London, May 15, 2026, 13:13 BST
- FTSE Russell and Planetrics signed a memorandum of understanding to develop climate-scenario indices and analytics.
- The move follows LSEG’s latest AI-data tie-up with Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise.
- Demand is not assured: sustainable funds have faced outflows and ESG products remain under political and regulatory pressure.
London Stock Exchange Group plc’s FTSE Russell has struck a preliminary agreement with Planetrics to develop climate-scenario indices and analytics, extending the group’s push to turn its data, benchmarks and models into higher-value products. FTSE Russell said the two firms expect to launch new indices later this year.
The deal matters now because LSEG is trying to show investors that its data business can gain from, rather than be squeezed by, artificial intelligence and shifting client demands. The company said in April that first-quarter total income excluding recoveries rose 9.8% on an organic constant-currency basis, and it guided 2026 revenue growth toward the upper half of its 6.5% to 7.5% range.
It also lands in a market where climate risk is being pushed from broad ESG labels into more specific, data-heavy tools. Climate-scenario indices are benchmarks built around possible futures, such as higher physical damage from weather events or uneven costs from the energy transition, so investors can compare portfolio exposure under different paths.
Planetrics, SLR’s climate-risk analytics platform, will make its physical and transition-risk models available to FTSE Russell under the proposed collaboration. FTSE Russell would handle index governance and commercial distribution, while Planetrics brings the modelling work behind company-level and portfolio-level climate signals.
Stephanie Maier, head of sustainable at FTSE Russell, said the firm wanted “transparent, innovative indices.” Thomas Bremner Bligaard, executive director at Planetrics, said the market needed to move “from acknowledging climate risk to actually pricing it.” LSEG
For LSEG, the commercial point is plain enough. FTSE Russell is one of the group’s core divisions, alongside Data & Analytics, Risk Intelligence, Capital Markets and Post Trade, and Reuters’ company profile describes LSEG as both a financial markets infrastructure provider and a data provider.
The competitive field is already thick. MSCI markets climate indices across equities and fixed income, S&P Dow Jones Indices offers climate benchmarks tied to carbon-reduction objectives, and Intercontinental Exchange sells climate-risk data covering physical and transition risks. FTSE Russell’s Planetrics tie-up is a push into that same data-led corner of the market.
The announcement came a day after LSEG said it would bring licensed data and analytics into Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise through a Model Context Protocol connector. MCP is a standard that lets AI systems connect to outside data and tools; in this case, LSEG said users could access pricing, macroeconomic data, company fundamentals, news, forecasts and estimates inside AI workflows.
That AI channel is central to the equity story. LSEG said in its April update that more than 150 customers had connected or were onboarding to its MCP server, while Reuters quoted Quilter Cheviot analyst Will Howlett as saying the quarter should help ease concerns over the “durability of growth.” Reuters
London trading was open at the dateline; the London Stock Exchange’s regular weekday session runs from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. local time. Broader UK markets were under pressure on Friday, with Reuters reporting falls in UK shares as political uncertainty and inflation worries hit sentiment.
The risk is that a memorandum of understanding is not yet a revenue line, and sustainable investing remains uneven. Morningstar said global sustainable open-end and exchange-traded funds had estimated net outflows of $27 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, with persistent headwinds still weighing on appetite.
There is a second risk: climate finance is politically noisy. Reuters reported in March that climate-focused investor initiatives had fallen out of favour over the past year, even as some asset owners continued to press managers on climate-risk strategies. That leaves FTSE Russell trying to sell precision in a market where labels have become a liability.
If the Planetrics products gain traction, LSEG can point to a more joined-up story: indices, data, risk models and AI distribution all feeding the same customer base. If not, the deal will sit as another partnership in a crowded climate-index market where clients are still deciding how much they want to pay for the next layer of data.
