In early February, The Market Age, which is shortly to change its name to Independent Investment Research PLC, announced a landmark deal with a major global investment bank whereby the bank would outsource part of its short-term technical research and strategy origination to Pronet's analysis team. In a novel evolution of outsourcing, Pronet guarantees interactive, immediate access to its desk analysts for real-time response to questions like "where is the current rally likely to leave USD/JPY in the next 30 minutes?"

Pronet's research dissemination platform allows all trading and sales staff in the bank, globally, to see the response simultaneously and against a back-drop of a real-time graphic picture of the technical condition of the market.

Shane Smith, Group CEO, sees the benefit of the product to be three-fold. "First, our clients require timely, reliable intelligence and analysis to drive house positions as well as client advice. We are providing mainly short-term input, which most independent research firms shy away from. Second, establishing an in-house research team, plus associated technology, is prohibitively expensive, whereas our solution is very cost effective. And finally, we guarantee an element of exclusive access to the skills of our analysts by limiting the audience to three banks in total. This preserves our clients' competitive advantage."

Negotiations are already underway with a second bank out of the maximum possible three, and this second deal is expected to be announced soon.

In other recent developments, Pronet announced that its core service (Pronet FX) is to be distributed on Bloomberg; meanwhile Pronet has gone live at the start of March in an advisory collaboration with Forex Capital Markets LLC, the New York-based currency broker.