Reuters America Holdings PLC has signed up PaineWebber Inc. for an equities market information service developed to succeed Reuters' old Quotron service.
Eleven thousand PaineWebber brokers are to be on-line with Reuters Plus by next April, the brokerage firm said.
Six hundred PaineWebber brokers in 15 locations have been testing Reuters Plus since November. Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. has also been testing the service.
At PaineWebber it will eventually supplant a host of other services, most notably Bloomberg's. Among the others are Quotron, which 40,000 of Reuters' 55,000 stock information customers in this country use. Reuters bought Quotron Market Data Services from Citicorp in 1994.
Reuters Plus combines content garnered from the Internet with real-time price information from the major international exchanges, historical price data on U.S. stocks, and analysis. The information will be fed to individual users over corporate intranets.
Reuters is counting on the new service to increase its North American market share.
"We want to establish a beachhead in the United States equities market," said Davis Gaynes, executive vice president at Reuters in New York.
That share was 24% in 1996, according to Dresdner Kleinwort Benson in London, the investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank. It projects a rise to 31% in 2002, largely because of Reuters Plus.
John Furlong, senior vice president and director of private client group systems at PaineWebber in Weehawken, N.J., said there is "no comparison" between the new service and Quotron. Reuters Plus "is a vastly improved product in stability, ease of use, functionality, and flexibility," he said.
Lawrence Tabb, a senior research analyst at Tower Group, said Reuters Plus can be tailored more than competitive products to individuals' needs.
"It spans trading to brokerage to more analytical functions to portfolio management," he noted.
The service is available at two levels of sophistication. Level 1 includes real-time quotes, intraday news, and charts and stocks. Level 2 includes research and analysis, historical information, and access to the Web and Edgar filings.
Reuters Plus is available only in the United States. Reuters Securities 3000, an international equities service, will still be offered here and abroad.
