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Biggest data deal & Biggest game-changer:
London Stock Exchange & Refinitiv
W
ithout a doubt the biggest
M&A deal of the year
and, quite possibly, one that will
change the game for many market
participants that do business
with the London Stock Exchange
Group in future: A combined
LSEG-Refinitiv entity would cre-
ate a data and trading powerhouse
with few rivals that possess such
scale.
Discussions between the two
firms were announced in late July
along with a £22 billion price tag
for the former Finance & Risk
division of Thomson Reuters. By
the start of August the offer was
officially confirmed and an agree-
ment was in place for the deal to
go through. LSEG chief executive
David Schwimmer hailed the
acquisition as “transformational”
72 // TheTrade // Fall 2019
for the exchange and there were
few in the markets that opposed
that view; analysts agreed that
this was a pure-data play, one that
would boost the group’s revenues
significantly and position the com-
bined entity as a serious threat
to Bloomberg’s dominance of the
financial data world.
One analysis detailed that the
deal would see the “$2.8 billion
exchange become an $8.4 billion
exchange/market data giant”,
while LSEG would also gain
significant footing in the fixed
income and foreign exchange mar-
kets. A knock-on of the deal also
ended Deutsche Börse’s interest
in acquiring Refinitiv’s FX trading
platform, FXall; talks between the
two firms had been confirmed in
April, with a $3.5 billion price
tag touted in the media, although
the German exchange operator
disputed the figure as “entirely
unfounded”.
At the time of publication, the
LSEG-Refinitiv had not been
finalised and there will be some
hurdles to clear before the union
is complete. Regulators and the
UK’s Competition and Markets
Authority are sure to be taking a
very close look at how the com-
bined entity plans to operate, and
may require some of the business’s
units to be clearly separated. In
mid-September, Schwimmer stat-
ed that the integration between
the two organisations could take
up to five years to complete,
although he expected “to get most
of those synergies within the first
three years of closing the deal”.