Top Banks Launch Joint Site for Corporate Clients

Computerworld - Seven of the world's leading investment banks last week announced plans to launch a joint financial information Web site for their institutional clients.
The site, TheMarkets.com, is expected to make it easier for corporate customers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to find equity research, market data and other investment information in one place. But customers won't be able to use the site to buy or sell stocks online, at least not initially, which may hinder customer adoption, analysts warned.
Big institutional investors, which typically have accounts with multiple investment banks, have grumbled about how they have had to jump around among different bank Web sites to locate and gather market information, said Don Callahan, a managing director at New York-based Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., one of the banks in the venture.
Using TheMarkets.com, customers should be able to get at this information more easily by going to a single, consolidated location, he added. The effort is akin to the kind of aggregation portal Citibank recently launched - MyCiti.com - that allows retail customers to view all their accounts from a variety of U.S. financial institutions.
But unlike the MyCiti.com site, which is available to Citibank and non-Citibank customers alike, TheMarkets.com will be available only to institutional clients of the participating banks, such as pension funds, asset managers and hedge funds.
Multex.com Inc. in New York will provide the infrastructure for the site, which will link investors to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Salomon Smith Barney Holdings Inc., Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown Inc. and UBS Warburg. The site is scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter.
Still, the inability to trade on the site could deter customers from using it, said Dana Stiffler, an analyst at Newton, Mass.-based Meridien Research Inc. "Until there's some kind of transactional capability, it's basically like putting a catalog online," she said.
Eventually, information-only sites and trading sites will converge, because it's logical for them to be linked and because customers will demand it, said Larry Tabb, an analyst at Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup.
According to executives at the participating investment banks, there will be no additional costs for clients to use the service. Callahan said the group is talking with other investment banks about joining the venture in the future.

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