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TheMarkets.com Broadens Relationships with Research Contributors

Research aggregation platform accepts direct feeds from brokers that are not owners.

In a strategy shift, TheMarkets.com is now accepting research and earnings estimates content directly from brokers and independent research firms, according to an announcement earlier this week.

Previously the firm obtained these research feeds from third parties such as Reuters and redistributed them to its buy-side customer base.

On Monday, the New-York based research aggregation platform said it had formed a Contributor Relations and Operations Division. The division will develop and manage relationships with brokers and independent research providers outside of its owners and deliver their research and estimates directly to more than 2,000 buy-side clients in 46 countries. At the request of many of these contributors, TheMarkets.com is now accepting data feeds directly form contributors and offering them additional services, including user-level entitlements control.

At the same time, the company announced the hiring of Peter Epstein to the position of Head of Contributor Relations, North America. Epstein was previously responsible for building broker relations at Multex, which was acquired in 2003 by Reuters. Epstein then led the effort at Reuters America where he was most recently VP and head of broker relations. In his new role, Epstein is charged with building and managing the company's relationships with North America-based brokers and independent research providers and further expanding the contributor relations team headquartered in New York.

Founded in 2000, TheMarkets.com was initially formed by eleven investment bank/owners (Banc of America, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Kleinwort, Goldman Sachs Group, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS Investment Bank) and Reuters (now Thomson Reuters), to distribute their content including full research reports and earnings estimate models to buy-side institutions. But it was not limited to its owners' content.

In 2003, TheMarkets.com began distributing research from other brokers that are not owners. But the company had traditionally provided access to those hundreds of brokers vis a vis a distribution agreement with a third party, says Amy Kadomatsu, chief product officer at TheMarkets.com.

With demand growing from clients as well as other brokers, "We wanted to establish direct relationships with the other brokers who were not owners of TheMarkets.com," explains Kadomatsu.

By forming a separate division, the company will be reaching out to the full gamut of brokers ranging from full service firms to the regional dealers. "We are very interested in having relationships with all of them," says Kadomatsu, noting that in order to meet client demand, the research aggregator wants to give them access to both global as well as regional players and specialty shops that focus on a particular industry.

As a result of going direct to contributors, TheMarkets.com expects to deliver more and unique types of content, according to a company spokesperson. For example, today the company offers earnings models in Excel format, tagged as such, with formulas and assumptions built in, an offering not available on other aggregation platforms, says the spokesperson. Direct contributors will be able to deliver content in that format, says the spokesman. With the new strategy, TheMarkets.com plans to leverage some of the technologies and processes it created, such as enabling contributors to control entitlements at the user level. Brokers could use these entitlement controls to deliver premium content, says the spokesperson. While the entire industry is moving in this direction, TheMarkets.com was a pioneer in this area and has a leg up in terms of managing this, claims the spokeswoman.

Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio

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