The race is on to win the hearts and minds, or at least the accounts, of the fund management industry. Third-party providers of financial information and research are battling to come up with added value in their offerings that clinches the deal. While generic financial information packages have been around for some time, the buyside is now looking for customised innovative solutions that help make investment decisions.

Geoff Campbell, research manager at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (MLIM), says: 'As fund managers we want to be able to see every single piece of information on a stock. But it has to be organised and focused. We need to organise the data by teams so we can see what a certain team is saying. We also need to be able to get at information that has been tagged with different symbols.'