MARKET DATA

Societe General has purchased a system from Asset Control for the management of instrument reference and market data supporting its capital markets operations. Asset Control's investment data supports mission-critical financial applications with data including instrument reference, corporate actions, counter party, client issuer, historic and real-time market data from vendors and in-house systems. The multi-sourced data is aggregated, validated, cleansed and consolidated into a "golden copy" set.

Lipper, a wholly owned subsidiary of Reuters and provider of mutual fund information and analysis, has acquired the operations of Capital Access International, which provides institutional investor profile information and bond ownership analysis to fixed-income professionals. Capital Access chairman and CEO David Farrington has been named executive vice president, institutional holdings at Lipper.

Standard & Poor's CUSIP Service Bureau will now provide users with a link for up-to-date valid CUSIP numbers for mutual funds and money funds, as well as unit investment trusts listed in Nasdaq's Mutual Fund Quotation Service. In addition, Standard & Poor's and Investortools announced a design change to the Standard & Poor's/Investortools Municipal Bond Indices. The criteria for deleting bonds from the Indices' population to exclude bonds no longer held in mutual funds priced by Standard & Poor's have been modified. The change aims to create an index portfolio that more closely mirrors the risk and performance characteristics of index users and users of portfolio/index analytics.