ROBERT FRANCES GROUP (RFG) LAUNCHES "FI*share" COLLABORATION AND ADVISORY SERVICE FOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS Innovative Service Designed to Reduce Operating Costs and "Time to Success"

Robert Frances Group (RFG; www.rfgonline.com), a leading provider of business advisory services to information technology (IT) executives, announced today the public launch of "FI*share" (http://www.fishare.com), a new advisory service for the financial industry. The new service enables financial institutions to lower costs and improve time to market for business critical, non-competitive and non-differentiated systems upon which such institutions rely. FI*share will help member financial institutions lower their infrastructure costs so that scarce resources can be diverted to support other mission-critical systems and initiatives.

FI*share offers a simple but compelling value proposition – enterprises that share the cost and risk associated with developing non-differentiating systems will have a competitive advantage over those who don't," said Dr. Adrian Bowles, President of FI*share and RFG Principal Research Fellow. "Learning to share takes work, but the results are demonstrably worth the effort," added Bowles, developer of the original concepts underlying FI*share, a joint venture with RFG.

Peer-to-Peer Collaboration, Free to Qualified Financial Institutions:
FI*share will include a collaborative online portal, called "Sherpa," a destination Web site where decision-makers at financial institutions can access archived research, help drive the FI*share research agenda, and participate in briefings and forums. Access to Sherpa will be offered at no charge to qualified financial institutions.

"We chose the name 'Sherpa' to convey our mission and our approach. We get our clients to the top, and they get the credit," FI*share's Bowles said. "Sherpa was conceived to satisfy growing requests from forward-thinking research and consulting clients who wanted to share and leverage the fruits of such engagements"

World-Class Knowledge and Expertise:
In addition to input from Sherpa participants, RFG and FI*share have assembled a world-class FI*share User Advisory Board to guide the venture's overall agenda and strategies. The Board currently includes IT executives from J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. Lehman Brothers, Inc., Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co., and XL Global Services, Inc.

Working closely with Dr. Bowles and the FI*share User Advisory Board will be RFG Principal Research Fellow Evan Bauer. Bauer was most recently Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the investment banking division of Credit Suisse First Boston (CSFB) and a senior IT executive at Bankers Trust. "Financial institutions must frequently find ways to meet business and technology requirements that arise from multiple sources, even though doing so may add little to no competitive value," Bauer said. "FI*share helps member firms identify and classify such requirements, then collaborate to satisfy them in the most cost-effective manner possible," Bauer added.

Other senior RFG industry analysts and consultants will also be active participants in FI*share, providing both strategic assistance and tactical contributions, including "hands-on" research and consulting for FI*share member companies. Unlike many other IT advisory services, RFG focuses on "the business of IT," and serves a clientele overwhelmingly made up of Global 2000 enterprise IT executives, one-third of whom are employed by financial institutions. By working closely and interactively with such decision-makers, RFG has developed extensive expertise in helping such executives deal effectively with their most frequent and chronic "pain points." (More information about Bauer, Bowles, and other RFG analysts can be found at http://www.rfgonline.com/analysts.html)

"Financial firms are experiencing a convergence of three forces that will greatly affect their very futures – increased regulatory demands, reduced revenues and profits, and stagnant and declining stock prices," said Cal Braunstein, RFG Chairman/CEO and Executive Director of Research. "To improve their bottom lines, financial institutions will have to find ways to do more with less, and more specifically, to better leverage IT investments to drive revenues and cut costs."

RFG and FI*share Principals Featured at IMN Forum in New York:
FI*share had its formal public debut in February, at an event held in New York City in association with the Information Management Network (http://www.imn.org/a437). The event was a conference on "The Business Side of Storage," with a particular focus on Archiving, New Storage Technologies, Regulatory Compliance, and other trends specifically affecting the financial industry. The event included roundtables and panels featuring users and industry experts from FI*share, RFG, and elsewhere, as well as user case studies. (For information on this or future events featuring FI*share principals, please visit http://www.fishare.com or contact Gary MacFadden via e-mail at mailto:gmacfadden@rfgonline.com.

Sherpa resources will be available to qualified financial institutions in late March 2003. Initial resources will include original research and research culled from RFG's extensive research archive. The FI*share Web site (http://www.fishare.com) will also include links to vendor sites servicing the financial community. Vendors can send e-mail to info@fishare.com for more information on how to participate.

About FI*share
FI*share is a unique collaborative and advisory service for decision-makers at financial institutions. FI*share enables such institutions to collaborate on and share resources of the non-competitive, non-differentiated information technology (IT) and business systems on which such institutions rely. Such systems often represent the majority of IT investments made by financial institutions, yet are generally invisible to clients of such firms.

A key feature of FI*share is Sherpa, a vendor-sponsored, Web-based collaboration portal site for online collaboration and discussion, free to qualified financial institution executives. FI*share is a joint venture between Dr. Adrian Bowles, a renowned expert in inter-firm collaboration methodologies, and Robert Frances Group (RFG), business advisors to IT executives. More information is available by contacting Gary MacFadden via telephone at (US) +203/291-6900, ext. 103, or via e-mail mailto:info@rfgonline.com, or at http://www.fishare.com on the World Wide Web.

About Robert Frances Group (RFG)
Robert Frances Group (RFG) is a leading source for unbiased technology research focused on the needs and concerns of enterprise users. With an emphasis on providing practical, business-oriented advice, RFG research and advice focuses on the critical issues users face deploying leading-edge technologies. These include contract review, return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis, vendor viability, standards, strategies, organizational structures, regulatory requirements and compliance, technology infrastructure, policies and procedures, and vendor relationship management. More information is available by contacting RFG via telephone at (US) +203/291-6900, by fax at (US) +203/291-6906 or via e-mail at info@rfgonline.com.