London Stock Exchange Group has agreed to buy Octus, a credit-intelligence and data provider used heavily by distressed-debt investors and restructuring lawyers, for $3.535 billion in cash — a deal aimed at giving LSEG a stronger foothold in one of the fastest-growing corners of financial data.
Octus, headquartered in New York, supplies credit data, news and workflow tools to more than 750 institutional customers and some 40,000 individual users, including banks, law firms, advisory shops and buy-side credit funds. The all-cash transaction, financed with external debt, is expected to close in the first half of 2027 and will fold Octus into LSEG's Data & Analytics division, with founder and chief executive Kent Collier staying on to run the business.
Betting on Private and Distressed Credit
The acquisition is a direct play on the growth of private credit and distressed-debt investing, markets that have expanded rapidly as companies increasingly borrow outside traditional bank lending and as a steady drumbeat of restructurings has kept demand high for the kind of granular covenant and claims data Octus specializes in. LSEG has said the deal will be neutral to adjusted earnings per share in its first full year and accretive after that, and that it should immediately lift the organic revenue growth rate of its Data & Analytics unit — the London exchange operator's largest and fastest-growing segment since its roughly $27 billion acquisition of Refinitiv in 2021.
Octus is expected to generate more than $300 million in revenue this year, with strong double-digit growth and an adjusted EBITDA margin near 40%, according to figures disclosed alongside the deal — a profile that explains both the price tag and the strategic logic. Credit-specific data providers have become acquisition targets across the industry as larger players race to bulk up analytics tied to private markets, where pricing and risk data are harder to come by than in public equities and bonds.
For LSEG, the purchase continues a pattern of using data and analytics acquisitions to diversify away from its legacy exchange and clearing businesses, which generate steadier but slower-growing revenue. Rivals including S&P Global and Moody's have made similar moves into private-credit data in recent years, underscoring how central the asset class has become to the broader financial-data business even as questions persist across the industry about how transparently that market prices risk.
The deal still requires regulatory clearances in the jurisdictions where Octus and LSEG operate, a process that typically takes several months for transactions of this size but is not expected to draw the kind of antitrust scrutiny larger market-infrastructure mergers have faced, given the two companies' limited product overlap.
