Good evening everyone, and welcome to Paternoster Square. Hello to everyone who's following us on the webcast. I'll shortly hand over to David, but first I'll just take you through the plan for the next day or so. After hearing from David and Anna through to about 6:30 P.M., we'll head off to The Ned for dinner. Table numbers are on your lanyards, and your places will be individually named. For tomorrow, you'll be given a second lanyard, which will have a personalized agenda on it. After we come back at around 8:00 A.M. for breakfast, we'll be back in here for the webcast presentations from Satvinder and Ron between 9:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M., and then we'll move into the breakouts.
Now, the breakouts are designed to give you a deeper dig into areas that we've touched on in the presentations, and they'll mainly be Q&A in format. Then we'll be back here at 3:15 P.M. for the panel Q&A, before witnessing a market close ceremony at 4:30 P.M. Please, enjoy yourselves, ask questions, and talk to our many leaders who are here throughout the event. With that, we'll kick off the event proper. David.
Thank you. So good evening and welcome. It is really great to have you all here. I'm delighted to see many familiar faces, but, I must also say, with over GBP 10 billion of our stock placed this year, I am also delighted to welcome those of you who may be new to LSEG. So I'll start by speaking briefly about the journey of the last three years, bringing us to today. I'll then talk about how we are clearly differentiated, both for our customers and also for you, for our investors. And most importantly, I'll highlight the great opportunities for growth that we have in front of us. As you go through the presentations and breakouts that will follow, you'll be able to hear more about all of these in greater detail. So back in 2020, LSEG and Refinitiv were two separate but complementary businesses.
We had the same customers, but we provided different services. LSEG's heritage was in European equity and derivatives markets, with a world-class index business. Refinitiv was a global data and analytics business with leading execution platforms in FX and fixed income. Both groups had long-term, robust relationships with key stakeholders, but it's fair to say that LSEG had a stronger brand and a more consistent sense of trust with customers. Although LSEG was a business mainly based on transactional revenue, it had a stronger growth track record. We announced the Refinitiv acquisition just over four years ago. It was big, surprising, and transformational for LSEG, and the execution risk gave a lot of people pause. We had a few points to prove to all of you over the last three years.
When we gave our 5%-7% growth guidance back then, there was a degree of skepticism as to whether we could hit even the bottom end of that range. I am pleased to say we have achieved it every year with organic growth, clearly towards the upper end of what we laid out. Within that, the turnaround in trading and banking was key, and we've delivered that with seven quarters of growth. That is before we transformed this business with Microsoft. We've also delivered on our synergies, with bigger cost targets delivered faster and revenue targets significantly increased. We've actually achieved over three percentage points of underlying margin improvement. Along the way, the perimeter has changed a lot, with investments with Microsoft, the acquisition of a few early-stage companies, and the sale of the high-margin Beta business.
These are all moves that make our business better set up for growth, even if they have had a short-term dilutive impact. And finally, our partners in the Blackstone consortium have done a great job in exiting their position in an orderly way, with nearly a quarter of LSEG's stock moving into new hands this year, and the Blackstone consortium stake dropping to 11%. So on this slide, let's look at the growth performance in more detail. As some of you will remember, at our last Capital Markets Day in July 2021, we built up that growth target line by line through our D&A business. We have met or exceeded every single one of those targets. So hitting our guidance has not just been a top-down exercise where we reached the target with our performance in certain areas.
We've done what we set out to do line by line. We've taken businesses that were pretty much all underperforming and losing market share in their respective markets, and we have brought them up to at least market-level growth in the space of 2.5 years. As you'll hear throughout the event, there is so much more to go for. you've heard us talk a lot about synergy delivery over the past few years, and Anna will give a recap on that journey in just a few minutes. I want to talk about the real integration that we have driven across the combined business, because remember, both old LSEG and old Refinitiv were themselves a combination of businesses that hadn't undergone much integration along the way. Our ambition was much bigger than taking out cost and removing areas of overlap.
I've talked in the past about how we have been really integrating our businesses, our systems, and our network infrastructure. We are well on our way to creating a transformed business, one that is simplified, resilient, and unified. We are simplifying and improving the product set for our customers, and this is showing up in how they are responding to those changes, with significantly higher customer satisfaction. We're also transforming the technology we use to run our business. We have made our platform much more resilient, with incidents down by two-thirds over the last two years. And we are unifying our business. Our brand campaign is improving how we show up to the market, bringing clarity and simplicity to what was a hodgepodge of over 20 branded products. All of this has only been possible because we've created a new culture.
We are a much more collaborative organization, breaking down silos and working across the group effectively. Our transformation is also building engineering muscle and improving the employee experience, as you'll hear in the breakouts tomorrow. We're also much more data-driven in our decision-making as we build a high-performance culture across the group, with more stretching aspirations and targets at all levels. We've built a great leadership team, too. We now have a very strong blend of deep industry experience, LSEG heritage, and new leadership from a range of industries, and this sets us up really well to deliver our next leg of growth. you'll get the chance to talk to most of these people at dinner and through tomorrow. I will just take this opportunity to recognize Tony McCarthy. Where's Tony? He was right here, who announced his retirement a few months ago.
Tony has had a long and distinguished career in financial markets technology and has been a great CIO for us these past four years. Irfan Hussain will join us from Goldman Sachs to succeed Tony in the new year. Given our divisional structure from 2024, which we've just announced, I'd like to call out Fiona Bassett and David Wilson, who are bringing great insight and energy to their roles. We're not covering FTSE Russell or Risk Intelligence in any detail at this CMD, but we will definitely provide opportunities for you to engage with them next year. To wrap up, we've come a long way in the last three years, and our team, our people, are very proud of what they have achieved. LSEG today is a strong launchpad for what we plan to achieve in the next few years. Our services are vital to our customers.
Our end markets are growing. We're highly diversified, with recurring revenue and very strong cash generation, and we have a highly differentiated approach. We also have a long history of trusted partnership. Our ecosystem is open and interoperable, and we are increasingly linking our businesses together to provide more integrated services. Let's see how the new brand campaign pulls all of that together, and then I will talk about how we are differentiated, both for our customers and for you, our investors.
In the world of finance, names can be a bit misleading. Take ours, for instance, pronounced LSEG, aka London Stock Exchange Group. Sure, we're in London, but we're also here, here, and here. In fact, we do business in 190 countries. We're practically everywhere, except here. Well, not yet, anyway. We're proud to be one of the world's biggest, most international stock exchanges, connecting capital with ideas for centuries. But that's just part of what we do. Today, we connect the news, information, insights, and systems to create possibility across the markets, partnering with almost every major financial firm in the world. you see, others do some of what we do, but not everything we do. Instead of LSEG, we could have called ourselves the London and Practically Every Other Place in the World Stock, Bonds, Currency, Data, Analytics, Indices, Risk Management, Clearing, Exchange, Multi-Asset Class Group.
But that's a little wordy. LSEG.
So what makes our business different? I'm looking at it here through two lenses. What makes it different for our customers, and then what makes it different for you, our shareholders? We are truly global. We span multiple asset classes, and we provide services through the entire trade life cycle. None of our competitors has the breadth of offering or the global reach of LSEG. This, in turn, supports genuine long-term partnerships built on trust. From a financial perspective, the nature of our services, the markets we are aligned to, and relationships we have mean that the quality and visibility of our earnings are very high and not correlated to a single driver. I'll unpack each of these. We are multi-asset class, and we operate across the trade life cycle. We are a genuinely global business, with people in 65 markets, serving customers across 190....
So whether you want to raise capital, research investments, benchmark your performance, check out whom you are planning to do business with, execute your trade, or clear it in a low-risk and efficient way, we are your partners. And we're your end-to-end partners across equities, fixed income, and foreign exchange. And we have large parts of the trade life cycle in commodities and other asset classes. No one else offers this breadth of product and service, and this breadth and depth is a true strategic differentiator. Many of you have heard me talk about how the nature of our conversations with customers has changed since the Refinitiv deal. Customers recognize that because we serve them across so many different parts of their business, our relationship is not that of a typical supplier. We've become a strategic partner.
We are increasingly working in partnership with our customers' leadership teams, working together to solve problems and create opportunities. We help them simplify their business, reduce their reliance on multiple other vendors, and drive growth, innovation, and efficiency. We have competitors in each segment, but they tend to be much more monoline in what they offer, and our customers really value our breadth and the benefits that it brings them. Crucially, we work in partnership. It's popular to talk about customers as partners, but for LSEG, it is in our DNA. Look at the businesses we run, whether it's the Clearing House, London Stock Exchange, Tradeweb, Turquoise, these were all businesses founded or built by the financial institutions that are now our most important customers.
They have successively entrusted us to run the critical market infrastructure that they rely on every day, and that trust has continued as we've invested in technology, innovation, and new services to make those platforms better and better, and to grow them. We're also proactive to partner where we know we don't have all the answers, and where one plus one can make much more than two. Our close collaborations with Microsoft and BlackRock are great examples of that, and you'll hear more about both tomorrow. Let me turn it over to some of our partners to share their thoughts.
LSEG is a global leader in data and analytics and financial markets infrastructure. Every day, we help our customers raise finance, make investment decisions, manage risk, and optimize capital. Our products span the whole financial markets value chain and across multiple asset classes. We are a leading player in real-time data, benchmark and indices, fixed income and foreign exchange trading, and the clearing of interest rate derivatives. We're partnering to transform our industry.
Behind every product, behind every offering, behind every trade we make, every analysis we provide for a client, is a very large and copious amount of data analysis. So it's really important, therefore, for us to have partners like LSEG, from whom we can source the data, to whom we can share data, and upon whom we can rely.
The LSEG partnership that HSBC has enables us to provide not only data to our colleagues to help our customers make decisions, but also real-time market data, so we can see trends, make forecasts, and better manage our bank.
The strategic dialogue that we have with LSEG's businesses, Data and Analytics, Capital Markets, and Post Trade, is extremely valuable. The global nature of LSEG's footprint means that whether we're servicing clients' needs in Europe, in the Americas, or Asia, we have touch points with the LSEG team across the board.
Through the acquisition of Refinitiv and the partnership with Microsoft, we are transforming our services for customers.
We've always trusted LSEG to provide us with information, market indices, capabilities. But, Refinitiv really brought a whole new set of capabilities, gives us a competitive advantage, gives us more information for our customers.
What LSEG did was capture what the essence of a financial company is today, or a financial infrastructure provider is. We want large data providers upon whom we can rely for quality, for resilience, for continued growth in capability. With the purchase of Refinitiv by LSEG, that's, that's done it for LSEG, it's done it for Refinitiv, and it's done it for us.
We've built a true working model, strategically aligning across the two firms and having our teams work together to create a shared roadmap of innovation and new product development for the benefit of our mutual clients.
LSEG is at the forefront of innovation. We build and run platforms that solve our customers' problems. Using LSEG's market-leading data and Microsoft's cloud and AI capabilities, we will empower our customers with the next generation of services.
We believe that the future of investment management and the future of technology are highly aligned, and our collaboration with LSEG is a core component of how we will ultimately deliver for client needs. To us, the future is about the whole portfolio and building technology, data, and analytics in support of that whole portfolio.
Both the datasets and data analytics products that LSEG has, as well as the trust and, you know, the deep partnerships that they have across the financial services space, it really is very unique. I think we're gonna find, with Generative AI, as we apply it to that data platform, is only gonna enable and unlock new use cases. And I think with LSEG and Microsoft, partnering together, we're really on the cusp of unlocking tremendous new potential.
With the digitization of markets and the rise of data-driven trading, we are shaping the major trends in our industry. We are helping customers to manage risk, comply with increased regulations, and optimize capital.
The development of Post Trade Solutions is a great example of this. In consultation with Goldman and market participants, LSEG is seeking to import best practices and innovation from the cleared markets to the uncleared markets. I expect that the industry will have much better tools at our fingertips to manage our risk, as well as optimize our capital footprint.
I think one of the things that we're looking to enable together is really speed. you know, how do we enable financial institutions to make decisions faster, to make better decisions, and with more confidence? The ability both to use real-time data, to be able to look at historical data, and to be able to merge it with your own proprietary data sets and help you assess and make those decisions quickly.
Our customers every day are transacting $trillions, millions of transactions, with all kinds of market data at their disposal. And we rely so heavily on an LSEG's data every day to run our business. And then you combine that with the Microsoft partnership, which is our core infrastructure from a technology perspective, and now we have quite a unique capability of data analytics technology running our bank every day.
So great customer relationships and strong partnership with the industry. What does that mean for our investors and the shape of the business that you own? We are global and highly diversified by region, country, customer, and product. This helps us on both offense and defense. Our customers are increasingly looking to consolidate suppliers and want partners who can match their own footprints across markets and products, and that plays to our strengths. We are not overly reliant on any single market, product, or customer type. Our business has a number of natural offsets, where market conditions that may drag on one part of the business naturally boost another. Let's look at how that translates into our revenue profile. We have a high proportion of recurring revenue, nearly three-quarters of our business in 2022.
These are subscriptions for services that tend to be pretty sticky, and they're not at all concentrated by product or customer. I think there is a lot of appreciation of that very high-quality, recurring revenue. But one point that is often missed is the very high quality of our transactional revenue. Almost all of it comes from two businesses, Tradeweb and Post Trade, and these both have excellent track records of multi-year, double-digit revenue growth. They've combined strong market tailwinds with consistent innovation and partnership, and I'm confident that they can continue to do so. One way to think about the quality of our revenue and the diversity of our business is to look at market correlations, or rather, the lack of them. Here, we've plotted LSEG's organic growth in each of the last five years, both before and after the acquisition of Refinitiv.
you can see how our growth has consistently been in that mid to high single digit range every year since 2018. But look at the data points that you might think would impact our business. Interest rates have been zero and then risen very steeply. Equity markets have risen and fallen significantly, and the same for equity issuance. The pandemic and geopolitics have driven volatility, and the fact is, these factors do have an impact in parts of our business. But the overall growth drivers we enjoy and the diversification of our business contribute to a really consistent top line, whatever the weather. Okay, I've talked about what we have achieved over the past few years and what makes us unique and different from others in the industry. Let's talk now about the big opportunity ahead of us. First, our markets are large and growing.
We operate in markets with around GBP 60 billion-GBP 70 billion of spend that are growing anywhere from mid-single digit up to double digits, and our market shares are in a sweet spot. We're well established, so we have the opportunity to grow with the market, but we also have room to grow share as well. There is also a significant unserviced TAM, which we think we can increasingly address, particularly in our partnership with Microsoft. This is in areas such as data management as a service. It's a big area of spend for many of our customers, and Satvinder will touch on this more in the morning. Second, the trends, such as increasing demand for data and new technologies that are driving growth, play to our strengths. In many cases, we are investing to shape these trends ourselves.
We're at the heart of industry change, whether it's the rapid rise of generative AI or the provision of ultra-low latency feeds, the constant innovation at Tradeweb driving the transition in their markets, or the creation of post-trade solutions to optimize capital efficiency. We tried to create a slide showing which of these drivers lined up with which of our businesses, but we abandoned the slide because it just showed a tick in every box. Effectively, all of our businesses are benefiting from these mega trends. So as we move to the next phase of growth, which underpins the new medium-term guidance that we have just published today, we see four powerful drivers accelerating our growth into the future. For all of them, you will see that we're not just standing still and waiting for growth to happen to us.
We're driving that growth through product innovation, investment, partnership, and opening new markets. I'll go through each of these over the next few slides, but tomorrow you will be able to learn about most of them in much more detail. First, I'll start with the continuing strength of our existing business. Let me touch on three of our world-class businesses, which together make up nearly half of LSEG. Our data and feeds business has a really strong market position, leading in real time and gaining share in pricing and reference services. As you'll hear from Satvinder and Stuart Brown tomorrow, there is much more growth to go for here. I've talked before about tick history and PCAP data. That combination has a really long runway for growth and is extremely hard for our competitors to replicate.
We're also building capability in direct feeds and machine-ready text, and we're continuing to deliver Refinitiv revenue synergies. you can see how growth has accelerated these last three years. Tradeweb is another great growth story. I touched on its 14% revenue CAGR a few minutes ago. Its track record speaks for itself, but its pace of innovation has opened up so many avenues for future growth. The core driver of electronification remains intact, as you can see from the penetration rates on the right, but the scope for international expansion, growing in new product areas, and Tradeweb's closer collaboration with the rest of LSEG position us well for continued momentum in the future. Tradeweb's president, Tom Pluta, is with us here, and he will talk more about that in the capital markets breakout tomorrow. And then Post Trade.
I often get asked if Post Trade has reached the end of its impressive growth trajectory, or if we face a big regulatory headwind from EU changes after Brexit. Post Trade continues to grow strongly due to both market conditions and our own innovation and investment. OTC derivatives volumes increased by 56% in 2022 to $39 trillion notional gross value, and our Post Trade business has compounded annually at 10% over the last four years. Post Trade has a strong reputation with its members and customers. This allows the business to continue growing in its core swaps franchise and also grow further in newer products like forex, repos, and CDS. We are attracting new customers, such as pension funds, that are increasingly required to clear, and via international expansion, with our first two Singapore members signing up this past year.
I will talk about Post Trade Solutions shortly. Let's look at three other businesses now, which add up to around 20% of LSEG. In each of these, we have strong market positions, and we have significant investments in flight to make them even stronger. Our benchmarks and indices business, FTSE Russell, has a great brand and is a top three global provider. We have particular strengths in the Russell franchise and the FTSE 100, but also in benchmarks for fixed income and FX. It's in a market sweet spot, with sustained growth coming from indexation, passive investing, and trends like ESG. But we are also seeing newer drivers like self-indexation and technology-driven solutions. Our transformation program is making good progress, and we are already seeing faster time to market.
But that's really going to leap forward on completion, making the production of a new bespoke index possible in days, down from months with the legacy systems. We're also leveraging technology to improve distribution for our customers, so they can receive our data in a way that best suits their needs, be it via APIs or the cloud. And FTSE Russell is partnering across the group as well, driving revenue synergies and now collaborating with Tradeweb on pricing data. Looking ahead, there is a real opportunity to commercialize the assets we have more effectively, with better geographic coverage, better customer segmentation, and a tailored approach to different asset classes. We've already begun to see improved growth in recent quarters, and we have plenty of levers to continue that.
In Risk Intelligence, which is the new name for the customer and third-party risk business, we're aligned with a very high-growth segment, growing double digits. World-Check is a leading platform in KYC/AML screening and gives us exposure into the wider corporate market outside financial services. We've made significant investments through M&A, moving into the digital identity and fraud market, and we've seen a real uptick in usage with the migration of World-Check to the cloud, demonstrating what this could do across our estate. We see three important next steps for this business: integrating the various platforms we have into a single customer solution, building a more mature sales model, including channel partners and digital sales, and continuing to look for opportunities in the higher growth segments of the market. And LSEG FX.
There are two really important aspects of our FX business, which has a great market position and customer loyalty, but the franchise has been running on pretty old technology. First, we are re-platforming that technology, which will deliver much better functionality and will be ten times faster. you may have seen the first product to come out of this re-platforming. Our new non-deliverable forwards matching platform in Singapore went live this past Monday, bringing together the liquidity, execution, operational, and capital benefits of an NDF Central Limit Order Book and clearing for the first time. Second, we are building a full FX ecosystem, from pre-trade through to clearing, and also incorporating a link to Tradeweb. But it's important to note that this is an open system, not a closed one.
We want to build a platform that makes workflows simple and efficient, but gives customers the option to work with others at any stage in the trade. The third wave of our growth comes from our major partnerships as we transform our industry. you will all be familiar with what we plan to do with Microsoft, but this diagram gives a little more color. you heard Scott Guthrie in the video a few minutes ago, talk about the strengths of the partnership and the opportunities that it creates. We are building a brand-new environment for our products and data in Azure, and that will be the foundation of the partnership. We're developing a really wide range of new services across data intelligence, analytics, and Workspace, like the Meeting Prep app that Microsoft introduced at their Ignite event yesterday, and another new capability, Open Directory.
Satvinder will take you through this in more detail tomorrow, but we will change how our customers discover and experience data. We will introduce AI-enabled apps and a modeling infrastructure that will improve productivity and enhance customers' own data excellence, and we will integrate LSEG Workspace into Microsoft Office, which will simplify workflows and expand communities. All of these add up to really material opportunities, both in our existing markets and in new areas of customer spend, which we currently do not address. And I'm really delighted to report that progress in less than a year has been very good. We've benefited from a couple significant developments. First, the rapid evolution of generative AI, with Microsoft as a leading player in the market. And second, the introduction of Fabric, Microsoft's end-to-end data platform, where we are a key development partner.
It's already saving us time and effort on our data platform journey. We are getting great engagement with some of our biggest customers through our Design Partner Program , and this operates with both key decision-makers and with people who will use these products every day. Satvinder will talk through that process in more detail tomorrow. We are ahead of plan in terms of product launch. We have previously indicated that our customers would start to see the benefits of the Microsoft partnership in the second half of 2024, but we're making excellent progress, and we will have the first new applications in the hands of customers in the first half of next year, and then a steady drumbeat of pilots, launches, and ongoing enhancements. you'll hear much more about all of this tomorrow as you meet with the people delivering the partnership for LSEG.
I'd like also to talk about how we are partnering with the industry on post-trade solutions. LCH has a history of strong and trusted partnership. We acquired LCH from market participants, and many are still engaged minority shareholders. Our bank members face two main problems: rising capital requirements and a lack of standards or consistency in bilateral or uncleared markets. We've been working with the industry for some time to address these challenges, and post-trade solutions is the answer. With the acquisitions of Quantile and Acadia, which was also an industry-owned consortium, and our SwapAgent platform, we're building a new suite of services. These will optimize capital and standardize process across the whole trading book, both cleared and uncleared. When you consider that OTC trading is roughly 50% cleared and 50% uncleared, this is a material new opportunity for LSEG.
Dan and Isabelle will go through this in much more detail for you all tomorrow. Finally, we are investing and exploring opportunities for the longer term, and this is something that LSEG has always done. The thinking and work we do today can be the seed of really substantial businesses in 5-10 years. We see real potential in new industry verticals. So much of the investment we're making with Microsoft, as well as the products in areas like Risk Intelligence, have much wider market applications. Our expertise in data management is second to none, and as all companies and industries become increasingly data-driven, they are going to look to experts to help them manage their data. We are well-placed to play that role. In new asset classes, we're investing in developing a trading venue for private companies to create a continuum from private markets to public markets.
We're looking in more detail at digital markets infrastructure in partnership with Microsoft and others. To sum it up, as we continue to execute on our strategy, we will continue to transform LSEG. We will develop our businesses from positions of strength to positions of leadership. Through investment, innovation, and partnership, we will shape the future of our industry. Growth will accelerate over the medium term. Margins will expand, and our cash generation will improve, creating opportunities for reinvestment in growth and continued shareholder returns. We will leverage our differentiated customer proposition to become the partner of choice across the financial markets value chain. I'm looking forward to the rest of the event. I know you will all get a lot out of it, and thanks again for making the time to join us.
I will now hand over to Anna to talk about how all of this translates into our medium-term financial outlook.
Thanks, David, and good evening. I'm going to look at our performance against the targets we set on the back of the Refinitiv deal. Then I'll go through the medium-term guidance that we announced today and some of the drivers behind that. And I'll also cover our capital allocation plans, including the new share buyback, and finally, the rationale for our new divisional reporting. So let's start with performance against our long-term targets. Income growth has been consistently in the upper end of the 5%-7% range, and we've seen acceleration through the period from 6.1% in 2021 to 6.7% for the first nine months of this year. EBITDA margins on an underlying basis are on track to meet guidance. The perimeter of our business has changed since we acquired Refinitiv, and we've made five bolt-on acquisitions.
We've disposed of Beta, which is a high-margin but low-growth business, and we've announced a transformational strategic partnership with Microsoft. Together, these have a short-term dilutive impact on our margin of around 150 basis points, but they set our business up for long-term growth. In the absence of these decisions, and excluding the impacts of FX and the Russia-Ukraine war, we'd be delivering a 50% EBITDA margin for 2023. Turning to revenue and cost synergies, and here we're on track to deliver against our upgraded targets. By the end of this year, we'll have largely completed our cost synergy program two years ahead of schedule. We're back within our target leverage range, about a year ahead of plan. So as you can see, we've delivered strongly against the targets we set ourselves, and we're well-placed as we enter the next phase of growth.
Looking ahead, we announced our medium-term guidance earlier today. Revenue will grow organically at mid- to high-single-digit annually, accelerating after 2024. This is as our customers start to benefit from some of the big investments we're making, like index replatforming and the Microsoft partnership. Underlying EBITDA margin will increase over time as costs grow more slowly than revenue. CapEx will remain at the current levels of 11%-12% of revenue for 2024, and then over time, the capital intensity will decline to a high-single-digit % of revenue. On cash conversion, our cumulative free cash flow will exceed net income. I'll give you more detail on each of these guidance points on the following slides. you've heard David talk about the big picture secular growth trends that are driving our industry.
I'm gonna break this down and talk to the specific actions we're taking to maximize the opportunity and deliver above-market growth. The strategic combination of LSEG and Refinitiv drives growth in three ways. Firstly, through revenue synergies. We expect to exit this year with more than GBP 130 million of run rate synergies, and by 2025, this will be GBP 350-400 million. So plenty more to go for over the next two years. Secondly, you've heard us talk about how we partner with our customers strategically, and we can do that because of the breadth of our combined offering. As we continue with our sales transformation, we're bringing that model to all of our top 250 accounts, increasing the penetration of our services and growing our share of wallet, just as we've begun to do with our biggest customers.
Thirdly, the end-to-end workflows that we now have across multiple asset classes is a strategic differentiator, and that will come to the fore over the medium term. With regards to pricing, there's a lot of opportunity here, and we've begun to prove that price can be an important driver for our business. Now, I think of price in three ways: improving the value of our services for our customers, being disciplined in making sure customers pay for that value, and increasingly, being paid for the volumes that our customers use. On the first of these, we continue to invest in our existing products. For example, you see us continue to add further datasets that deepen and broaden our data moat. And we're rolling out workspace updates all of the time.
These improvements mean customers are giving us better and better feedback, and that supports higher prices over time. Secondly, we can be much more disciplined in our price realization. This will be delivered through the transformation of our sales approach and a more empowered and confident sales organization, and you'll hear more about that from Ron tomorrow. And longer term, we'll be increasingly moving to a usage-based pricing model. This gives us real-time insight into how our customers are consuming our data and products, and allows us to charge in line with that and upsell. So overall, I would say we're getting smarter with our pricing approach. The third area of growth is from new products. Much of what we've achieved over the last three years has been about fixing the basics and running an under-managed business better.
What you'll see going forward is the benefit of the investments that we're making in new product. It takes time to build a product pipeline, but we're starting to see a real rhythm of innovation and collaboration with customers. This will deliver new applications and enhancements to market with increasing regularity. Today, that's most evident in enterprise data. But across the rest of Data and Analytics, as well as Capital Markets and Post Trade, there's a lot in the pipeline, and you'll hear a lot more about that from the teams tomorrow. And finally, there's geographic expansion. We're already doing this in LCH, for example, with the addition of new members to our clearing services in APAC. And in Tradeweb, the acquisition of Yieldb roker connects the Australian and New Zealand markets with Tradeweb's global network. In Data and Analytics, this wasn't an initial focus.
We wanted to fix our existing footprint and portfolio first. But with that work done, we're now well-placed to tap into geographic growth. As David mentioned, we're also beginning to expand into new asset classes, like private markets and digital assets. The Microsoft partnership increases the potential for every one of these levers and enables new and adjacent market opportunities. The building blocks on this slide are why we can deliver accelerated growth. We've got teams lined up against each one of these levers, and we're putting them already, and that's why we're confident in our delivery. Turning to cost. I show you a cost bridge like this in every results presentation, with investment for growth and efficiency well-balanced, and you can continue to expect it to look like this in the future. Let me talk you through that.
Now, as I've said before, people and technology make up over 75% of our cost base, and naturally, there'll be an inflationary impact. Outside of this, we'll continue to deliver efficiencies and invest for growth. Investment for growth will drive incremental revenue opportunities, some of which should be delivered fairly quickly, such as Tradeweb. Others take a little longer, such as the investment in some of our early-stage acquisitions. On the efficiency side, we've enjoyed the tailwind of significant cost synergies from the Refinitiv integration, and that will benefit us for another year. But that's not the end of the opportunity. Many aspects of our broader transformation program are building a more efficient and scalable platform. Taken together, costs will grow slower than revenues, enhancing our margin. Our EBITDA margin was 48% in 2022, and we're confident of improving that over time.
If I unpack that by division, our scaled capital markets and post-trade businesses sit at 52%, and that's largely in line with industry averages. The real opportunity, as you know, lies in data and analytics, where we benchmark below our peers, and this reflects legacy systems, product duplication, and process complexity, all stemming from historic underinvestment. Our existing integration and transformation programs are addressing these issues, but there's more to go. We're on a multi-year journey to create a genuinely scalable platform, and one which also improves the service we provide to customers, and you'll hear more about that in the transformation breakout tomorrow. At its heart, the transformation program is about end-to-end process and product simplification, and we know we can do this 'cause we've done a lot of similar work as part of the Refinitiv integration.
But just to give you a flavor of what we're working on, data and content transformation is just one of our many programs underway. We're modernizing our data sourcing and ingestion. This will result in higher accuracy and speed, and coverage beyond the 90 million instruments we cover today, as well as the wider provision of unstructured, complex data. We're modernizing our technology infrastructure. We're implementing a software-defined network and migrating physical infrastructure to the cloud. This improves our resilience, automation, and product development capabilities, making our tech stack much more agile for our evolving business. We're building an e-commerce platform and digitize customer service capabilities. Our top 250 customers account for 55% of our revenues. This platform will serve a good proportion of the remainder of the 40,000 or so customers, which don't always require the high-touch human interaction that they get today.
But it'll also make it easier for small customers to self-serve on our platform. Our EBITDA margin improvement won't be linear, but as I said, we're confident that it will improve over time. Moving to CapEx. We've been investing heavily in our business, and the level of spend has been ahead of our peers. There's a few reasons for this. First, when we acquired Refinitiv, we were aware there was historic underinvestment in the business that would require addressing, and we're already seeing the benefits of these investments coming through in our revenue. But there's more to come here. Secondly, we're integrating these two businesses from the bottom up and delivering sizable cost and revenue synergies, which comes with a cost to achieve over a five-year period. And lastly, we've been investing in new capabilities to drive future growth.
Looking ahead, we expect 2024 to have a similar level of capital intensity at 11%-12%. Beyond this, the capital intensity will decline over time to a high single-digit percentage of revenue, even as we continue to invest for growth. On the previous slide, I talked about the CapEx outlay to integrate LSEG and Refinitiv and deliver the cost and revenue synergies. We're over halfway through the total combined cash spend relating to the integration. We're a highly cash-generative business, and as this rate of integration spend declines sharply in 2025, the final year of the integration, this will improve even further. Over the medium term, our cumulative free cash flow will exceed net income.
The strong cash generation allows us to have a balanced capital allocation framework, with capacity for organic investment in growth, to continue our progressive dividend policy, to target M&A where it adds value, and where available, to return excess capital to shareholders proactively. Our M&A focus will continue to be on acquisitions that enhance LSEG's offering through new technology capabilities or data, and are value accretive for the group. Value accretion needs to be measured over different periods. The early-stage businesses that we've acquired over the last couple of years have longer-dated returns but have huge potential. More established businesses should pay back more quickly. Other important considerations for us are, first, scalability. We look at services and products that can be scaled across the group through our nearly 3,000-person sales force and our global network of customer relationships.
Secondly, opportunity cost, the cash and time to develop these in-house versus acquiring the capabilities. And finally, structure. We ensure our deals are structured appropriately to tie maximum consideration to stretching performance and deliver value accretion for the group. From a strategic perspective, we scan for opportunities that fulfill one or more goals for us. That could be building out functionality in an existing offering, like TORA's order and execution management capability. We also look for opportunities that expand our product offering, like GDC, which builds out our digital identity verification business. And then there are acquisitions which add new products or markets to our customer proposition, which is where Acadia fits in. MayStreet does all three of these things from a strategic perspective. Today, we announced a simplification to our dividend policy.
Our old policy reflected the pre-Refinitiv business that was more exposed to transaction volumes, which made it a bit harder to predict financial performance for the year. Now, our revenues are largely recurring and more visible as a result. The policy doesn't change the expected payout. The coverage ratio remains at 2.5-3 times. The interim dividend will now be set as one-third of the expected full-year dividend, giving shareholders more consistency between interim and final dividends from year to year. Our dividend policy remains progressive, building on our notable track record. We continue to be active in returning excess capital to shareholders. We've returned nearly 4% of our equity to shareholders in the last 15 months through buybacks. Today, we announced our plan to return a further GBP one billion via share buybacks in 2024.
Testament to our continued strong cash generation, and we'll provide more detail on the structure with the 2023 prelims. From 2024, we'll be revising our reporting structure to align divisional disclosures with management reporting lines. This primarily impacts the data and analytics business that we report today. For the new data and analytics perimeter, revenues will be grouped by product types under three business lines: workflows, data and feeds, and analytics. This grouping allows for identification of the underlying trends in products and usage rather than trends in user groups and communities. Workflows will consolidate all of our user interface businesses, comprising trading and banking, plus the desktop activities previously reported within investment solutions and wealth. Data and feeds will consolidate all of our data businesses and comprise enterprise data, plus the data and feeds activities previously reported within investment solutions and wealth.
Analytics was previously reported within investment solutions. Benchmark and indices will be split out from investment solutions and be renamed FTSE Russell as a separate division. And similarly, customer and third-party risk will also become a standalone division and be renamed Risk Intelligence. There'll be no change to our capital markets or post-trade reporting, apart from the combination of non-cash collateral and net treasury income revenue lines. So to wrap up, we've built a strong track record of performance and delivered on the Refinitiv acquisition. We've announced a clear step up in our growth expectations, along with improving profitability and strong cash flow ahead. And we've signaled our intention to return GBP one billion via share buybacks in 2024. I'm really looking forward to catching up with you all later on. And with that, I'll pass back to David.
So I'm gonna close by just repeating our vision for LSEG tomorrow. And this really is what you will take away from LSEG, in fact, tomorrow.
The presentations and the breakouts will give you much deeper and broader insights into our transformation, our growth, and our partnerships. And I know the teams are looking forward to talking with you. So now, it is time for dinner in the Tapestry Room at The Ned. It is a 10-minute walk down Cheapside or one stop on the tube, for those so inclined, from St. Paul's to Bank. So we look forward to seeing you there. Thank you very much.