets. The business differentiates on breadth and depth rather than price. Its multi-decade tick archive is one of the longer continuous historical records in the industry, and PCAP captures raw, lossless packet data at the exchange colocation level rather than reconstructed or vendor-normalised ticks, a distinction that matters for transaction-cost analysis, backtesting and regulatory reconstruction work. Data is normalised to a consistent symbology across venues and delivered through APIs, WebSockets, cloud distribution (including Tick History Query on Google BigQuery) and managed data-centre feeds rather than as a retail terminal product. Customers are banks, hedge funds, quant and algorithmic trading desks, asset managers, fintechs and academic institutions that need enterprise-grade, cross-asset market data for trading, risk, compliance and model-building, not individual investors. LSEG completed its all-share acquisition of Refinitiv for 27 billion dollars in January 2021, buying the business from a consortium led by Blackstone and Thomson Reuters; Thomson Reuters retained a large indirect shareholding in LSEG as part of the deal. In December 2022 LSEG entered a ten-year strategic partnership with Microsoft under which Microsoft acquired an approximate 4 percent equity stake in LSEG and LSEG committed to migrate its data platform and other infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, with a contractual minimum cloud spend of 2.8 billion dollars over the term of the deal. LSEG is listed on the London Stock Exchange under ticker LSEG and is a FTSE 100 constituent; group revenue was 9.081 billion pounds in 2025. The group also owns index provider FTSE Russell, holds an 82.61 percent stake in clearing house LCH, and holds a 51.30 percent stake in Tradeweb. LSEG retired the Refinitiv brand in August 2023, folding the former Refinitiv real-time feeds and Tick History products into the LSEG Data & Analytics division under LSEG naming; the Azure migration and Microsoft product integrations announced in 2022 have continued as part of that repositioning.
