A portrait image of Emma Miller, head of investment banking and capital markets in the data and analytics division at London Stock Exchange Group.

Emma Miller, head of investment banking and capital markets in the data and analytics division at London Stock Exchange Group, looks at how technology and data could catalyse a shift in deal-making, boosting efficiency, productivity and the workplace environment. Andrew MacDowall reports.

Could a growing number of deals between ‘big tech’ companies and stock exchange operators point the way for capital markets in the coming years? Emma Miller, head of investment banking and capital markets in the data and analytics division at London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), believes so.

Fundamentally, she sees Microsoft’s £1.5bn investment into the group as part of a broader transition towards universalisation of technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, in the sector.

And she is perfectly placed to have oversight of this trend. Ms Miller’s role is focused on global investment banking, deal-making and capital markets, including the role of technology in deal execution and increasing productivity. “For most of our customers, market data is usually the second-largest cost after people,” she says.

Career history: Emma Miller 

  • 2022 Global head of investment banking and capital markets – data and analytics, London Stock Exchange Group
  • 2018 Global head of strategic partnerships – risk and investment solutions, Refinitiv
  • 2017 Director, strategy and operations, customer and third-party risk, Thomson Reuters
  • 2015 Chief of staff, office of the president, financial and risk business, Thomson Reuters
  • 2014 Management associate, Thomson Reuters

LSEG has the 300-year-old bourse at its heart — one of the world’s oldest — but now encompasses a range of financial services and financial information businesses. With a market capitalisation of around £40bn, it is now highly diversified, with 40,000 customers in 190 countries, including almost all of the top 100 global banks and three-quarters of the top 100 asset managers.

The big deal

In December 2022, Microsoft agreed to take a £1.5bn stake in LSEG as part of a 10-year strategic partnership “for next-generation data and analytics and cloud infrastructure solutions”. The deal is intended to strengthen LSEG’s data and analytics offerings, while also boosting longer-term growth through new products, the companies have said.

LSEG CEO David Schwimmer said that the partnership will go far deeper than merely shifting the group’s infrastructure and data to Microsoft’s cloud. It follows LSEG’s $27m acquisition of data and trading infrastructure business Refinitiv in 2019 and it is hoped that the Microsoft deal will help LSEG better leverage Refinitiv. LSEG’s data platform will use Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and certain Microsoft applications and will become interoperable with Workspace, LSEG’s data and analytics workflow solution.

“We’re hugely excited about the Microsoft partnership,” says Ms Miller, who previously had various jobs at Thomson Reuters and Refinitiv, including as global head of partnerships for risk and compliance at the latter. “And I think it’s hugely exciting for us as a company and for the investment banking business. The potential through collaboration is huge.”

While deepening its relationship with Microsoft, LSEG is maintaining its open cloud policy, with partnerships with other major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google. The deal is one of several in recent years that has seen big tech companies ink tie-ups with major bourse operators: Google invested $1bn in Chicago’s CME in November 2021; and AWS signed a deal with Nasdaq the same month that will see the stock exchange’s North American markets shift to Amazon’s platform over the coming years.

“It’s very much an ecosystem of trusted, best-in-class players coming together,” says Ms Miller.

At the time of the Microsoft investment, the Financial Times quoted Royal Bank of Canada analyst Ben Bathurst as saying that the deal could see LSEG’s system “become more widely accepted as a credible competitor to Bloomberg”. Ms Miller claims that LSEG offers a wider range of products and services than any of its competitors, from cloud services through to banking workflow and analytics.

And while some have questioned the risk to stock exchanges from partnerships with big tech companies, given that the latter are increasingly in regulators’ crosshairs, she points out that LSEG is already adept at operating in a highly regulated sector. “So much of what we do exists in controlled and regulated environments,” she says. “We have compliance baked into our DNA. When we bring new things to market, clients know they’re compliant.”

Market benefits

Ms Miller sees technology and better application of data as essential to modernising the investment banking industry — helping financial institutions lower costs during a difficult period for the global economy, but also speeding processes, enhancing decision-making and even making banks more pleasant places to work.

“Despite a lot of the fintech innovation and start-up culture that you see in the financial services space, investment banking workflow in particular hasn’t really changed or evolved in the 35 years since the invention of the original Excel spreadsheet,” says Ms Miller.

investment banking workflow hasn’t really changed since the invention of the original Excel spreadsheet

“Our ambition is to really drive a step change and a reimagination of what the banking workflow should look like. When you think about some of the possibilities in things like ChatGPT and AI, you start to imagine a world where we can shorten timelines.”

Ms Miller cites increased automation to remove some of the more repetitive, monotonous work currently done by junior bankers as an example, adding that better use of technology can smooth out the boom-and-bust, hiring-and-firing cycle that has become increasingly controversial in the financial sector.

“During the pandemic, we saw a pushback on the grind culture that’s always surrounded banking,” she says. “We are seeing customers wanting to partner with us to figure out how junior bankers can genuinely get to work on things that they feel are fulfilling and interesting, so they can attract and retain the best talent possible.”

In January, LSEG launched a suite of productivity tools that link PowerPoint and Excel, updating data in the former in real time. The aim now is to develop beyond that to drive greater efficiency and productivity, creating “seamless full integration between all the data and capability that’s within our Workspace platform”, removing friction that comes from moving back and forth between different platforms and programs, and moving information from one to another.

“[We have] fundamentals — data, pricing, news, whatever data points you might want — seamlessly integrated throughout Teams, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft tools as well,” says Ms Miller. “Within that, we’re also envisioning working with the Teams platform to have external communication between companies, the ability to share market data, updated financial models and news that may have an impact on deals.”

AI, meanwhile, can draw on trusted and structured financial information to answer questions about deals, deal patterns and the league tables that are so prized in the investment banking industry.

One challenge that Ms Miller’s team faces is that in many cases, their clients know and trust existing platforms and services, but the interfaces need updating. Recently LSEG migrated its SDC Platinum product to Workspace, working closely with clients to safeguard that it loses none of its long-standing strengths, while ensuring it delivers information much more quickly and with a better user experience.

Gaining traction

More broadly, Ms Miller sees broader adoption of AI, neuro-linguistic programming, machine learning and analytics across the financial sector, particularly in investment banking.

“These things have been around for a while, and a lot of these capabilities sit within our product offering,” she says. “I think we’re seeing a real pivot to a world where this stuff isn’t just bits and pieces, or something that’s for smart computer people to figure out, but something we can all natively interact with and use.”

According to Ms Miller, some of LSEG’s clients use data from a combination of sources — including LSEG and in-house research — to create predictive analytics for potential new deals and investments, with machine learning highlighting opportunities and signals that might have otherwise been overlooked. The company’s partners are also increasingly seeking its support for data-heavy aspects of regulatory reporting and on sustainability metrics of potential acquisitions.

Historical strength

LSEG’s modern-day innovation sits on foundations more than three centuries old. Ms Miller is an enthusiast for the group’s roots, noting its background in London’s coffee house culture and referring to the homing pigeons used by Reuters in the mid-19th century as “the peak of next-generation fintech at the time”.

“As a business, you don’t get to exist for 300-plus years if you aren’t keeping up with change, and evolving and moving with the market and your clients,” she says.

The current merger and acquisition environment — in which activity dropped off sharply after a bumper post-pandemic year in 2021 — makes this all the more important, she argues.

“We can help our clients drive efficiency and reduce their cost base,” Ms Miller says. “But there are still deals to be done, and clients want the best possible data and information, and the most relevant news to try and stay ahead of where these opportunities are.”

 

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