By the end of the year, seven investment banks will launch a portal through which clients have access to all their equity research, aggregated on a single website, to be called themarkets.com. Each will publish all their equity research in one place and the site will offer 'much more than research', says one source.

After long discussions with fund managers, the seven heavyweights - Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, Merrill Lynch, Schroder Salomon Smith Barney, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Banc Alex Brown and UBS Warburg - formed a new company to manage the distribution of research, which was becoming increasingly fragmented with the advent of the internet.