London Stock Exchange Group has appointed Amit Zavery, president, chief product officer and chief operating officer of ServiceNow, as a non-executive director, adding a career enterprise software operator to a board overseeing the group's long transition from exchange owner into a data and analytics business.
Zavery joins the board in December and will sit on the risk committee, the remuneration committee and the nomination committee. The group disclosed the appointment under the United Kingdom listing rules, which require a listed company to set out the relevant details of a new director on appointment.
The choice says something about where the group believes its competition now sits. London Stock Exchange Group still runs the exchange that gives it its name, but the larger part of the business is the data, analytics and workflow operation built out of its acquisition of Refinitiv, and that business competes less with other exchanges than with enterprise software vendors. Zavery has spent his entire career on the other side of that boundary.
At ServiceNow he holds a combined product and operating remit, responsible for the direction of a workflow automation platform used by large corporations and government departments to coordinate technology, customer and employee processes. He joined the company in 2024.
Before that he spent five years at Google Cloud as vice president and general manager, where he led the platform business, the layer on which customers build and run their own applications. He began his career at Oracle and stayed for twenty five years, rising to run the company's cloud platform and middleware products through the period in which that business moved from licensed software installed by customers to services delivered over the internet.
That sequence matters for a board weighing how quickly to move market data and analytics products onto cloud infrastructure, and what it costs to get the migration wrong. Zavery has lived through the same shift twice, once at a company defending an installed base and once at a company attacking one.
The appointment also tidies a governance point. Zavery is a non-executive director of Broadridge Financial Solutions, the investor communications and technology provider, and is stepping down from that board in November, before he takes up the London Stock Exchange Group seat. Broadridge serves many of the same banks, brokers and asset managers that buy the group's data products, and the orderly sequencing avoids holding both seats at once.
Non-executive appointments of this kind rarely move a share price on the day they are announced, and this one is unlikely to be an exception. Their effect shows up later, in which questions get asked in a committee room when a large technology programme runs behind schedule, and in whether anyone at the table has run one before.
