Big tech pushes further into finance

With no endCEO,cmeAWS to the tech downturn in sight, the industry’s titans are eyeing new markets. The bigger, the better: in the past year the combined revenue of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Meta reached $1.5trn, so further growth that moves the needle can only come from a giant business. One candidate is finance. What is more, that industry generates petabytes of data, the crunching of which is a core competency of tech firms. And it is dominated by stuffy, old institutions. For a tech it looks ripe for disruption.One such boss is Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. On December 12th his company announced a ten-year deal to provide cloud-computing and data-analytics services to the London Stock Exchange Group. As part of the transaction, Microsoft has agreed to pay £1.5bn ($1.9bn) for a 4% stake in the financial-services firm. This follows a tie-up last year between Google Cloud Platform, Alphabet’s cloud business, and , one of the world’s busiest derivatives exchanges. Weeks later, Amazon Web Services (), that giant’s cloud division, announced a similar arrangement with the Nasdaq stock exchange.