London, May 14, 2026, 16:02 BST
London Stock Exchange Group plc shares rose on Thursday after UBS analyst Michael Werner kept a Buy rating on the stock and held his target price at 11,700p, according to MarketScreener with dpa-AFX Analyser. The stock was last shown at 9,262p, up 1.49%, at 15:47 in London, ADVFN data showed.
The call lands at a useful moment for LSEG. The group is trying to show investors that artificial intelligence is a new route to sell licensed financial data, not just a threat to its Workspace terminal and analytics franchise.
On Wednesday, LSEG said it would bring its data and analytics into Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise through a Model Context Protocol connector, a technical link that lets AI models connect to outside data and tools. Emily Prince, LSEG’s group head of enterprise AI, said financial institutions wanted “to move faster with AI,” while Graham Drury of Google Cloud said agents are “only as good as the data” they can reach. LSEG
That is the core of the story now. Reuters reported in February that Elliott Management had built a stake in LSEG and was pushing for better performance, while investors were weighing whether AI would squeeze data and analytics revenue after LSEG moved away from reliance on exchange trading fees.
LSEG’s April trading update gave management some room. The company said first-quarter total income excluding recoveries rose 9.8% on an organic constant-currency basis, with Data & Analytics up 5.1% and Markets up 15.5%. It also said it had completed £1.1 billion of share buybacks in the quarter and expected 2026 revenue growth to land in the upper half of its 6.5%-7.5% guidance range.
The competitive line is not just against exchanges. LSEG sits in a financial-data market where FactSet, Bloomberg and S&P Global also serve entrenched institutional clients, and where AI tools are being pitched as faster ways to search, model and monitor markets.
LSEG also added a second product item on Thursday. FTSE Russell, its index business, and Planetrics, part of SLR, signed a memorandum of understanding to develop climate-scenario indices and analytics. Climate-scenario indices are benchmarks designed to reflect how companies or assets may perform under different climate-risk pathways.
Under the proposed tie-up, Planetrics would provide physical and transition climate-risk analytics, models and scenario tools, while FTSE Russell would handle index governance and commercial distribution. The companies said they expect new indices later this year.
Stephanie Maier, head of sustainable at FTSE Russell, said the planned partnership was aimed at “transparent, innovative indices”. Thomas Bremner Bligaard, executive director at Planetrics, said the market was moving from acknowledging climate risk to “actually pricing it”. SLR Consulting
The risk is execution. LSEG still has to prove that AI connectors can lift revenue rather than just move clients to a different way of consuming the same data, and rivals are not standing still. The shares remain below last year’s levels; ADVFN’s historical summary showed LSEG down 17.67% over one year, despite Thursday’s bounce.
For now, UBS’s unchanged target gives LSEG a clean vote of confidence. The harder test is whether the group can turn Google, OpenAI-style connectors and new index products into paid usage before the market asks again whether AI is friend or foe.
