LSEG to Acquire Octus for $3.5 Billion: Building a Credit Leader from Public to Private Markets

The headline terms are simple. LSEG will pay $3.535 billion in cash for the whole of Octus. The sellers are funds advised by the private equity firm Permira, together with Octus’ management team, which includes the company’s founder and chief executive, Kent Collier. There is no share component and no earn-out disclosed in the announcement, so the price LSEG has published is the price the sellers receive for the business.

The acquisition will be financed by external debt rather than new LSEG shares. That keeps LSEG’s share count unchanged, and the group has set out how its balance sheet absorbs the borrowing alongside its other commitments, which are covered in the financial effects. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval, and the announcement does not set a shareholder vote as a condition.

A strong set of advisers sits on both sides. Morgan Stanley & Co. International plc is acting as lead financial adviser to LSEG, with Barclays Capital Inc. also acting as financial adviser. Evercore and Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC are acting as financial advisers to Octus’ shareholders. The person responsible for the announcement on behalf of LSEG is Lisa Condron, the group’s Company Secretary.

One of two credit deals in LSEG’s orbit

LSEG presents Octus as one half of a wider move in fixed income. In the same announcement, the group points to Tradeweb’s planned acquisition of Trumid, the electronic credit trading platform, and says that its existing data and analytics capabilities, the Trumid deal and now Octus together position LSEG as a global leader in fixed income, able to partner with customers throughout the trade lifecycle. Tradeweb, in which LSEG is the majority shareholder, covers execution; Octus adds the intelligence, data and workflow that sit before and after a trade.

For Octus’ own team, the terms also settle leadership. On completion Octus will become part of LSEG’s Data & Analytics division. Kent Collier will continue to run the Octus businesses, reporting to Gianluca Biagini and Ron Lefferts, the division’s co-heads. That continuity matters for a business whose value rests on analysts, legal specialists and journalists with long-standing relationships across the credit market.

Octus was founded in 2013 by Kent Collier and is headquartered in New York City, with a global footprint. According to LSEG, it has more than 900 employees, 750 customers and over 40,000 individual users, spanning buy-side firms, investment banks, law firms and advisory firms. Its core strength is the part of the credit market where information is hardest to find: private and illiquid credit, where much of what matters sits in loan agreements, covenants and deal terms rather than in public filings.

That is the work Octus’ teams do. LSEG describes an offering of intelligence, fundamental data and expert analysis, developed by Octus staff who source hard-to-access credit documentation and turn it into structured, searchable data. In June 2026 Octus said its global team of more than 250 financial analysts, legal analysts and expert journalists covers more than 6,600 companies across the full credit lifecycle, from primary issuance through restructuring. The data is built into Octus’ own workflow and portfolio management tools, and customers reach it through the Octus platform, an MCP connector or AI workflows.

The financial profile is strong. In 2026 Octus is expected to generate more than $300 million of revenue, with strong double-digit growth and an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 40%. LSEG adds that Octus has achieved double-digit compound growth in revenue since 2022. Those are the figures LSEG has used to describe the business; Octus, as a private company, does not publish audited accounts.

Eight million data-room documents and 170 covenant fields

The product set has widened quickly in 2026. In March, Octus launched a unified version of CreditAI (opens in a new tab), a generative AI search that combines Octus’ proprietary intelligence with permissioned data-room documents, syndicated loan and private credit agreements and financials on private bond and loan issuers, with every answer linked back to its source documents. Chief executive Kent Collier said at the time that the covenant analysis model alone runs more than a dozen agents working from over 10,000 finely tuned prompts.

In July, Octus launched the Octus MCP Connector (opens in a new tab), which routes Octus intelligence, data and deal-room documents into Claude, ChatGPT and other large language models. The release set out the data behind it: more than 55,000 articles a year of reporting and analysis, liquid and private credit fundamentals, more than 8 million private documents in the FinDox repository, private company analysis and Deal Term Analytics, with more than 170 covenant data fields per instrument across syndicated loans and direct lending deals. The connector sits alongside REST API access and cloud data sharing through Snowflake and Databricks.

Sky Road and LevPro move Octus into the trade workflow

Octus has also been building beyond research. It acquired Sky Road, a compliance and optimisation platform for CLO managers, in June 2025. On 8 June 2026 it agreed to acquire LevPro (opens in a new tab), front-office software for CLO, broadly syndicated loan and private credit managers, and completed the deal on 10 June. The combined suite, Octus Credit Portfolio Solutions, offers five modules covering portfolio management, research, compliance, optimisation and trade order management. LevPro’s private credit module adds sourcing CRM, deal pipeline management, investment committee approval workflows and funding and allocations, so a manager can move from Octus deal intelligence to deal pipeline and portfolio monitoring without leaving the platform.

LSEG’s case starts with complementarity. The group already has a significant presence in liquid credit through news, in the form of IFR, through evaluated pricing and corporate actions, and through the Yield Book and LPC analytics businesses. Octus adds leading specialism in illiquid and private credit. In LSEG’s words, the combination creates a single source of fixed income data and analytics and workflow spanning the entire credit spectrum, so a customer can follow a borrower from a public bond to a private loan with one data structure.

The customer bases fit as well as the products. LSEG says Octus has a very strong buy-side footprint, particularly with hedge funds and alternative investment managers, a segment where LSEG has historically been under-penetrated. Octus, in turn, gains access to LSEG’s global footprint. LSEG plans to sell Octus’ intelligence and workflow solutions across that footprint and to bring its own products to Octus’ credit- and buy-side-focused customers.

Public and private credit converge on one platform

The market backdrop supports the move. LSEG says public and private credit markets are converging, and that the private credit industry has grown substantially in recent years to a size LSEG puts at $3.5 trillion. The served market for private markets data, workflow and access solutions is put at $7 billion to $9 billion, and LSEG expects it to grow at a double-digit rate, driven by growth in private markets assets under management and by customer demand for timely, accurate and predictive intelligence and proprietary data in less liquid markets.

Octus had been describing the same need from the other side. When it agreed to buy LevPro in June, it noted that private credit managers had been running origination in CRM tools, underwriting in spreadsheets and portfolio oversight in systems built for public markets. Kent Collier framed the challenge as intelligence and execution systems that "have lived in different worlds". LSEG’s plan extends that thinking across the full liquidity spectrum, from liquid bonds to private loans.

LSEG also plans to build new products. It intends to combine Octus’ proprietary content with Workspace, its flagship desktop, and with LPC, Yield Book, PRS and Tradeweb, to help customers develop a consistent view of a fragmented market with a common data structure, valuation and portfolio management tools. LSEG describes the synergies as both immediate and longer term, which points first to wider distribution and then to jointly built products.

LSEG has set out the financial effects in detail. The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to the organic revenue growth of its Data & Analytics division, and additive to LSEG’s guidance for group organic subscription revenue growth of around 7% in 2027. Because of Octus’ strong margin profile and operating leverage, there is no change to LSEG’s medium-term guidance for underlying EBITDA margin to rise by a cumulative c.150 basis points over 2027 to 2029 from the 2026 baseline.

On earnings, LSEG expects the deal to be neutral to adjusted earnings per share in the first full year after completion, and accretive thereafter. That timing reflects the interest cost of the external debt used to fund the purchase, set against the earnings Octus contributes from a business running at an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 40%.

A growth-company price for a 40% margin business

The disclosed figures give a clear basis for judging the price. Set against Octus’ expected 2026 revenue of more than $300 million, the consideration of $3.535 billion is shown as a calculated revenue multiple in the deal figures above; because revenue is stated as more than $300 million, that multiple is a ceiling rather than a point figure. LSEG pairs that revenue with an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 40%, which places Octus among the more profitable growth businesses in financial data. Any multiple Acquiry shows is our own arithmetic from LSEG’s rounded figures, not a number LSEG has published.

Those multiples sit with a business that has delivered double-digit compound revenue growth since 2022 and, according to LSEG, continues to grow at a strong double-digit rate, in a served segment LSEG expects to keep growing at a double-digit rate. Growth on that scale, at that margin, is what allows the deal to lift the division’s organic growth rate from the first day of ownership.

Leverage peaks in 2027, then returns to mid-range by 2028

LSEG has also shown how the debt fits its capital plans. Allowing for forecast cash flow, the completion of its current £3 billion share buyback programme by February 2027, the completion of the Octus and Trumid acquisitions and capacity for further share buybacks of £1 billion to £1.5 billion, LSEG expects leverage at the end of 2027 to be around the upper end of its 1.5 to 2.5 times target range. It then expects leverage to return to the middle of that range by the end of 2028.

The integration model keeps Octus intact. On completion Octus becomes part of LSEG’s Data & Analytics division, with Kent Collier continuing to run the Octus businesses and reporting to Gianluca Biagini and Ron Lefferts, the division’s co-heads. Collier said Octus’ customer-first mindset and drive to deliver the best products to clients is a natural cultural fit with LSEG, and that joining will pair Octus’ data, intelligence and workflows with global distribution and fixed income depth.

Schwimmer, for his part, said he looks forward to partnering with Collier and the Octus team to continue to drive future growth. Both leaders describe the combination in terms of reach: Octus gains distribution across LSEG’s customer base, and LSEG gains a specialist team and a buy-side franchise it can extend. For Octus customers, the products they already use, from CreditAI to the portfolio tools built on Sky Road and LevPro, continue under the same leadership.

The remaining step is regulatory. The announcement says the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval, without listing individual jurisdictions. In the meantime LSEG’s other capital commitments run on their own timetable, including the completion of its £3 billion share buyback by February 2027 and Tradeweb’s planned acquisition of Trumid.

Five milestones between signing and a combined credit platform

• –Regulatory approval. The clearances that set the timing of completion, expected in the first half of 2027.
• –Financing. The external debt raised to fund the cash consideration.
• –Wider distribution. First evidence of Octus products sold across LSEG’s global footprint, and LSEG products into Octus’ buy-side base.
• –Combined products. Octus content inside Workspace, LPC, Yield Book, PRS and Tradeweb.
• –Leverage. Progress back to the middle of the 1.5-2.5x range by the end of 2028, as set out in the financial effects.