Thread regarding Refinitiv layoffs

The main goal of the workspace business at LSEG is for people to hand out salaries to their friends.

It certainly isn’t to grow revenue or make new products, based on the earnings call today. If no one in this team came to work in 2024, virtually the same would have been accomplished.

They can’t even pretend to be visionaries. Every initiative they’re trying to take credit fo, such as the Microsoft partnership, the TORA acquisition, and all the content, features, and solutions available in Workspace, was launched before they joined. They haven’t created or contributed any real value.
Their only idea, the OpenFin partnership, has zero users and no clear plan for launch. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. D&A is lagging behind other LSEG businesses in both growth and profitability. Instead of firing skilled employees, the board people should focus on removing the toxic Workspace team and the unnecessary roles they’ve added over the past few years. Really happy to have left (my choice!) that shrinking trip.

I am reading the comments and I wonder, do you think he, his manager, or LSEG care? In his and his manager's egomaniac minds, every criticism is just jealous noise from folks who can’t see the bigger picture. Their egos tell them these comments only prove that true visionaries, as they see themselves, are misunderstood and they dismiss any backlash as predictable from people "who can’t handle change" or understand that yelling, backstabbing, lying and throwing people under the bus is necessary for progress.

Our WS guru left UBS after 2,5 year. 9 months more here? Prophetic lol.

LSEG had some very experienced industry people (a bunch of ex-bbg, ex-symphony employees) leading this area at one point.

I presume they were all fired to make way for the group now, who seemingly have no experience and make public posts that embarrass the company. Hard to grasp the rationale that led to that decision.

You take it literally. Everyone knows these announcements and interviews are performative. Just corporate theater to keep the buzz alive.

With that said, industry norms say that between 24–36 months in a leadership role, the 'vision phase' ends and the 'Wait… what have you actually built?' phase begins. He’s already 21 months in, meaning he has about 3–15 months before people stop nodding politely at the buzzwords and start asking for actual results. If there’s no real adoption data, clear ROI, or major client success story soon, the 'intergalactic rocket' might need a crash landing protocol. (By the way, how long was he at UBS? Asking for a friend.)

@28g+1jjf83y0s Fasten your seat belts, WS circus goes intergalactic!
Instead of pretending to be an expert in federated platforms, he should just own it and update his profile to ‘LSEG WS Ringmaster | Chief Evangelist of Hype and Deception'.

I had to look up the Major Tom reference, and wow—now that I get it, even if it sounds a little bit harsh, I have to say it’s not far off from my own experience working with him.

There’s always a lot of grand talk about “pushing boundaries” and “transformative experiences”, but when it comes to real numbers, clear timelines, or honest discussions about adoption challenges, it’s like trying to get a signal from someone floating in deep space. You hear the comms, but there’s never a straight answer back.

I’ve seen this first-hand—big, exciting presentations filled with metaphors, but when someone asks practical questions, there’s a lot of circling around the topic without directly addressing what they actually need to know. If you challenge anything and he lets you keep your job, the response is either dismissive or at best a more high-level storytelling rather than a concrete answer.

So yeah, Ground Control to Major Tom hits a little too close to home. It's all vision and inspiration, but the moment you ask, “Okay, but how do we actually do this?” the signal gets fuzzy.

It seems to me a desperate move, a paid interview to build his profile.

Regardless, it's amazing how he can speak without saying anything and his words outnumber facts 10x (ten to one). Let’s break this down.

"Last year, we assembled the rocket. This year, it’s lift-off…"
Translation: We still don’t have real numbers, so here’s a dramatic space metaphor to distract you.

Mr Rocketman, about 10x you said "adoption is growing"—cool, but how much? Are we talking tens of thousands of users or just a handful of internal testers? If your 10x BS is truly taking off, why not share real numbers instead of vague enthusiasm?

The integration with Teams sounds nice, but what’s the actual impact? If it’s saving users time and improving workflows, where’s the evidence? Client adoption? Anything concrete?

OpenFin is described as a "key strategic partner," but let’s be real—it’s just a Chromium wrapper. LSEG had its own version, but for some reason (guess why), it was scrapped in favor of OpenFin, which now comes with a hefty price tag. What exactly makes it worth it? More importantly, did this decision introduce any delays? How many clients are actually using OpenFin Workspace, and how do they feel about it? Is adoption widespread? Did it deliver the promise of out of box interoperability with other applications?

The AI-powered content discovery sounds fancy, but where’s the proof? Does this actually improve decision-making, or is it just another chatbot regurgitating market summaries based on limited datasets? If AI is such a game-changer, surely there’s a way to quantify its impact rather than just name-drop it. Are you innovating or you try to catch up with competion?

Sunsetting Eikon is a big move, but there’s no real discussion on how that transition is going. Have customers embraced Workspace? Which version of Workspace web, desktop or OF? No mention of user sentiment probably means it’s not going as smoothly as advertised.

And here’s the big question—what do clients actually need to do to enable all these "seamless" new features? Do they need approvals from their compliance teams or reconfigure their infrastructure? More importantly, are they willing to do it? Because it’s easy to market innovation, but it’s a lot harder to convince clients to adopt it if the benefits aren’t clear.

Ground control to Major Tom... less rocket talk please, more real numbers. If your work is truly a success, it should be easy to prove it with data rather than metaphors and buzzwords.

What is this guy smoking…
https://a-teaminsight.com/blog/seamless-interoperability-the-next-chapter-for-lseg-workspace/

@22k+1jjf83y0s bs word salad is the speciality of the Workspace leader. This is what happens when you let someone with a “50 IQ + public speaking courses” into a senior leadership role.

LSEG, for the love of god, please get this bozo out of your company and end the public embarrassment.

This seems like just another word salad trying to convince the outside world that something important is happening, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt if they share the actual adoption rate for LSEG Entra SSO. That should give us a good estimate of when they expect to have all 1.3 billion users seamlessly ‘connected.’

And while they’re at it, maybe they can also share the adoption numbers for last year’s ‘groundbreaking’ innovation, Meeting Prep and how much money generated for LSEG?

That should give us a real sense of the impact they’ve actually made.

Innovation, Excellence, and Collaboration my 4$$...

Here is why this and previous announcements from this team are perfectly fake PR:

• Say a lot but explain nothing.

• Overload every announcement with excessive buzzwords to sound innovative.

• Hype up 'exciting enhancements' without actually committing to anything real.

As the previous comment said, they still struggling to rename Workspace and they went ahead and announced this nonsense.

These inspiring leaders, pioneers of efficiency and innovations with two decades each on deep industry disruption and, yet somehow, they’re incapable of renaming Refinitiv Workspace to LSEG Workspace

Bank robbers would be impressed with the workspace leadership team’s ability to steal money (aka their salary).

No one in the corporate world lying more right now to create “shareholder value”. This team would make Elizabeth Holmes cringe.

The comments here and elsewhere resonate with my experience reporting to these uninspiring, self obsessed managers and my view also is that they constantly overpromise and underdeliver while creating a miserable environment for anyone outside their inner circle. Lastly, their initiatives are purely performative, however, so far they are like Teflon, nothing seems to stick on them, despite their despicable behaviour and abysmal performance.

Anyway, I wanted to ask for an impartial view, so I provided a generative AI with WS announcements, LMP updates from earnings calls, and transcripts from interviews and panels featuring the WS leadership team, then I asked it about previous initiatives and to predict the next few ones.

I pasted the response below—it's interesting what it came up with:

2023: LSEG OpenFin Partnership
"Seamless Workflows Reloaded: The Desktop Integration Connecting Nothing to Nowhere"
"Experience the thrill of an overpriced Chromium wrapper! Effortlessly switch between workspace applications like excactly how you did it before, thanks to a revolutionary synergy that allows you to… open web pages! Truly an industry-first"

2024: Microsoft Financial Meeting Prep
"Next-Gen AI Synergy: Because You Can’t Be Bothered to Do the Job You’re Paid For"
"Why waste precious time preparing for client meetings when an AI can generate a glorified few-pages memo—based on limited datasets—that you’ll skim five minutes before the call? Our groundbreaking solution ensures you show up looking unprepared"

2025: LinkedIn for Finance
"The Social Network Nobody Wanted: Repackaging Chat for the 10th Time"
"Now you can message in real-time, just like you could before, but with extra steps! Because what finance really needed was to send LinkedIn messages."

2026: Quantum Finance Matrix™
"Intergalactic Trading: Connecting You to Every Market—and Maybe Aliens"
"Leverage AI-driven, blockchain-powered quantum algorithms to trade across multiple dimensions! Now featuring universal compliance with interstellar financial regulators to ensure smooth transactions from Wall Street to Alpha Centauri!"

2027: FinanceVerse Infinity™
"Where Traders Become Gods"
"Step into the metaverse of finance, where every banker gets their own NFT-based avatar and trades synthetic assets in VR. Trade, invest, and manage portfolios while sipping virtual champagne on the blockchain. Optional upgrades include a customizable yacht NFT for networking events with other self-proclaimed visionaries."

2028: Single Sign-On (SSO) Finally Arrives!
"The Future of Convenience: Logging in Without Crying"
"After years of disruptive innovation, paradigm shifts, and intergalactic ambitions, LSEG proudly delivers the biggest game-changer yet—ONE login for Workspace! No more remembering your Workspace password, resetting credentials once a year, or crying at the helpdesk. The financial industry will never be the same."

The traitors in this thread need to stop questioning the wisdom of the “expert of federated platforms”. We need more evangelists !!!

How dare some of you question the noble endeavors of our esteemed leadership team?

If anyone wishes to assess the credibility of these leaders' promises, just take a stroll down memory lane.

Remember the grand 'On-The-Glass' interoperability claims and how the LSEG-OpenFin partnership was poised to reshape financial workflows into a seamless, plug-and-play experience?

It's truly astonishing how this team manages to revolutionize financial workflows every single year!

So, where is this groundbreaking innovation now?

And while we're at it, has anyone seen any reports on:

• How much LSEG pays to OpenFin
• How many WS Users run WS OF
• How many non LSEG applications interop with WS OF
• How it had "revolutionised" user workflows. Any use cases?
• What is the return on investment from this initiative?

Curious minds would love to know and objectively assess the claims for the "LinkedIn for finance" 2025 BS initiative...

It’s all a fugayzi. You know what a fugayzi is?

Fugayzi, fugazi. It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart.

Here’s a clearer and more polished version of your text while keeping the same tone and message:

What surprises me is that the Workspace team only communicates about new features that aren’t fully ready, creating high expectations. This happens partly because they aren’t familiar with existing features—they didn’t create any of them. Their new mantra is all about sales being evangelists. The implication is clear: if you don’t buy into their strategy and become an evangelist, you might end up in the next round of layoffs. An evangelist doesn’t ask questions or report issues—they’re just expected to believe. And in this case, “god” is the Workflows leader. A choice of words which means a lot. Employee are clearly asked (threatened!) to follow them without questioning or challenging the choices being made. This is new since the new Workspace team joined…

D&A lacks a strong internal challenge culture, where employees feel empowered to push back against unrealistic claims.

Sadly, our 'leaders' take advantage of this and use these announcements to pad their resumes rather than genuinely transform the company. When the project fails, they initially pass the blame downward and then move on to another role before accountability catches up.

It wasn’t always like this, but especially after the ex-UBS man came on board with his leadership playbook— deceiption, bullying, forced resignations, redundancies, and selective new hires—he imposed a ‘yes-man’ culture.

They should set-up a circus tent in the middle of Paternoster Square to commemorate the workspace leadership team.

The Workspace circus together with their counterpart in MSFT knows
the claims are far-fetched, but the goal is to position themselves as innovators, impress investors and their furure employers.

Their full of BS press release and the fresh demo video feels like a classic case of "perpetual postponement", the idea that a claim isn’t a lie if you keep saying it’s coming soon. This tactic has become a pattern under the current WS team, with many projects in the LSEG-Microsoft partnership following the same playbook: bold announcements, vague timelines, and little tangible progress. By framing ambitious goals as an ongoing journey, they avoid accountability while keeping investors engaged. It’s a strategic PR move: control the narrative, justify the Microsoft deal, and keep the market believing in future innovation, even if execution remains elusive.

@wc+1jjf83y0s LSEG should fully expect a FINRA or CFTC investigation into whatever it is they are building. Sounds like it’s regulated messaging on an unregulated platform with social media somehow also integrated.

It’s like the company is being run by zoo animals now.

I read this press release, and in my extensive experience in financial services, I have never encountered such a rushed job before. This press release risks misleading stakeholders and falling afoul of FCA rules. It raises red flags and I am not sure how it went through LSEG's legal team.

DB’s tone in that blog sounds a lot like that of the circus clown he hired to run Workspace.

The question is, has DB or anyone in LSEG, MSFT or ex-UBS, Natwest, Barclays person that contributed to this ever tried to request from LSEG, MSFT, Natwest, Barclays or UBS to allow cross company communication over MS Teams or access to 3rd party MS Teams bots?

How LSEG even allowed these kind of far-fetced statements about TAM to become public, let alone KYC and considerations around 3rd party data distribution (LSEG owns only a limited amount of datasets available on Workspace) over 3rd party platforms (LinkedIn, MS Teams).

I think their purpose is to entertain us. And it's funny because the 'expert' in federated platforms, during a workshop not long ago, said, 'Zuckerberg is full of BS; there isn't a community of 3 billion users—communities are much smaller groups. The Wealth community, the FI Trading Community, etc '

Now, given the facts, I am sure he told DB 'You are full of BS! We cannot go public with this kind of statement. You make us look like clowns.'

Nah, he sat like a good puppy and worked on the new BS demo video for something they know they will never deliver. After all, he hasn't left with much credibility, almost 2 years in this role and except of promises, the 'expert' and his 'leadership' team haven't delivered anything substantial, yet.

Lastly, instead of ridiculous claims, in this press release I expected them to give some answers to:

• What is Open Directory and how will enhance collaboration?
• Which targeted communities piloted it externally?
• How many clients and how many users? -What's their detailed feedback?
• Do these users pay for workspace licenses?
• How long it took them to go through internal processes and enable communication with external participants over these shared channels?
• What percentage of lseg workspace clients use MS Teams?
• What is the actual size of this opportunity?

@OP+1jjf83y0s Why stop at only a billion users? Why not say LSEG's total addressable market is every person on the entire planet? Maybe aliens come to earth and the first thing they ask for is Open Directory and Workspace?

D&A and the Workspace business is the biggest clown show you'll ever see now. The industry and their clients had a good laugh at the announcements this week as no one understands what LSEG is even talking about. It refers to POC apps no one knows about, and makes it sound like Microsoft needs LSEG to build communication tools for them (ha imagine that). It includes yet another vaporware marketing video, which is LSEG's main business now.

I only feel bad for the younger and junior employees in these areas. Leaders are convincing them this is good exposure for their career, and its the complete opposite (the company is such a joke and they look like they are part of it).

My message to those employees would be: "Stop listening to your leaders making £1mil+ a year to peddle lies and spin. Those guys will be fine with their golden parachutes when it all goes wrong. Get out of LSEG as soon as you can, and go get a career at a company that builds products and not vaporware marketing videos to confuse investors."

The E in LSEG right now stands for "Enron".

Yeah, I read the D&A press release and it made me wonder, didn't anyone tell him this is a serious business and not a TV show like Grand Designs?

The press release is overly optimistic, full of typical marketing buzzwords with claims of unifying billions of users and transforming workflows that feel far-fetched. It clearly overhypes the integration of LinkedIn, Teams, and LSEG Workspace without addressing practical challenges like compliance, user overlap, or execution. It leans heavily on marketing jargon, making the vision seem aspirational rather than achievable.

This is sad.