London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) steps up its £1bn buyback, as shares edge higher and its AI, data and tokenisation strategy gathers pace on 27 Nov 2025.
London, 27 November 2025 – London Stock Exchange Group plc (LSEG) has released a fresh Transaction in Own Shares notice this morning, confirming another tranche of its £1 billion share buyback programme, while the stock closed modestly higher and investors digested a busy month of AI partnerships and data deals. [1]
Below is a full rundown of what’s new around LSEG today and how it fits into the wider investment story.
1. Today’s headline: 127,379 shares repurchased under ongoing buyback
In a regulatory filing dated 27 November 2025, LSEG announced that it has repurchased 127,379 ordinary shares of 6 79/86 pence each on 26 November 2025 from Citigroup Global Markets Limited, as part of the £1 billion buyback programme it launched earlier this month. [2]
Key details from today’s notice: [3]
- Number of shares purchased: 127,379
- Price range:
- Lowest price: 8,820.00p
- Highest price: 8,926.00p
- Volume‑weighted average price:8,882.89p, implying a buyback value of roughly £11.3 million for this tranche.
- Intended use: All repurchased shares will be cancelled, rather than held in treasury.
Following cancellation of this batch, LSEG reports: [4]
- Shares in issue (excluding treasury): 513,870,676
- Treasury shares: 24,051,599
- Total voting rights: 513,870,676
Today’s purchase represents only around 0.025% of the current voting share count, but it’s part of a much larger capital‑return plan that management intends to run through early 2026.
2. How today’s buyback fits into LSEG’s £1bn capital return plan
The latest transaction builds on a series of daily Transaction in Own Shares announcements since mid‑November, as Citi executes the programme on LSEG’s behalf. Recent disclosures include purchases of 207,500 shares on 18 November and 115,714 shares on 25 November, also earmarked for cancellation. [5]
The framework for the current buyback was set out in LSEG’s Q3 2025 trading update and a follow‑on RNS earlier this month: [6]
- In October, LSEG announced an additional £1 billion in share repurchases, targeting completion before its 2025 preliminary results, taking total buybacks for the 12 months from March 2025 to February 2026 to £2.5 billion. [7]
- On 3–4 November, the group formally commenced a new £1 billion buyback programme with Citi acting as riskless principal, with purchases set to run no later than 25 February 2026. The stated purpose is to reduce LSEG’s share capital. [8]
This comes on top of earlier buybacks with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs that completed in June and early November 2025, respectively. [9]
Taken together, the scale of the repurchases underlines management’s confidence in the business and its cash‑generation profile after the Refinitiv integration and the recent sale of a 20% stake in its post‑trade business, announced alongside Q3 results. [10]
3. LSEG share price today: modest rise, still well below 2025 peak
On 27 November 2025, LSEG’s London‑listed shares closed around 8,910p, up roughly 0.25% on the day, giving the group a market capitalisation of about £45.7 billion. Intraday, the stock traded between 8,856p and 8,972p. [11]
Other snapshot metrics at today’s close: [12]
- 52‑week range: 8,096p–12,185p – meaning the shares are trading about 27% below their 12,185p high earlier this year.
- Price/earnings (P/E) ratio: ~24.5x trailing earnings.
- Dividend profile: last ordinary dividend 47p per share, with three‑year average dividend growth of about 16–17% per year.
Broker data compiled by platforms such as eToro point to an average analyst target price around 12,767p and a consensus “Strong Buy” rating, suggesting material upside from current levels if management can deliver on growth and margin guidance. [13]
Today’s move comes against a relatively muted backdrop for UK equities. After some intra‑day weakness, the FTSE 100 ended the session only slightly higher, while investors continued to digest Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ tax‑raising budget and a new three‑year stamp duty holiday for newly listed London shares, a measure explicitly designed to revive IPO activity on the London Stock Exchange. [14]
The stamp duty waiver – removing the 0.5% tax on purchases of newly listed shares for three years – was welcomed by London Stock Exchange CEO Julia Hoggett as an “important first step” towards revitalising UK capital markets, a structural positive for LSEG’s Capital Markets division if it translates into more listings and higher trading volumes. [15]
4. Under the bonnet: strong 2025 financial performance so far
H1 2025: double‑digit earnings growth and higher margins
LSEG’s interim results for the six months to 30 June 2025 showed a business still in strong execution mode: [16]
- Total income (excluding recoveries): £4.49 billion, up 6.8% year‑on‑year (8.7% at constant currency).
- Reported EBITDA: £2.16 billion, up 10.9%.
- Profit before tax: up 43% to £991 million.
- Adjusted EBITDA margin: improved to 49.5% from 48.5%.
- Adjusted earnings per share (AEPS): up 20% to 208.9p.
- Interim dividend: raised 15% to 47p per share.
Management also upgraded 2025 margin guidance, targeting a 75–100 basis‑point improvement compared with prior expectations of 50–100 bps, and announced the intention to launch a further £1 billion share buyback in H2 – the programme now being executed. [17]
Q3 2025: broad‑based growth and more capital returns
The Q3 2025 trading update in October reinforced that momentum: [18]
- Total income (excl. recoveries): up 6.4% in the quarter and 7.3% year‑to‑date on an organic constant‑currency basis.
- Strong growth across data‑centric divisions:
- Risk Intelligence: +13.9%
- FTSE Russell: +9.3%
- Data & Analytics: +4.9%
- Markets: +6.3%
- Subscription businesses delivered 6.5% growth, with annual subscription value (ASV) up 5.6% excluding the impact of a large new UBS contract. [19]
- LSEG raised its EBITDA margin guidance again, now expecting margin at the top end of the upgraded 2025 range. [20]
- The group announced the sale of a 20% stake in its Post Trade Solutions arm to a consortium of banks and confirmed the additional £1 billion buyback, bringing total planned repurchases to £2.5 billion over 12 months. [21]
The message from both H1 and Q3: LSEG is using strong cash flows from its data, indices and clearing businesses to both invest in growth and return capital to shareholders.
5. AI, “LSEG Everywhere” and the Anthropic partnership
A central theme of LSEG’s current strategy is “LSEG Everywhere” – a push to embed its “trusted, licensed” financial data directly into the AI tools and workflows used by banks, asset managers and corporates. [22]
Claude + LSEG: financial data for AI agents
On 27 October 2025, LSEG announced a high‑profile collaboration with AI company Anthropic to give enterprise users of its Claude platform access to LSEG’s licensed financial data, starting with Workspace and Financial Analytics content. [23]
Key points of the partnership: [24]
- LSEG will deliver AI‑ready, licensed data to Claude via a new server based on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for linking AI systems to external data sources.
- Claude will be able to help financial professionals with tasks such as summarising earnings calls, scanning due‑diligence materials, and identifying tradeable market signals.
- The rollout is phased, starting with Financial Analytics datasets and expanding to additional asset classes over time.
- The market reacted positively when the tie‑up was announced, with LSEG shares rising as much as 1.7% intraday on the news. [25]
LSEG characterises this as the latest step in its AI roadmap, following partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake and Rogo to make its datasets natively available inside widely used AI and analytics platforms. [26]
Microsoft Copilot & AI agents
Earlier in October, LSEG also revealed that customers will be able to use its data to build custom AI agents via Microsoft’s Copilot Studio, again using MCP to ensure interoperability with clients’ own AI stacks and third‑party tools. [27]
The idea: let banks and asset managers deploy AI agents that can act autonomously on LSEG data – for example, monitoring portfolios, triggering workflows or flagging compliance risks – while maintaining tight governance and data security.
Innovation Forum: showcasing the roadmap
These AI initiatives were a major theme at LSEG’s Innovation Forum on 10 November 2025, where management laid out its strategy, engineering transformation and new product roadmap for investors and analysts. The company emphasised that no new financial guidance was given at the event, but used it to demonstrate AI‑enhanced analytics APIs, next‑generation trade surveillance tools and new distribution channels under the “LSEG Everywhere” banner. [28]
6. Digital assets: tokenising gilts with UBS and putting indices on‑chain
LSEG is also pushing deeper into digital assets and tokenisation, both through its own infrastructure and its FTSE Russell index arm.
UBS trial on LSEG’s Digital Markets Infrastructure
In the last 24 hours, industry outlets and LinkedIn posts have highlighted a trial in which UBS and LSEG collaborated to tokenise specific gilt holdings on LSEG’s Digital Markets Infrastructure (DMI) platform. [29]
According to LSEG executives involved in the project:
- Four UK government bonds were digitally mirrored in a secure test environment using distributed ledger technology (DLT).
- The aim was to show how tokenisation could improve efficiency and transparency in securities financing and collateral management workflows.
While still a proof‑of‑concept rather than a commercial roll‑out, the UBS trial is another building block in LSEG’s efforts to position itself as a leading digital‑markets infrastructure provider.
FTSE Russell & Chainlink: indices go on‑chain
Earlier this month, FTSE Russell – an LSEG business – announced a collaboration with Chainlink to publish major indices, including the FTSE 100, Russell 1000, 2000 and 3000, WMR FX benchmarks and FTSE digital asset indices, on‑chain via Chainlink’s DataLink service. [30]
This move allows thousands of decentralised applications and tokenisation platforms to access FTSE Russell benchmarks directly on blockchain networks, potentially supporting tokenised ETFs, structured products and new digital‑asset indices that still rely on institutional‑grade pricing.
7. Private markets push: partnerships with Nasdaq and BlackRock
LSEG is also leaning hard into private markets data, an area expected to grow strongly over the next decade.
Strategic partnership with Nasdaq
On 6 November 2025, LSEG announced a strategic partnership with Nasdaq® to distribute institutional‑grade private markets intelligence through LSEG’s Workspace and data‑feed products. [31]
Under the agreement:
- LSEG will license Nasdaq eVestment™ private markets datasets, including Market Lens insights, hedge‑fund intelligence and Limited Partner (LP) data.
- LSEG receives limited exclusive distribution rights for certain Nasdaq private‑markets datasets, benchmarks and deal‑level metrics.
- The datasets will be integrated into LSEG’s ecosystem to improve transparency and decision‑making for investors in private equity, credit and other alternatives.
For LSEG, the deal deepens its footprint in a high‑growth data segment and complements its own indices and analytics franchises.
Extended partnership with BlackRock & Preqin data
Just days earlier, LSEG and BlackRock extended their long‑standing relationship by adding Preqin’s private‑markets data – now owned by BlackRock – into LSEG’s Workspace platform and related products. [32]
This builds on BlackRock’s acquisition of Preqin and its view that the private‑markets data industry could grow from roughly $8 billion today to $18 billion by 2030, and follows LSEG’s renewal of its multi‑year arrangement to supply pricing and reference data to BlackRock’s Aladdin platform. [33]
Together with the Nasdaq tie‑up, these deals reinforce LSEG’s ambition to be the default data and analytics hub for private markets, not just public equities and fixed income.
8. Business mix: more than “just” an exchange
Although best known for operating the London Stock Exchange, LSEG today generates most of its revenue from data, indices, risk intelligence and post‑trade services rather than equity trading. [34]
The group reports across five main divisions: [35]
- Data & Analytics – financial markets data and infrastructure, including Workspace and feeds.
- FTSE Russell – global equity and fixed‑income index business.
- Risk Intelligence – KYC, AML, third‑party risk and fraud‑detection datasets and services.
- Capital Markets – London Stock Exchange, AIM, Turquoise and FX venues.
- Post Trade – clearing, risk management and optimisation solutions (e.g., LCH, SwapClear).
In the latest reported periods, data‑related businesses accounted for the majority of growth, with Risk Intelligence and FTSE Russell posting double‑digit and high‑single‑digit revenue increases in Q3. [36]
That’s important context for today’s buyback: LSEG is no longer a cyclical volumes‑driven exchange operator, but a diversified financial‑infrastructure and data company with high recurring revenues – a profile more akin to major information providers.
9. What analysts are watching from here
Recent commentary from research providers highlights a few key themes: [37]
- Valuation vs growth: Morningstar and others note that despite rising income and profits, LSEG’s share price is down roughly 25–27% from its 2025 peak, partly on concerns about competition in financial data and the pace of AI‑driven disruption.
- Improving fundamentals: Updated fair‑value estimates on Yahoo‑hosted research have nudged higher, with one note citing a target around £123 per share (12,311p) versus a spot price near £89 today, implying upside if execution continues.
- Dividend and capital returns: With dividend growth running in the mid‑teens and a large buyback underway, total shareholder yield (dividends plus buybacks) is attractive relative to many other FTSE 100 names, albeit from a relatively low cash yield starting point.
- Execution risk in AI and digital strategy: Analysts remain focused on whether LSEG can fully monetise its AI partnerships (Anthropic, Microsoft and others) while defending its franchise against both traditional rivals and new AI‑native entrants.
In short, today’s incremental buyback is being interpreted less as “new news” and more as evidence that management is following through on the capital‑allocation promises made at H1 and Q3.
10. Key takeaways for investors following LSEG today
Putting it all together, here’s what matters from 27 November 2025:
- Buyback machine in motion: LSEG has repurchased another 127,379 shares as part of a £1 billion programme that’s on track to run until February 2026, contributing to a planned £2.5 billion of buybacks over 12 months. [38]
- Shares still depressed vs highs: Despite a modest uptick today, the stock trades roughly 27% below its 2025 high, even as earnings and margins trend higher. [39]
- AI and data strategy gaining real traction: Partnerships with Anthropic, Microsoft, BlackRock and Nasdaq, plus the Innovation Forum, show LSEG moving quickly to put its data at the heart of AI workflows and private‑markets investing. [40]
- Digital assets no longer theoretical: The UBS gilt‑tokenisation trial and FTSE Russell’s on‑chain indices signal that LSEG is serious about digital‑markets infrastructure and tokenisation. [41]
- Policy tailwinds emerging: The UK government’s three‑year stamp duty holiday for new London listings could, over time, support LSEG’s capital‑markets franchise if it successfully draws more IPOs to London. [42]
For now, the daily share‑purchase notices are the visible manifestation of a much broader story: LSEG using its balance sheet to return cash to shareholders while doubling down on AI, data, private markets and digital infrastructure.
Disclaimer: This article is for information and news purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell any security, or any form of financial promotion. Investors should conduct their own research or consult a regulated financial adviser before making investment decisions.
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