TheMarkets.com and Leading Investment Banks Announce Launch of MeritMark

NEW YORK, May 23 /PRNewswire/ -- TheMarkets.com and twelve of Wall Street's largest investment banks today announced the launch of MeritMark, a full-service broker research evaluation program. These leading global banks include: Banc of America Securities, Bear Stearns, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Investment Bank.

MeritMark was created to collect buy-side feedback on broker research personnel and services in a standardized format. MeritMark includes a streamlined system to collect, analyze, and report broker evaluations. Or, for buy-side firms using another system to collect evaluation data, MeritMark offers to report it direct to the brokers that are part of the program.

"A full-service program, MeritMark presents a solution to the shared interests of the buy- and sell-sides in improving broker evaluation," said Amy Kadomatsu, Senior Vice President of TheMarkets.com. "MeritMark offers buy-side firms a simple, straightforward way to communicate with their brokers about what they value-ultimately resulting in research service and coverage better aligned with their needs."

Key advantages of MeritMark to the buy-side are: -- Adding efficiency to the research evaluation process, through a consolidated feedback mechanism -- Automatic tallying of broker individual and service evaluations across the firm to support resource allocation -- Directly impacting the broker research products and services delivered

"MeritMark is a first step in our initiative to improve the broker evaluation process and expand participation in it," said Thomas Bianco, Managing Director at Merrill Lynch. "We believe that MeritMark represents a mutually beneficial solution to our goals and those of our clients, and we're poised to respond to what we hear as a result. We look forward to offering this program to our clients as an opportunity to partner with us in maximizing the value of our relationships."

MeritMark is not the first product developed by TheMarkets.com for a consortium of sell-side firms. In 2001, TheMarkets.com launched its flagship product of the same name, a global research and estimates platform for institutional investors. "Since our founding, we have positioned ourselves at the nexus of the sell-side's services and the buy-side's needs," said David Eisner, CEO and President of TheMarkets.com. "Adding MeritMark to our product suite offers us another opportunity to give our-and the brokers'-clients a way to achieve greater efficiencies in their broker-related workflows. We are excited to introduce MeritMark, which like TheMarkets.com, will offer a unique way to leverage the benefits of broker relationships," Eisner said.

About TheMarkets.com

TheMarkets.com delivers unprecedented access to the premier real-time research, earnings models, estimates, and full website content and quantitative tools of its eleven contributing Member Firms, plus U.S. equity deal coverage and research from hundreds of global contributors. TheMarkets.com is owned by: Banc of America Securities, LLC , Citigroup , Credit Suisse , Deutsche Bank , Dresdner Kleinwort, part of Dresdner Bank AG and a member of the Allianz Group , The Goldman Sachs Group , JPMorgan Chase , Lehman Brothers , Merrill Lynch , Morgan Stanley , UBS Investment Bank , and Reuters , the global information company, which provides technological infrastructure, web-hosting services, and certain proprietary content.

Contact: Beth Kite TheMarkets.com +1.212.812.4633 bkite@themarkets.com