LSEG and RiskSpan Forge Alliance to Illuminate Structured Finance Markets

ARLINGTON, Va. – June 25, 2026 – In a move poised to reshape the landscape of financial data, RiskSpan and the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) have announced a major collaboration to deliver what they term “next-generation” data and pricing for the notoriously complex world of structured finance. The partnership aims to merge RiskSpan’s specialized analytics and data engineering prowess with LSEG’s global distribution network and evaluated pricing expertise, promising a new level of clarity for investors navigating assets like mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities.

This initiative directly targets the persistent challenges of opacity and valuation that have long plagued this corner of the market. By combining their distinct strengths, the two firms intend to establish a new industry benchmark for how these intricate financial instruments are priced, validated, and delivered to institutional investors, dealers, and risk managers.

Bernadette Kogler, CEO of RiskSpan, underscored the complementary nature of the alliance. "Our collaboration provides great value to clients," she stated. "LSEG brings world-class evaluated pricing, reference and derived data strategy, and global market distribution. RiskSpan enhances those capabilities with structured finance analytics and modeling, scalable data engineering, and rigorous validation and workflow tooling. Together, we are raising the standard for how structured products are priced, validated, and delivered to the market."

A Partnership Built on Proven Synergy

While the announcement signals a new strategic direction, it is not the beginning of the relationship between the two companies. It represents a significant deepening of an already established and mission-critical workflow. According to the announcement, RiskSpan already powers valuation operations within the LSEG ecosystem, processing reference data for more than 165,000 unique securities (CUSIPs) daily. Furthermore, LSEG currently leverages RiskSpan’s platform to deliver daily evaluated pricing for approximately 100,000 of those structured product CUSIPs.

This new, formalized collaboration elevates RiskSpan from a crucial component in the background to a strategic partner at the forefront of innovation. The goal is to move beyond the existing infrastructure and co-develop a fully integrated, end-to-end solution that addresses the entire lifecycle of structured finance data operations. This shift is critical for a market that demands not just data points, but a complete, auditable, and transparent process.

The Tech Engine Driving a New Era of Transparency

The promise of a “next-generation” solution is rooted in a powerful technological synergy. RiskSpan brings to the table advanced cash flow and valuation models specifically designed for the idiosyncratic nature of structured products. These are not generic fixed-income models; they are sophisticated engines built to handle complex prepayment assumptions, credit waterfalls, and other unique features of securitized assets. This is coupled with highly automated data pipelines and rigorous validation frameworks, designed to ingest, normalize, and quality-check vast amounts of disparate information with minimal manual intervention.

This specialized analytical engine will be integrated into LSEG’s formidable technological infrastructure. Bolstered by its acquisition of Refinitiv and a strategic partnership with Microsoft, LSEG has been aggressively pursuing its “LSEG Everywhere” AI strategy. This initiative focuses on creating a cloud-based ecosystem for delivering AI-ready data and advanced analytics. The recent launch of its Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform, which allows financial institutions to host and consume sophisticated models in a secure environment, provides a potential framework for deploying RiskSpan's advanced capabilities at an unprecedented scale.

Todd Hartmann, LSEG Group Head of Data & Feeds, commented on the technical integration, stating, "This collaboration with RiskSpan strengthens our structured finance pricing capabilities and reinforces our commitment to delivering high-quality, transparent data and analytics to the market. By combining our skillsets, we are enhancing the scalability and consistency of pricing across complex asset classes."

Taming the 'Hard-to-Value' Beast

The practical impact of this collaboration will be most acutely felt by portfolio managers, traders, and risk officers who grapple daily with hard-to-value assets. The 2008 financial crisis cast a long shadow over structured finance, with the opacity of certain mortgage-backed securities being a central factor in the market’s collapse. In response, regulators across the globe instituted stringent rules, such as the Dodd-Frank Act in the U.S. and EMIR in Europe, demanding greater transparency and more robust valuation methodologies for illiquid instruments.

This partnership directly addresses that regulatory and market-driven need. For an asset manager holding a portfolio of complex asset-backed securities, obtaining a reliable, independent price has often involved a patchwork of vendor solutions and manual internal processes. The integrated RiskSpan-LSEG offering aims to provide a single, trustworthy source of truth. By delivering more accurate pricing, detailed underlying data, and a transparent validation process, the solution empowers investors to make more precise trading decisions and gives risk managers a clearer, more defensible view of their portfolio exposures.

Reshaping the Competitive Data Landscape

The financial data market is dominated by a handful of titans, including Bloomberg, S&P Global, and Moody's Analytics, all of whom offer extensive data and evaluated pricing for structured products. The LSEG-RiskSpan alliance presents a formidable new competitive dynamic. It combines the agility and deep domain expertise of a specialist firm with the immense scale, data assets, and global client network of a market infrastructure powerhouse.

This “best-of-both-worlds” strategy allows LSEG to instantly deepen its capabilities in a highly complex asset class without the long development cycle of building such specialized analytics in-house. For RiskSpan, the partnership provides unparalleled access to LSEG's 40,000 global customers. The joint offering also directly targets a key pain point for financial institutions: the desire to consolidate vendors and streamline data workflows. By promising a single, comprehensive solution for structured finance, the collaboration could capture market share from competitors who offer less integrated services.

This strategic move aligns perfectly with LSEG's recent performance and stated goals. The company reported its strongest quarterly growth in over five years for Q1 2026, driven by its data and analytics division and accelerating adoption of its AI products. This collaboration is a clear execution of that strategy, leveraging partnership to enhance its core data offerings and solidify its position as a critical provider of infrastructure for the 21st-century financial markets.