London Stock Exchange Group plc

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to LSEG's first quarter update. I'm here with David and Michel-Alain Mapp. He'll make some brief opening remarks on our Q1 performance, and then we'll open up to questions on the conference call line. So let me hand over to him right now.

Thanks, Peregrine. Good morning, everyone. I'm very happy to be talking to you for the first time after my first two months in the group. It has been quite an intensive onboarding. I've spent a lot of time in the business as well as joining David on investor roadshows. For me, the status is clear. We have a strong portfolio of businesses, a rapid pace of innovation, and a strategy that is well understood. Now it's time to execute. I'm excited about the potential of accelerating growth, and I also see the opportunity for improving margins and cash flows over the medium term, consistent with our guidance. I'm confident we will deliver all of that, and I'm already deeply engaged in making that happen. For 2024, we have started the year well, with a good performance across the group. There are some puts and takes across the business, but these are very much as expected. We remain well set for the rest of the year and are on track to deliver all of our guidance. Total income grew 7.3% on a constant currency basis. This includes 90 basis points of M&A benefit, mainly from Acadia in post-trade. Organic growth was 6.4% and I will actually refer to this metric through the rest of my comments. Growth was a little lower than in 2023, as expected. This mainly reflects the exceptional growth in post-trade in Q1 last year, plus some erosion from Credit Suisse. We saw a robust performance across all of our divisions, reflecting the strength of our product offerings and the benefits of our services to customers. Turning first to data and analytics. So this is the new DNA, reflecting the reporting changes we made at the start of this year. And we published 2023 numbers on this basis a few weeks ago. Overall, it represents just under half of the group. Organic growth was 4.3%. This compares to growth of 5.5% through 2023. As we highlighted at the full year result, our annual price increase was similar to what we achieved going into 2023, reflecting our investments in improving our products and services. In addition, our overall sales and retention performance was solid. As expected, we are now seeing a greater impact from the Credit Suisse cancellation in revenue growth. In addition, we renegotiated our relationship with another major investment bank at the start of the year. We moved from service-by-service contracts to a data access model, significantly extending the breadth of our relationship. In year one, this has resulted in a slight step down in revenue, but it will generate attractive growth and greater value over the full length of the new contract. Taking these two relationships together accounts for 1% of growth of DNA with a slightly bigger impact within data and feeds. Workflow's revenue was up 1.7%. Our underlying performance was consistent with the growth rates seen through 2023. We continued to make good progress on migrating customers from ICON to Workspace. We were able to retire our legacy SDC Platinum deals platform with all banking customers migrated to Workspace, which has SDC Platinum integrated. We have also maintained a strong pace of improvement and innovation. During the quarter, we made over 100 enhancements to the platform. In data and feeds, we had another solid performance, with growth of 6.8%. In Q1, we launched cloud-based real-time full-tick data, complementing our existing range of feed-based full-tick and real-time optimized services. And in analytics, we achieved 6.5% growth. It was primarily driven by demand for fixed income analytics. So you can see the pipeline of standalone innovation across the division is strengthening. And we are also making strong progress with Microsoft. Our first products, Meeting Prep and Open Directory, are now entering the pilot phase with customers. And our Leaper AI Insights platform is on the brink of commercialization. We are looking forward to bringing you feedback on these at the first half results. At the same time, we are accelerating the migration of our datasets to the Microsoft environment we have built. You can expect to hear more on the data intelligence services this will facilitate at our H1 in August. Turning now to our two new divisions, starting with FTSE Russell, our index business. FTSE Russell was a strong performer in Q1, with growth of 9.5%. The subscription line continued to grow well, up 6.2%, with some price benefits and good sales momentum. The reported slowdown in growth just reflects a one-off of around 3 million in the prior period which we reference at the time. Asset-based revenue was up 16.4%, combining new inflows, strong market performance, and a weaker comparable period in 2023. Risk intelligence continues its very strong trend, with growth of 12.5%, on top of similar levels of growth in the prior period. WorldCheck, our leading screening platform, remains a main driver, and we are also seeing good growth from our digital identity business. We had a busy start to the year in terms of new products. We launched a new platform in the quarter which consolidates third-party risk data, allowing customers to screen their supply chain and distribution networks effectively. And this month, we are launching a consumption-based pricing option for new customers for the first time. Let me turn now to ASV growth, which covers all the subscription business of the three divisions I just covered. ASV growth stood at 6.0% at the end of Q1. There are three main elements to the movement from Q4 6.7%. First price. As you know, the vast majority of our annual price increase lands in January. So given my earlier comments, in 2024, the price increase was equivalent to the one in 2023 and consequently was neutral to ASV growth from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024. Second, Credit Suisse. As you remember, we expected the impact to increase coming into 2024. And this accounted for half of the ASV slowdown quarter on quarter. Overall, we are now around halfway through the Credit Suisse impact on ASV. For the rest, this relates to the data access deal we struck at the start of the year with a large bank and which I mentioned earlier. It impacts on ASV and revenue in the year, but it will be a driver of growth in 2025 and beyond. Taking all this into account, we now expect ASV growth to be around these levels through the rest of 2024. Moving on to capital markets, this was a strong contributor to group growth in the quarter. Organic growth was 14.4%, consistent with the Q4 exit rate. TradeWeb was the main driver, with strong volumes and continued share gains, mostly in credit, including a record 17.6% share of fully electronic US high-grade bond volumes. This performance drove organic growth in our fixed income line of 21.3%, with total constant currency growth of 23%, including contributions from the acquisition of Yield Broker and Redfin. Earlier this month, we announced the acquisition of ICD, which brings a fourth leg to TradeWeb's business by opening up the corporate treasury channel. Its growth and margin profile is very similar to TradeWeb's and we think it makes an excellent and synergistic fit. Revenues in our equity business returned to growth, up 1.6%. In secondary markets, share gains for the LSE were offset by a decline in overall volumes. FX revenue was down 2.2%. Good volume growth in FX all was offset by a less favorable product mix towards short-dated FX swaps. We saw strong demand in Forward First Fixing, an innovative new product launched last year. Actually, 64 billion was traded using this protocol in Q1. Matching was affected by weakness in interbank volumes. Post-trade revenue grew 5% in constant currency and were flat on an organic basis, excluding the Acadia benefit. This actually represents a very robust performance despite the slowdown in headline growth. As you know, we faced various headwinds this year. The combined impact of the Euronext exit and last year's software migration revenue was circa 15 million in Q1, across OTC derivatives, securities and reporting, and NTI. In addition, March 2023, so exceptional volumes on the back of volatility created by the crisis around Credit Suisse and Silicon Valley Bank. Taking all of those into account, I think we can be very happy with the performance here. We put through price increases for both members and clients at the start of the year, reflecting the significant value we provide to the marketplace. In addition, we are successfully monetizing our post-trade data and analytics products. As expected, net treasury income declined a bit year on year, with strong yields more than offset by a fall in collateral balances. We are seeing some optimization here from clients, shifting collateral from cash to non-cash, and we expect this to continue. Finally, let me turn to capital allocation and financing. In March, we issued $1.25 billion of bonds, refinancing maturing debt. Given the move in interest rates, there is a significant step up in coupons to above 5%. And we have swapped the 10-year tranche to floating rate, which is more expensive in the short term. So this move will have a small impact on net financial expense in the year. Also in March, we participated in Blackstone's fourth placing, committing 500 million in a directed buyback. Blackstone holding is effectively now down to 4% from around 34% at the start of last year. We have a further 500 million to deploy as and when the opportunity arises. So to sum up. We have delivered another quarter of solid growth. We are trading through the expected headwinds well and continue to innovate and improve product and services for our customers. We are confident of delivering on guidance and we are fully on track to deliver on all revenue, margin, capex and cash flow targets as provided in November 2023 Capital Markets Day. I look forward to meeting more of you over the coming months. And with that, I will pass back to Peregrine for questions.

Thank you, Matt. Operator, please, would you open the line to questions now?

Thank you, Peregrine. And if you would like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you are listening to the call via loudspeaker and are called upon to ask your question, please pick up your handset and unmute your device to ensure you are clearly heard. Again, to join the queue, please press star one. And your first question comes from the line of Bruce Arnault-Giblatt from BNP Paribas Exane. Your line is open.

Yeah, good morning. I've got three questions, please. Firstly, can I ask about the Microsoft agreement? You've talked about making prep and open direction coming through. I'm just wondering if there are more products coming through in the pipeline and are we still expecting to see contribution to the P&L come through in 2025. My second question is, you pointed out that there was an enterprise-wide, sorry, you struck an enterprise-wide agreement with a major investment bank that led to a step down in ASV and that should rebuild from here. I'm wondering, could you give a bit more color around this? Are you, for example, charging on usage or is that a big part of the equation that's going to lead to the growth of that account? And do you have other potential to strike these sorts of deals with other clients? Thanks.

Morning, Arnaud. David here. So with respect to your first question on Microsoft, everything's very much on track. As Map just mentioned, we now have in pilot versions out there of open directory and of meeting prep. We are also close to the same stage with respect to the AI functionality that we have added to Lipper. There are a few other things that we're working on, such as the interoperability of Workspace in the Microsoft productivity suite, which we've put a demo out on a couple months ago. So everything very much on track. No change in terms of what we've said in the past with respect to when we expect to see revenue, and that continues to be in 2025. But overall feeling very good about the progress we're making with the Microsoft partnership. And then your question on the enterprise agreement, this is a – let me just spend a moment on this actually because this is a textbook example of a successful turnaround in a relationship through one of these data access agreements. This is a big global bank that we had had a – I'll say flat to declining revenue record with them over the last 10 years in the Refinitiv and Thomson Reuters era. And the team did a very nice job in terms of turning that from a transactional relationship where there was constant negotiation on a product by product basis and constant sort of chipping away because this bank was looking to address their own cost issues. As we've talked about with you all in the past, we had a discussion with them, turned it into a strategic relationship. And that covers a broad array of their products. We expect to see meaningful displacements across a number of our competitors that they have been using. It's just as part of this, the negotiation we have, it's attractive in terms of the multi-year arrangement, and we gave them a modest discount in year one. So that's the impact that MAP was referring to with respect to ASV. The second part of your question, whether there are others like this. There are a relatively small number of our customers where these kinds of very large data access arrangements, one, make sense, and two, would have an impact like this that you would see. But we have these kinds of conversations pretty regularly, and as I said, it's It's a great turn in what historically was, frankly, a more challenged relationship. The other point I should just make on this is that this is another good reason or a really good example of why you shouldn't get hung up on moves in little bits of ASV from quarter to quarter, because this is a good outcome for us, and yes, in-year it has a modest tick down in terms of ASV.

That's very helpful. Thank you. Thanks.

Your next question comes from the line of Bruce Hamilton from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hi, morning, guys, and thanks for the information so far. Two questions from me. Just on the ASB, you've obviously given quite a lot of the inputs that have taken us through the last quarter or two and been very explicit on CF. But as we think about the path from here, obviously there's still some CF pain to come, but you're indicating you think, you know, ASV should be flat, and so other things should be, I guess, adding. So I'm just trying to think how to consider that part of ASV acceleration, take through into 2025. And then second point, a number of your peers have pointed to sort of client-driven pressure, I think particularly from buy-side clients, impacting some subscription revenue growth, including in index. And I guess it sounds like that, you know, elongated sales cycles, client pressures are not something you're seeing in your business. But I just wanted to double check that. Thank you.

Hi Bruce, so maybe I begin with the ASV and the ASV variation and evolution for 2024. Let me first say, I mean ASV is obviously an important KPI for sure, but I think it should be considered more on a trend basis and not really on a quarter by quarter basis. And I should add that over time, it will become less and less relevant as we move towards more consumption-based pricing. Now, if I go to the evolution of ASV in Q1, remember that we did expect a slowdown because of the impact of Credit Suisse. But we did not know its weight quarter by quarter throughout 2024 until early 2025. And as previously communicated, we think that overall it will represent less than 1% of the former DNA revenue, so about 100 bps on the ESV. So if you take the Q1 slowdown, it actually captures around 30 bps of these 100 bps. on top of the 10 bps or so we already had in Q4 last year. So what does it mean going forward? It means that all in all, we have captured about half of the Credit Suisse impact in ESV so far. In terms of the rest, You know, it's still hard to be precise, but as I said in my remarks, we do expect ASV growth to remain around this level of 6% through the rest of the year, and despite these further Credit Suisse headwinds that I was referring to. Please, David.

Yeah, Bruce, I'll just take on your second question with respect to, as you mentioned at the beginning, uh... some of the pressure that some of our competitors are talking about you know we are not seeing any broad based weakness uh... in terms of our business and we are not complacent about this we track this very carefully uh... in terms of you know we look at all our metrics around deal velocity deal size number of deals win rates et cetera And we are not seeing any kind of broad-based weakness. There's a little bit of moves up and down in the different metrics. So nothing that I would describe as a trend. We're certainly aware of some of the different factors that are out there that some of our competitors have talked about. Obviously, Map was just talking about Credit Suisse. We've seen a little bit of bank consolidation in Canada, for example. But overall, I think this is a function of the diversity of our business relative to our competitors. We are global. We serve our customers across asset classes, across products. We have a very broad range of customer types. You touched specifically on pressure from the buy side. We work with the buy side. We work with the sell side. We work with corporates through the trade lifecycle. So I think we really have a different scale and a different level of diversification. And then on top of that, we don't have huge exposure to per-seat pricing models. So we will continue to execute. We'll continue to improve our product, invest in our capabilities. And maybe the last thing I would say, in my remarks a moment ago, I talked about the success of these enterprise relationships. And the breadth of our product offering and our diversification really allows us to serve our customers in a very different way from our competitors.

Really helpful.

Thank you. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Ian White from Autonomous Research. Please go ahead.

Hi there. Thanks for taking my questions. Just a few follow-ups, please. Can I just ask for a little bit more detail around the enterprise-wide agreement you've signed? I'm particularly interested to understand if there is an embedded agreement that the cost of the service to that customer will rise. Or is there kind of some obligation on Elsev to deliver additional products, particularly under the Microsoft partnership, for example, or some link back into consumption for that deal? I'm just trying to get my head around to what degree is growth kind of assured from that or contingent on other deliverables. On FTSE Russell subscriptions, I think obviously given a lot of colour in the previous answer, but can you just say a bit about how client retention rates have progressed there over the last few quarters specifically, please. And finally, just interested in the yield progression on NTI in post-trade. Can you help me understand how much of the return you're making there is being driven by the cash collateral fees that you charge to customers versus... market returns please if that's a number that you you might have available thank you

Sure, maybe I'll start with the last one and then we'll work our way up. We are seeing, and Map or Peregrine, feel free to correct me on this, but we are seeing modestly lower collateral levels and modestly higher yield in terms of the portfolio. So hopefully that gives you an answer on your question on the yield progression. With respect to the FTSE retention rates, I don't think we've seen any change there, any meaningful change at all. So not much more to add on that. I know there's a lot of focus on that in the market, but from our perspective, I'd sort of say nothing to see here. And then your question for more color on the... data access agreement. The way these typically work, and this most recent one is very similar, is that they are multi-year contractual relationships, tend to have a step up year over year. As part of that step up there, some of that may be related to our adding some incremental product that we are already investing in and already planning on building. With respect to a number of these, there are basically displacement plans baked into those, displacement of competitors. And so as they are able to get off some competitor products and move over to ours within the same fixed arrangement. That becomes a cost saving for them. So, as I said, kind of a textbook example of using the breadth of our offering and the continuing improvement in our offering to serve our customers better and to displace some of our competitors.

Okay, thanks. Just to get my head around slightly on the enterprise deal a bit more, is it fair to think of this as a kind of a discount being given to the client in exchange for much greater consumption of LSEG product? Is that essentially what this boils down to over a number of years and hence you get this growth profile mostly based on greater consumption of LSEG services basically?

So, yes, I'm just being cautious about your use of the word consumption because this is not yet a consumption-based pricing agreement. So they will be using more of our products because we are displacing some of our competitors. So from that perspective, yes, more consumption of LSEG products. but not within a framework of consumption-based pricing, if you follow me. And then it's a multi-year arrangement. And so as part of the negotiation and part of our desire to really make sure we have appropriately attractive growth rates in the coming years, we gave them a modest discount in year one. So that's how you should think about that.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Hubert Lam from Bank of America. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got three of them. Firstly, on TradeWeb, there's obviously another very strong quarter in TradeWeb. Can you just talk a little bit more about your thoughts for the rest of the year? I guess if you go into higher comp, tougher comps for the rest of the year, just wondering what your thoughts are on the TradeWeb growth. Second question is on FTSE Russell. You had 9.5% growth, organic growth this quarter. I think at the back end of last year, you had double-digit growth. Just wondering how confident you are in terms of getting back to that double-digit growth that we saw at the back end of last year. And lastly, a question for Map. I know today's update is mainly on revenues, but just wondering what your thoughts are on costs as you took a look at it for the first time and what you can do about it and for the efficiencies you can come through on the cost side. Thank you.

Thanks, Hubert. So I'll take your first one, and then Map will take the FTSE and cost question. With respect to TradeWeb, look, this is a great business. The team's doing very well. We have a lot of confidence in Billy and Sarah and Tom and the team there. I don't think that we would have anything to add with respect to the rest of the year beyond what you would hear from the TradeWeb team. Again, feel very good about their execution. We are happy with what they're doing so far on the M&A front. We like the ICD deal. We think that's a great fit both for TradeWeb but also for the broader LSEG market. given the access to the money market and corporate treasurer field there for ICD. We think that fits in very well with TradeWeb and also with us, with FX All, with WorldCheck, with Workspace, et cetera. But in terms of specific thoughts for the rest of the year, I'll leave that to Billy and Sarah.

So on FTSE Russell subscription revenue, in Q1 the organic growth was 6.2%. So it's true that it compares with double digit 12% actually in Q4. But around half of this difference relates to a one-off of 3 million in Q1 2023, which was related to back-billing, as we flagged previously. So really, when you take this one-off out, we're very close to 9% underlying. So for the rest, it is just some natural quarterly fluctuation. We are confident on good growth here through the rest of the year. So on the cost side, indeed, I have spent time in the business into reviewing both the operating model of the different division and the different projects on which we are engaged, a project of transformation. Let me first say that this year is an interesting year because we are finishing up integration and we are moving into transformation for most of our businesses. So the point is really about capital allocation and the ability to run a strategic program with large impact on growth and margin. So overall, I think I see really opportunity on the cost side, particularly in terms of more efficient operation in between the different divisions. So long and short, I'm confident we can deliver improving margin and cash flow as per our guidance.

Great. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Enrico Bonzoni from JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. So the first question relates to this strategic agreement you signed with another big bank. Can you just tell us if these large agreements that you're signing were fully included in your guidance that you presented at the Capital Market Day, or if in a way these are on top? In other terms, when you presented the guidance, were you really expecting to sign these big agreements, or it's a positive surprise going forward and therefore can be an upside risk to your original guidance? And my second question relates to you mentioned displacement. So you expect that you'll be able to displace some of your competitors as part of the agreement. I was curious if you could provide some color in terms of which areas of, for example, the bank you just signed the agreement with. you see the greatest potential of displacements. Is it in well management? Is it in investment banking or in risk functions? So I'm just trying to understand really where your product is stronger. And related to that, is the displacement driven more by pricing or you think it's more by your unique product offering? Thank you.

Thanks, Enrico. So with respect to your first question, I would say I would not view this as a – don't put this in the positive surprise category in terms of changing our guidance or changing your outlook. But I would say that it is a consistent sort of record of how we are executing. And we regularly get questions from people saying, over the past year or two in terms of how have we made this a faster growing business how have we improved uh... the performance in particular of the data and analytics business and this is just a really good example of that uh... where we have been investing in our product our product is getting better and better our customers are recognizing that we have an unmatched breadth and depth of our offering And so when we take that to our customers and we have these discussions around the strategic opportunity that they have to, as I said, lower their overall cost and we get higher wallet share, that's a win-win for them, for us. So I would just put this in the category of the continuing improvement in how we are executing and continuing improvement in our performance and our relationship with our customers, market share, et cetera. But I wouldn't take this on its own as a signal in terms of kind of changing your outlook. Hopefully that's clear. To the question around some specificity on the displacements, I would describe it, there are three main areas for this customer, actually, and it's really about desktops, and then real-time, a real-time offering, and then also non-real-time. So desktops and then basically data and feeds, a number of different areas within data and feeds are the primary areas for displacements. The other point I should just make, when we have these data access arrangements, and we've seen this with a number of the others, when the relationships really, the enterprise arrangements really start working well, we become a natural first call for other opportunities, other RFPs, which can then lead to other displacements. But in terms of the starting point here, it's desktops and then within the data and feed space. Does that help?

Yes, very much. Thank you.

Great.

Your next question comes from the line of Benjamin Bathurst from RBC. Please go ahead.

Good morning. I've got two questions, if I may. Starting on ASV, you've mentioned previously that the group is less likely to see ASV improvements from improved retention. I just wondered if you could confirm if retention at a group level has now sort of flatlined or if you're still seeing improvements in that area, maybe just more minor. And then secondly, on Gen AI, you're obviously very clearly exposed to that trend via the Microsoft partnerships. But are there any other areas of major investment that you're carrying out across the group outside of that Microsoft initiative that we should be aware of? Thank you.

Sure. Thanks, Ben. So I would say in terms of retention, we are still seeing modest improvement in retention. So I would say it is flattening out. And we've talked about this. given the areas of improvement over the last few years, it is flattening out relative to that. But we're still seeing, as I said, some modest areas of improvement. With respect to Gen AI, we are actually doing a bunch with Gen AI in some of the operational aspects of the business that have nothing to do with Microsoft, actually. So, for example, we have a... I think we've mentioned in the past that we have about 2,200 people doing... Customer service, basically responding to inbound customer questions or customer queries. And we get a lot of them given the breadth of our business. And some of them are quite complex questions and can be challenging for people to answer quickly. So what we have put in place is what we call QAS, question and answer service. And it is an internal LLM based on all of our internal documentation of how to do things, how to find things, how to chart things. And that is now used by our 2,200 people, our own customer service team, to make them better at their jobs. And it makes them more efficient. more responsive to our customers. And as we are using this model, we are training it and making it better and better. And so our plan and our hope is to get that QAS model strong enough so that we can expose it directly to our customers. I don't want to put a timeframe on that yet, but we're making very good progress on that. So that's a really good example. That is a model. We are using one of the open source models for that. So great technology and free.

Great. Thank you for that. Thanks, Ben. Your next question comes from the line of Russell Quelch from Redburn Atlantic. Please go ahead. Hi, guys. A couple of questions.

Firstly, David, you spoke on the Q4 conference call to an additional 50 billion TAM opportunity in data as a service. I was hoping you could elaborate on what you're looking to do here in terms of a product offering, how integrated you expect to be with Microsoft in that product area, and how soon we should expect LSA to start to grow into that TAM. That's the first question. My second question was around Workspace. You've obviously started to retire from legacy platforms, which is great. Just wondered if that has come with any increase in customer usage as they migrated to the new platform and if that then presents a future pricing opportunity. And you gave a helpful demo of Workspace integrated into Microsoft Office. I think that's the point at which most would expect there to be an acceleration in sales and pricing. So can you be very specific as to the timing of that product rollout?

So I'm I'm confident I won't be as specific as you want me to be, but happy to happy to try to be helpful here. So first on your first question. With respect to the 50 billion pound, Tam, this refers to all of the spend that we see our customers doing in-house as they manage their data. And that was what Satvinder was talking about at the Capital Markets Day in November. And we will, I'll touch on this briefly now, but we will be giving more of an update on our data intelligence offering and how that is developing at the half year. But the concept here is that uh... are we have expertise and we are at scale in terms of managing data uh... and we currently provide enormous amounts of data to our customers then they have to uh... spend uh... their own uh... capital and human resources in terms of managing that data for themselves uh... interacting with their own data, et cetera. And typically they are not operating at scale and don't have that expertise as a core competency. And so we see that as an opportunity in the coming years. We already do this to a certain extent with our tick history, where it is such a large data set that it is much easier for our customers to effectively rent access to it from us while we manage it in our cloud environment. Whereas in the past, we used to send it to them, and that was costly, unwieldy, difficult for them to manage. So that's an early example of how we're thinking about this concept of managed data services. As I said, we will talk more about our data intelligence approach at the half year. So looking forward to that. With respect to Workspace and the rollout there, nothing really to add. In other words, everything is going according to plan. The icon migration to Workspace is going well and going according to plan. Meeting prep and open directory, of course, will have incremental changes. uh... benefits for workspace in terms of making it that much more of a useful and powerful tool uh... for our customers who have access to it uh... and then uh... we had talked about the notion of interoperability uh... which as you those of you who have seen our demo on that can see how powerful that is going to be where you can move seamlessly between the microsoft productivity tools and workspace uh... across teams across workspace et cetera And we're building that, and I would say no change in the timing.

Can I just add, Russell, just on the integration of legacy platforms into Workspace, so we talked about SDC Plasnim, and usage of that was up 85% year-on-year across January and February post-integration. So, yeah, to your point, we do see a big uptake.

Super. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Werner from UBS. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much. Just a question regarding swap clear. I think you mentioned you raised pricing this year, both on clearing members as well as clients. I was just wondering, A, if that was effective of the 1st of January, and B, is it something that we should expect going forward? And then C, any help in terms of better understanding the magnitude of the price increases would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, sorry, Michael, it's Peregrine. I'm going to take that one. I think one of them was effective 1st of January and the other was effective 1st of February. In terms of the quantum, actually, it's all public on our website. So you can see what the new prices are. But for, I think, top tier, it was, you know, I think sort of mid to high single digit, that kind of area. But remember, these are not common, these price increases.

Okay, so we shouldn't expect them to be recurring going forward, is that correct?

No.

Okay, thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Andrew Coombs from Citi. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Two technical questions, please. Firstly, just on the debt issuance, The 1.25 billion, I think more than covers the two maturities you had in April 2024. I think you've got one more maturing in November of this year, and then nothing until April 2026, if I'm correct. So I just wanted to know, do you think you're done in terms of issuance? Or is there more to come this year? That's the first question. Second question, trade web acquisition of ICD set to close in the second half. I think it did 85 million of revenues last year, companies guiding to around a 50% EBITDA margin. But I just wanted to check if Firstly, I assume it will be fully consolidated in the same way that TradeWeb is into your account, but is there any difference in scope in IFRS versus US GAAP? How should we think about modeling that going forward? Thank you.

Okay, maybe I take the first question about the debt. So we had 1.25 billion of debt maturing. So we decided to come back on the US market. We haven't been there since the Refinitiv acquisition. So we shoot two bonds here, one at 5 years and one at 10 years. The 5 years at 500 million and the 10 years at 750, which is covering our need for flexibility in the year to come. So your analysis is good actually. We do not expect to reissue any bond this year.

And then, Andrew, on your TradeWeb question, yes, we'll continue to consolidate with respect to TradeWeb. I think in terms of your specific question around whether there are any accounting differences between IFRS and how TradeWeb accounts for it, maybe we should take that offline. And if there's any specific color there, we can share that with you. But we'll take that offline.

Great, thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Kyle Voigt from KBW. Please go ahead.

Hi, good morning. Maybe just a few questions on consumption-based pricing, the rollout this month in risk intelligence. I guess I'm wondering if your sales team has actually gone to market to end clients with the consumption-based pricing model yet. And if so, any initial questions feedback from those conversations and how those have gone and how interest has been from those clients. And I believe in the remarks, you said the pricing model is being offered to new customers specifically. Do you anticipate rolling that out to existing clients as well upon contract renewal in that segment? Is that also being rolled out this month? And then last part of this question, can you remind us what other businesses you're looking at to potentially roll out this consumption-based pricing model next?

Thanks, Kyle. So I don't have a lot of feedback for you yet because we turned on the consumption-based pricing. Tuesday. Yes, just this week. Tuesday. So you're absolutely right. At this point, it's for new customers. And we'll see how this goes with the new customers. There'll be a little bit of learning, frankly, on our end. But yes, we expect over time to be rolling that into the broader existing customer relationships. uh... in terms of other areas where we will do consumption based pricing one other area where we already have it actually is in yield book uh... but this is something that we will be uh... looking at across the business over time if you think about how our model is shifting and as more of the business is moving into the cloud, as there's greater usage of our data in a cloud environment, that leads to greater cloud costs. And so we just need to make sure that our commercial model reflects the variable expense on the cloud cost. Does that help? It does. Thank you. Great.

There are no further questions on the conference line. I will now hand the presentation back to Peregrine Riviere, Group Head of Investor Relations.

Great. Thanks, Paulie. Thanks, everyone, for your questions and look forward to speaking to you soon. Have a good day.