London Stock Exchange Group plc

Good morning and welcome to the LSEG First Quarter Results 2026 Investor and Analyst Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines and instructions will follow at that time. I would like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded. I will now hand over to David Schwimmer, Chief Executive Officer, to open the presentation.

Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to our first quarter results. I'm joined by our CFO, Matt, and our head of IR, Peregrine Riviere. Q1 was a record quarter for the group and a perfect example of the value of our model. Our leading multi-asset class trading venues have been critical sources of liquidity, price discovery, and risk management. While customer engagement with our trusted data to inform their decision-making has reached new highs. This is reflected in revenue growth of almost 10%, the highest since the acquisition of Refinitiv five years ago. This strong start puts us in an excellent position to deliver on our financial targets for the year. And as you will have seen from this morning's announcement, we expect revenue growth to be in the upper half of the 6.5% to 7.5% guidance range. We continue to take an agile approach to capital allocations. In the first quarter, we used the dislocation in our share price to buy back 1.1 billion pounds of shares. Including dividends, we expect to return more than 3 billion pounds over the next 12 months. Q1 was also a quarter of strong strategic progress. We're continuing to innovate and invest to capitalize on the opportunities that the ongoing technological change across our industry is creating. Our LSEG Everywhere strategy is embedding our AI-ready data across financial services, driving further growth in March and April in the number of customers accessing our data via MCP servers. We're also transforming our own products with very strong feedback on the workspace AI tools we introduced in Q1 and an exciting pipeline of additional enhancements this quarter. The group's innovation goes far beyond AI. We executed the first transaction on our private securities market in Q1, expanding private market funding through our public markets infrastructure. We're making excellent progress on post-trade solutions in partnership with 11 global banks. We're building digital markets capabilities, including a digital settlement house and a digital securities depository, and forging a new distribution channel for financial models through our model-as-a-service offering. I'll say more in a moment about our strong commercial and strategic progress, But first, I'll hand over the map to give color on the record financial performance. Thanks, David.