Wall Street Takes to the Internet for Institutional Clients

With Wall Street officially onboard the Internet, it figures that a business-to-business Web site would be next on its "to do" list.

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The Street's power brokers -- Citigroup's (C) Salomon Smith Barney unit, Goldman Sachs (GS), Merrill Lynch (MER) and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (MWD) -- on Tuesday announced plans for a joint Web site aimed at institutional investors looking for information on stock offerings. Credit Suisse First Boston, UBS Warburg and Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown also will be part of the site, called TheMarkets.com.

The site's pull will be the deal calendars contributed to by the brokers, which constitute Wall Street's largest underwriters. Consolidating these deal calendars, which include upcoming initial public offerings and offerings for companies already public, will cut down on the number of Web sites that institutional clients have to visit, explained Don Callahan, managing director of Equity.com at Morgan Stanley.

While each bank has its own Web site that provides information about deals, such as dates for presentations to potential investors before IPOs, institutions don't like the time it takes to go to each site to search out the information. The same is true for equity research.

All of this leaves one question: How much did the firms pay for domain name, TheMarkets.com? Morgan Stanley is just one of the firms keeping mum on that subject.

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