Gary Wright, Managing Director of CityCompass and creator of the unique business benchmarking process said "When CityCompass organised the first benchmarking of Corporate Action systems in 2003 there was of twenty software vendors offered participation that has now consolidated down to the six systems who achieved the benchmark in 2004 and have been proven to have real capabilities by the benchmark process. It was stated in the first report that consolidation was expected and this has now clearly happened and we believe that the benchmarking has been important in identifying which vendors really have live systems and real functionality. It will be interesting to see if there any new vendors in the market that are able to meet the vigorous benchmark process. As in previous years we will be offering participation to all Corporate Action and Data vendors and hope they all will agree to be examined. The 2005 B.I.S.S. Benchmarking will now move further towards identifying the market leader in each category of Custody, Asset Management and Broker Dealers. A clear winner will be announced at the benchmarking event in June 2005 based on the scoring of the industry user panel and the independent product review by the analyst and the bar will be raised for the systems to achieve the 2005 benchmarks."
Wright further stated "The Corporate Action industry user panel is being extended to representatives from other international markets. The Market Data category of benchmarks for systems and services will be further enhanced to identify the services and systems that are actually achieving market requirements and will cover many different forms of offerings. We anticipate the benchmark report to cover electronic Proxy Voting and Class Actions as well as industry issues around the standardisation of primary market data. CityCompass will be announcing further details of the report and benchmarking in January along with our new partners involved in the benchmarking event"
