LSEG Just Paid 24x EBITDA for a $145M Credit-Data Asset — and SPGI and Moody's Now Have to Match It

The £3.5B price tag is the talking point; the multiple is the story. Octus is expected to generate ~$145M of EBITDA in 2026 and ~$200M in 2027, per Reuters sources. At the announced £3.5B consideration, LSEG is paying roughly 24x 2026E EBITDA and 17.5x 2027E — well above the 12–14x EV/sales range that has governed recent financial-data transactions. Octus's growth profile justifies the premium: the platform is built on a high-retention subscription model with double-digit revenue growth, ~$250M of assumed revenue, and ~25% growth, implying ~$313M in 2027.

For Permira, the math is brutal in the other direction. The firm bought Octus (then Reorg) from Warburg Pincus in August 2022 at a $1.3B valuation. A £3.5B exit — even after Permira's rebranding and product investment over2022–2026 — represents roughly 2.7x money in four years, an IRR in the high-20s% range. Permira bought low, in a private-credit winter; exited high, at the peak of a private-credit AUM cycle. That timing is the lesson for the next data-asset owner.

Twelve months before the LSEG offer, S&P Global announced its own private-markets data move. On Oct. 15, 2025, SPGI agreed to buy With Intelligence from Motive Partners for $1.8 billion. The target carried ~$130M of expected 2025 revenue with high-teens organic annual contract value growth — implying a 13.8x EV/sales multiple on day one. The deal closed Nov. 25, 2025, and SPGI began folding the LP/GP coverage into Capital IQ Pro during2026. In private-markets intelligence, SPGI got there first. It also paid the price.

SPGI's share price has fallen roughly 22% from its 2025 high — Morningstar notes the stock is now trading 22% below its $570 fair value estimate and that the underperformance is \"dramatic\" relative to the broader market. The selloff is not a fundamentals story. Ratings segment revenue grew 8% in FY 2025 to $4.72B with a 64% operating margin. It is an AI-disruption story: investors are repricing the assumption that human-curated data and ratings carry pricing power in an AI world. SPGI's FY 2025 EBITDA margin of 50% on $15.3B of revenue is a long way from zero — but the market has moved first on the worry.

Moody's and SPGI sell ratings. Octus sells something different — first-to-market deal intelligence, covenant analytics, and distressed-debt data on the leveraged-finance and private-credit markets that the rating agencies cover from the top down but never instrumented deal-by-deal. The platform covers 3,300+ broadly syndicated loan and high-yield issuers, 170+ benchmarked covenant fields, more than 15,000 private-credit deals, and over 2,500 issuers across performing U.S. and European high-yield and leveraged loans. Permira scaled this asset to 35,000 professionals served, 300 analysts and journalists, and roughly 50,000 intelligence articles published annually — a content moat that compounds with every distressed exchange and every private-credit amendment.

LSEG had the front-end credit footprint already. Tradeweb — majority-owned through Refinitiv — operates electronic marketplaces for credit and rates; LSEG LPC dominates syndicated-loan reporting; LSEG Workspace carries pricing for over 2.7 million fixed-income securities; SDC Platinum captures deal flow. What LSEG did not have was the distressed-deal covenant depth and the buy-side private-credit origination coverage that Octus built under Permira's ownership. The Octus acquisition closes the only meaningful gap in LSEG's front-to-end credit-data franchise.

Short term — days to quarters — the trade is asymmetric. LSEG's confirmation language is a soft underwrite: management signalled \"immediately accretive\" growth without committing to specific synergies. If Octus closes at the £3.5B headline price, the deal is 14x EV/sales on $250M of 2026 revenue and 17.5x 2027E EBITDA. That is a premium to LSEG's own 5.2x EV/sales — value-accretive in a DCF, multiple-dilutive on a comps basis. The market will likely react to the headline price first and the value-second mechanics later. SPGI and Moody's shares are the second leg of the trade: any meaningful defensive acquisition by either name has to come at a comparable multiple to Octus, validating that the SPGI AI-disruption selloff is over-extended.

Long term — one to three years — the structural story is consolidation, not pricing. Private-credit AUM is forecast to grow from $2T in 2026 to $3.4T by 2030 in PwC's base case, with 67% of surveyed managers citing greater competition as the primary 2026 performance driver. That competition drives demand for differentiated data on the buy side and sharper origination on the supply side — exactly what Octus sells. The four survivors — LSEG, SPGI, Moody's, and MSCI — now hold the only institutional-scale credit-data franchises. Pricing power shifts from the buyers (LPs and GPs) to the toll-takers, with each acquiring distinct sub-niches: LSEG with Octus and Tradeweb, SPGI with With Intelligence and RatingsXpress, Moody's with its analytics subscription growth.