London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) Share Price: OpenAI Deal, Massive Buybacks and 2026 Stock Forecasts

London Stock Exchange Group plc (LON:LSEG) is trading around 8,690p as of the close on 4 December 2025, near the bottom of its 52‑week range of 8,096p to 12,185p and roughly 29% below its February high of 12,185p. ^[1]

That weak share price contrasts sharply with what’s happening inside the business: mid‑single‑digit organic revenue growth, upgraded margin guidance, a £2bn+ share buyback programme, a new blockchain-based Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI) platform, and fresh AI partnerships with OpenAI and LG AI Research layered on top of LSEG’s long‑standing Microsoft alliance. ^[2]

Below is a detailed look at the latest news, forecasts and analysis on LSEG stock as of 5 December 2025.

LSEG share price today: near 52‑week lows despite strong fundamentals

Last close (4 December 2025): 8,690p (i.e. £86.90)
Day range: 8,690p–8,904p
52‑week range: 8,096p–12,185p
Market cap: roughly £44.5bn
P/E ratio (simple): about 24x
Dividend yield: around 1.5% ^[3]

MarketWatch data show that in the last few sessions:

1 December: LSEG fell 1.28% to £87.94, leaving it ~27.8% below its 52‑week high. ^[4]
3 December: shares rebounded 1.42% to £88.68, still ~27.2% below the high. ^[5]
4 December: the stock dropped 2.01% to £86.90 while the FTSE 100 was up 0.19%, and trading volume was well below the 50‑day average. ^[6]

According to Investing.com, LSEG’s 12‑month total price return is roughly ‑23%, underperforming both the FTSE 100 and global data‑peer benchmarks over the same period. ^[7]

In other words: investors are treating LSEG more like a de‑rated “old London exchange” than a growth‑oriented data and technology group — even as fundamentals move the other way.

Fresh headlines: OpenAI integration, directorate changes and daily buybacks

1. Integrating LSEG data into ChatGPT

On 3 December 2025, LSEG announced a new collaboration with OpenAI:

LSEG is rolling out a Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector that lets users with LSEG credentials access licensed financial data and analytics from tools such as Workspace and Financial Analytics directly inside the ChatGPT interface. ^[8]
The integration is part of the firm’s “LSEG Everywhere” AI strategy, aiming to embed generative AI into client workflows and give around 4,000 employees and selected customers access to ChatGPT Enterprise with LSEG data wired in. ^[9]

Practically, this is LSEG trying to ensure that when financial professionals ask an AI model about markets, the answers are grounded in paid, permissioned, legally licensed data that LSEG controls — rather than scraped public feeds.

2. Board reshuffle

Also this week, directorate changes were flagged:

Martin Brand of Blackstone, a key architect of the Refinitiv sale to LSEG, will step down from the board in April 2026.
Dominic Blakemore, CEO of Compass Group and chair of LSEG’s audit committee, will also depart, with Lloyd Pitchford taking over the audit role. ^[10]

Coverage of the changes underlined how far the group has shifted since the Refinitiv deal: roughly half of revenue now comes from data and analytics, and only about 5% from traditional equities trading, with a workforce of around 26,000 across 65 countries. ^[11]

3. Continuous “Transaction in Own Shares” RNS

The London Stock Exchange’s own feed and brokers such as Hargreaves Lansdown show near-daily “Transaction in Own Shares” notices through November and early December, reflecting LSEG’s accelerated buyback programme. ^[12]

These repurchases are not symbolic. As we’ll see, LSEG is on track to retire billions of pounds worth of stock over roughly a 12‑month window.

Q3 2025: upgraded margin guidance and a re‑engineered clearing business

On 23 October 2025, LSEG released its Q3 2025 trading update, which did several important things at once. ^[13]

Growth:

Total income excluding recoveries rose 6.7% at constant currency (6.4% organic).
The Data & Analytics division — built largely on Refinitiv — grew 4.9% organically in the quarter.
FTSE Russell index revenues were up 9.3%, while Risk Intelligence (screening and KYC data) increased 13.9%.
The Markets division (trading & execution) grew 6.3%, with strong volumes across fixed income, derivatives and FX.

Guidance:

LSEG lifted its 2025 EBITDA margin guidance: it now expects margin expansion of about 100 basis points in constant currency, at the top of its prior range, before the impact of the clearing deal.
Including changes to the SwapClear revenue share (see below), management expects a further ~100 bps margin boost across 2025. ^[14]
It reaffirmed guidance for 6.5–7.5% organic total income growth (excluding recoveries), capex at ~10% of income and equity free cash flow of at least £2.4bn for 2025. ^[15]

Post Trade Solutions / SwapClear deal:

Alongside the update, LSEG announced a restructuring of its clearing economics:

Eleven global banks will buy a 20% stake in Post Trade Solutions (PTS), valuing the business at £850m. ^[16]
LSEG will pay £1.15bn (mostly in 2025) to increase its share of surplus revenues from SwapClear, reducing banks’ share from 30% to 15% in 2025 and down to 10% from 2026, with the revenue‑sharing extended out to 2045. ^[17]
Management expects the transaction to improve the Markets division EBITDA margin by ~250 bps and group margins by ~100 bps from 2025, and to be 2–3% accretive to adjusted EPS in 2025. ^[18]

The market liked the package at the time: Reuters reported that LSEG shares jumped around 8% on the day of the announcement as investors digested stronger‑than‑expected quarterly figures, the clearing deal and a new £1bn share buyback (on top of an already‑announced programme). ^[19]

Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI): LSEG’s blockchain push into private funds

In mid‑September, LSEG unveiled Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI), a blockchain‑based platform for private funds built in partnership with Microsoft and hosted on Azure. ^[20]

Key points:

DMI aims to cover the entire lifecycle of private-fund assets — issuance, tokenisation, distribution, secondary trading, settlement and ongoing servicing. ^[21]
It is initially focused on private funds but is designed to extend to other asset classes over time. ^[22]
LSEG has already facilitated its first blockchain‑powered fundraising on the platform with reinsurance asset manager MembersCap, a transaction described by the Financial Times as the first end‑to‑end tokenised capital raise hosted by a major global exchange group. ^[23]

DMI is tightly integrated with LSEG’s Workspace terminal, making tokenised private funds discoverable alongside more traditional securities. ^[24]

The broader context: asset managers such as DWS are pushing hard into fund tokenisation, seeing blockchain as a way to cut costs and improve liquidity in private markets. ^[25] By moving early with a regulated, infrastructure‑grade solution, LSEG is positioning itself at the centre of that trend rather than watching from the sidelines.

“AI everywhere”: Microsoft, LG AI Research, Anthropic and now OpenAI

LSEG’s AI story is now multi‑layered:

Microsoft: 10‑year cloud and AI partnership

Since 2022, Microsoft has owned roughly 4% of LSEG and committed to a 10‑year strategic partnership. The Q3 trading update describes how:

LSEG is piping its data into Microsoft 365 and Copilot, so bankers and portfolio managers can call up market data inside their everyday productivity tools.
LSEG and Microsoft are building Azure-based trading and analytics workflows that connect thousands of institutions, including new routing networks for fixed income and derivatives. ^[26]

LG AI Research: EXAONE‑BI and the AI Equity Forecast Score

In September 2025, LSEG and LG AI Research launched EXAONE Business Intelligence (EXAONE‑BI) — a multi‑agent financial AI system that runs on LSEG data and is capable of full‑stack market analysis and report generation. ^[27]

On 19 November 2025, the partners formally introduced an AI‑Powered Equity Forecast Score (AEFS):

AEFS analyses around 5,000 NYSE‑listed stocks daily, predicting expected returns over a four‑week horizon and assigning each stock a score from 1–100, with explanatory text. ^[28]
The system combines structured data (prices, macro indicators, analyst revisions) with unstructured information such as filings and news, using four specialised AI “agents” (journalist, economist, analyst, decision‑maker) to produce the final output. ^[29]
AEFS is being piloted with institutional clients across the US, Europe, Japan and Korea, offered via data feeds and white‑label services. ^[30]

LSEG’s logic here is clear: if AI is going to forecast markets anyway, better that it runs on LSEG’s paid data feeds than on scraped, unlicensed sources.

Anthropic, BlackRock and alternative data

LSEG has also partnered with Anthropic, allowing the Claude AI assistant to access LSEG data, and recently extended its relationship with BlackRock by adding Preqin private‑markets data to the Workspace platform. ^[31]

That means a quant or allocator sitting on BlackRock’s Aladdin platform can increasingly pull together LSEG’s pricing and reference data, Preqin’s private‑market datasets and sophisticated AI tooling in a single workflow — all powered by LSEG infrastructure.

OpenAI: ChatGPT integration as the front‑end

The December 2025 OpenAI collaboration closes the loop, putting LSEG’s licensed data directly into the hands of end‑users via ChatGPT Enterprise. ^[32]

Taken together, this network of partnerships positions LSEG less as “a stock exchange” and more as core plumbing for AI‑driven finance — a data utility and workflow provider that gets paid whenever professionals need high‑quality, permissioned data inside their AI tools.

Multi‑billion buybacks and a steadily rising dividend

LSEG is leaning hard on capital returns to support its share price.

Share buybacks

From its Q3 update and earlier announcements: ^[33]

A £500m buyback was completed in H1 2025.
A further £1bn buyback was announced with the July 31 half‑year results; by 22 October, LSEG had repurchased 10.5m shares worth £938m at an average price of about £88.95. ^[34]
Alongside the Q3 results, LSEG committed to an additional £1bn buyback, to be completed by the 26 February 2026 full‑year results, with “around half” expected to be executed before the end of 2025. ^[35]

That implies roughly £2.5bn of buybacks across twelve months. Against a market cap of about £44.5bn, this equates to something like 5–6% of the company being retired over that period, before counting dividends. ^[36]

Dividends

Hargreaves Lansdown’s data show that LSEG has increased its ordinary dividend steadily: ^[37]

2024 total dividend: 130p per share
2023: 115p
2022: 107p
2021: 95p

With the shares at 8,690p, that puts the trailing yield around 1.5%, with dividend cover near 2.8x earnings — modest income, but consistent with a growth‑oriented data franchise. ^[38]

GuruFocus estimates a dividend yield of ~1.5%, 3‑year dividend growth of ~16% and a 3‑year average buyback ratio of 1.7%, for a combined shareholder yield of around 3–4% before the latest acceleration in repurchases. ^[39]

Analyst ratings and 12‑month price targets: strong‑buy consensus

Across multiple sources, the sell‑side is almost unanimously bullish on LSEG:

LSEG’s own analyst consensus (12 November 2025) aggregates 10 models and reports 17 Buy, 1 Hold, 0 Sell, with a consensus target price of 12,244p versus a closing price of 9,186p on that date. ^[40]
Investing.com lists a “Strong Buy” consensus from 15 analysts, all rating the stock a Buy, with an average 12‑month target of ~12,349p (range: 11,000p to 13,790p), implying roughly +42% upside from 8,690p. ^[41]
TradingView shows a slightly higher average price target of 12,396p, with 18 analysts over the last three months also giving a Strong Buy rating. It notes that last quarter’s EPS was 2.09p vs a 2.00p estimate, and that the next quarter’s consensus EPS is 1.96p on revenue of £4.67bn. ^[42]

A detailed TS2 Tech roundup of broker data (2 December 2025) collates external aggregators such as TipRanks and MarketBeat and arrives at very similar numbers:

TipRanks average target around 12,810p (high 13,790p, low 11,000p).
MarketBeat’s averaged target about £126 per share (12,600p), implying roughly 40–45% upside from recent prices in the mid‑£80s. TS2 Tech

While methodologies differ, the message is consistent: Street models assume LSEG can grow revenue in the mid‑single‑digits, expand margins and compound earnings enough to justify a share price back above £120.

Valuation: premium multiples, discounted sentiment

So is LSEG “cheap” after the sell‑off? The answer depends on which lens you use.

Classic multiples

On simple reported numbers:

Hargreaves Lansdown puts LSEG’s trailing P/E at about 23.9x, with a dividend yield around 1.5%. ^[43]
GuruFocus, using IFRS earnings, shows a headline P/E of 47.8x, but a forward P/E closer to 19.4x, along with price/sales of ~5.2x, EV/revenue ~5.9x and EV/EBITDA ~12.5x. ^[44]
A separate relative‑valuation snapshot of the US‑traded LSEG ADR (LSEG.Y) suggests a P/E of about 45.6x, compared with a peer average of 33.2x for other exchange and data groups, and EV/revenue around 5.8x. ^[45]

TS2’s synthesis (based on trailing 12‑month revenue of roughly £9.1bn and net profit around £1bn) arrives at:

Net margin ~11%
Trailing P/E mid‑40s
Price/sales ~4.9x
1‑year total price return: around −22%. TS2 Tech

In other words, LSEG still trades on a premium multiple to the wider UK market, but has de‑rated significantly versus its own recent history.

Versus global data peers

Global peers such as Moody’s, S&P Global, ICE, CME and MSCI also trade on high‑teens to mid‑30s forward P/E ratios, reflecting the structural value of their data, index and clearing franchises. ^[46]

Some models (like those at Simply Wall St, referenced in the TS2 piece) argue that LSEG is expensive on P/E relative to those peers, suggesting downside if growth disappoints. TS2 Tech+1 Others, including Morningstar and several bank analysts, view the current price as undervalued versus their long‑term fair‑value estimates, given the group’s recurring revenue, high switching costs and opportunities in AI and private markets. ^[47]

So valuation is not screamingly cheap in absolute terms — but it is a lot less frothy than it was when the shares were above £120, and the gap between price and consensus target (around 40–45%) is large.

Structural story: from “exchange” to data‑and‑AI infrastructure

Several strands of recent coverage emphasise how different today’s LSEG is from the old cash‑equities‑centric London Stock Exchange:

Data and analytics (including Refinitiv, FTSE Russell and Risk Intelligence) now account for around two‑thirds of revenue and the majority of profits. ^[48]
GuruFocus estimates 3‑year revenue growth of ~11% and 3‑year EBITDA growth of ~15–16%, with consistently high gross margins (~87%) and EBITDA margins (~47%). ^[49]
MoneyWeek’s “Dashing Dozen” study of long‑term UK winners highlighted LSEG’s 821% share‑price gain over 12 years (to April 2025), vastly outpacing the FTSE 100 and even the S&P 500, albeit from a smaller base. ^[50]

At the same time, LSEG has been re‑engineering its technology base:

A Financial News report notes that since early 2024 the group has reduced its engineering workforce by about 3,000 people, shrinking the total from 17,000 to around 14,000, while increasing the share of internal staff from 40% to 58% (with a target of 80% by 2027) and claiming 11% higher output from the leaner team. AI tooling is said to be contributing up to 34% productivity gains in some areas. ^[51]

Taken together, these moves point toward LSEG as a scaled, high‑margin “picks and shovels” provider for increasingly automated, AI‑driven capital markets.

What could go wrong? Key risks around LSEG stock

Despite the bullish consensus, analysts and investors do flag several important risks: TS2 Tech+2FNLondon+2

AI commoditisation and pricing pressure
- The same generative‑AI wave that LSEG is embracing could, in theory, commoditise some categories of financial information, particularly if regulators push for more open data. Even if LSEG’s core reference and index data remain well protected, customers will push hard on price and may experiment with alternative providers.
Execution risk in DMI and new products
- History is littered with ambitious blockchain projects in market infrastructure that never reached scale. If DMI fails to attract enough issuers, investors or secondary‑market activity, the investment could end up looking like costly R&D rather than a new profit engine. ^[52]
Macro and market‑cycle sensitivity
- Trading, clearing and index revenues all depend on market volumes and asset values. A prolonged downturn in global markets, or a sharp rotation away from risk assets, would weigh on LSEG’s top line, even if subscription revenue softens the blow. ^[53]
Regulatory and political risks
- As both a listed company and an operator of core financial infrastructure, LSEG is exposed to regulatory shifts in the UK, EU and US, including debates over data ownership, benchmark regulation, market‑structure rules and UK pension‑fund reforms.
The “UK discount” and governance questions
- Articles in the FT and elsewhere have highlighted the broader “London valuation discount” and investor scrutiny of executive pay proposals at UK blue chips, including LSEG. TS2 Tech+1 This may continue to weigh on the multiple regardless of operational performance.

Outlook: is the LSEG sell‑off opportunity or value trap?

Putting everything together as of 5 December 2025:

Business performance: Mid‑single‑digit organic income growth, rising margins, high recurring revenue and strong cash generation look intact. ^[54]
Strategy: LSEG is leaning into AI and tokenisation from multiple angles — Microsoft, LG AI Research, Anthropic, OpenAI and DMI — with the stated aim of making its data and infrastructure the rails on which next‑generation tools run. ^[55]
Capital returns: Around £2.5bn of share buybacks plus a growing ordinary dividend deliver a meaningful shareholder yield and gradually shrink the equity base. ^[56]
Market perception: Despite all that, the shares are trading close to their 52‑week lows, more than 25% below their peak, after a year of de‑rating driven by worries over AI competition, slower subscription growth and global risk‑off episodes. ^[57]
Street view: Analysts are almost uniformly in the Strong Buy camp, with 40–45% implied upside from current levels based on 12‑month price targets clustered around 12,300–12,600p. ^[58]

Whether that upside materialises depends on a simple but non‑trivial question: does AI make LSEG’s data and infrastructure more valuable — or less?

If the bullish scenario plays out, LSEG could justify its premium multiple as a critical, cash‑rich “AI utility” for the global financial system, with buybacks amplifying EPS growth. If not, the current valuation could prove fragile despite the share‑price pullback.

Either way, the stock is likely to remain a key barometer for how investors value data, indices, clearing and AI‑driven infrastructure in a post‑“just an exchange” world.