Information Builders Partners w/First Rate Investment Systems

Information Builders, a leader in Web business intelligence, and First Rate Investment Systems, provider of investment portfolio performance solutions for leading financial institutions, announced a strategic alliance focused on providing high-capacity, Web-based performance analysis for brokerage and defined contribution portfolio providers.

The companies are working together to offer a truly scalable and dynamic set of analysis tools that can handle hundreds of thousands of investment transactions required to report accurate, portfolio-specific performance analysis for retail and institutional investment clients.

WebFOCUS from Information Builders provides First Rate clients the ability to run the First Rate Performance suite of products on their database (RDBMS) of choice. WebFOCUS' middleware makes it possible for a custom solution to be created that integrates multiple databases of different types into a single end user solution. Also available with WebFOCUS is EDA, which can read data from almost any database so that First Rate Performance programs can access and store performance data on multiple RDBMS platforms based on the client's preference. This new solution allows investment managers to easily create and distribute detailed reports to investment institutions.

"We have experienced tremendous success working with Information Builders to quickly and easily accommodate the necessary information to compute performance from multiple data sources," David A. Stone, president of First Rate Investment Systems, said. "Their technology makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of portfolios to have performance processed daily and made available for review by clients over the Internet."

WebFOCUS allows First Rate Performance to run multiple processes across multiple servers to optimize the performance of the system. This load balancing breaks up accounts into several jobs and runs many of them at one time, instead of running one job after another. This significantly reduces the amount of time that clients must wait to process their account data.

"This partnership really provides financial institutions the most robust, reliable solution for customizable Web reporting," said Information Builders CEO Gerald Cohen. "This combined solution meets the demands placed on banks by customers, partners, and employees. The amount of analysis banks require is tremendous. The WebFOCUS First Rate solution surpasses those demands. Our combined list of innovative customers tells that story."

About Information Builders

Information Builders is a leader in Web business intelligence. Headquartered in New York, Information Builders helps companies and government organizations improve their mission-critical operations by transforming data into usable intelligence and delivering it through the Internet. With its market-leading WebFOCUS product, Information Builders boasts more than 9,000 global customer sites, including 93 of the Fortune 100, among its current customers. The company employs 2,000 professionals worldwide and generated revenues exceeding $300 million in 2000. For more information, go to www.informationbuilders.com.

About First Rate Investment Systems

First Rate Investment Systems is the developer and provider of portfolio analysis and performance measurement software for many of the largest financial institutions in the United States. Launched in 1991, the privately held, Texas-based firm has a staff with over 300 years of collective experience in the investment performance-measurement industry. The First Rate Performance suite of applications provides complete Web-based portfolio tracking and reporting solutions specific to the needs and workflow of institutions with large numbers of individual client portfolios. For more information about First Rate Investment Systems, visit www.firstrate.com.

Contact First Rate Investment Systems, Tisha Golangco, 972-660-1550 x108, tgolangco@firstrate.com or Information Builders, Jon Stotts, 917-339-5442, jon_Stotts@ibi.com.