CLSA announces agreement with researchsummary to market investment research

CLSA confirms partnership with researchsummary.com Limited, the RIXML portal and application developer, to distribute global financial research utilising RIXML and PDF technology

LONDON October 29 2002 - CLSA Ltd. announced today a decision to join forces with researchsummary.com Limited to make its PDF (portable document format) and RIXML (Research Information eXchange Mark-up Language)-enabled research available via the reseseachsummary.com portal service, joining firms like Bear Stearns, ING Financial Markets, HSBC and WestLB Panmure.

The service will enable the firm to strengthen its relationship with buy-side customers and to tailor investment research to meet individual client needs.

Currently, most firms that publish investment research are using their own costly proprietary solutions to distribute the information, often via limited MS Word templates, valuation databases and electronic PDF distribution.

Increasingly, sell-side firms are now producing research in RIXML format, in a drive to reduce waste and provide their analysts and compliance and publishing staff with the means to create, update and publish compliant investment research to the investment consumer.
                                                                            
Current pioneers in the RIXML space are Bear Stearns, CLSA and UBS Warburg. The implementation of new regulations like NASD 2711, however, will see the acceleration across the investment industry of RIXML-based research production over the next year.
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This new industry-wide standard allows sell-side firms to convert, 'unlock' and process and the financial information typically trapped in a research document using applications like researchsummary's NavigateDepth - anything from Earnings Per Share, Dividend Per Share and Recommendation and a host of other tables, charts and graphs.

Researchsummary's NavigateDepth product enables the research consumer to interrogate aggregated research databases in a format they want, customised how they want and through a channel they want. The system can 'co-present' research from internal and external sources, in multiple formats (Word, PDF, RIXML, Excel, Video, Audio).

RIXML tagging built into NavigateDepth makes investment research more manageable, creating 'research components' to help categorise, store and better interrogate the documents. Interrogation is via Researchsummary Professional, a user interface to search for and extract the research required, or directly through systems developed by firms.

Says Jolyon Montague, Head of Research Technology, CLSA Ltd: "We are very excited about joining the researchsummary.com service, which will bring huge benefit to our clients. Information overload is the dread of the industry, with some 100,000 research notes published by the industry every week. By working with researchsummary we are responding to our clients who demand better and more effective ways to manage information."

Says John Thorne, CEO, researchsummary: "We are very pleased with the success of the site which, with the addition of research from CLSA, now boasts a dozen institutions. Being XML-enabled the service can help accelerate the usage of RIXML in the industry by providing a platform for the buyside to make use of the new schema to search and extract the research required."

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About CLSA (www.clsa.com)

CLSA Emerging Markets is widely recognised as a leader in brokerage and investment banking services. Headquartered in Hong Kong and actively supported by over 650 staff globally, our client-focused operation is complemented by our comprehensive research. This research has long been accepted as the benchmark for excellence amongst institutional investors, brokers and investment banks throughout emerging markets.
CLSA success is built upon the quality, depth and strategic outlook of our research. Year after year, independent surveys show that institutional investors consider CLSA research to be among the best in Asia. The accolades, however, are by no means restricted to CLSA research product. Our equity capital markets team has gained market leadership in Greater China deals, while our corporate advisory team has been awarded mandates in many markets across a variety of sectors.

About researchsummary.com (www.researchsummary.com)
Researchsummary.com, founded in 1999, operates at the cutting-edge of the financial technology sector, developing innovative web-based research and deep-search XML technologies for the investment research market.

The company's suite of products empowers industry professionals to manage the vast amounts of investment information available on the web, utilising research and deep-search technologies to tailor information retrieval to individual requirements. Researchsummary develops XML-enabled software as a base to help investment banks, fund managers and brokerages apply and leverage technology advances in the increasingly competitive global investment research marketplace. For additional information about researchsummary.com, please visit the firm's web site at www.researchsummary.com.

About RIXML.org and RIXML (www.rixml.org)
Developed by the buy- and sell-side global market leaders that make up RIXML.org, RIXML is an open standard for the electronic exchange of investment research. The RIXML standard will provide a structure for classifying research in a way that will enable consumers of research to define specific sorting, filtering, and personalization criteria across all research publishers.
RIXML uses XML to tag any piece of research content, in any form or media, with enough meta-data information for the consumer to search, sort and filter through publisher research and quickly provide highly relevant information to their decision makers. The creation of RIXML as a common language provides a low-cost way to vastly improve the value of broker investment research.
Version 2.0 was published in June 2002 and expands its original equity research focus to include corporate fixed-income research and adds an events group and calendar.

NASD Rule 2711 (www.nasd.com)
Research Analysts and Research Reports: NASD Rule 2711 is intended to address potential conflicts of interest in the issuance of research reports by members, improve the objectivity of research, and provide investors with more useful and reliable information when making investment decisions.