Principia System Incorporates Markit Credit Default Swap Data For Comprehensive Credit Derivatives Lifecycle Management

Jersey City, New Jersey, 23 March 2005 - Principia Partners LLC, a leading technology provider of comprehensive front-to-back office solutions for managing highly complex, structured financial assets, liabilities and derivatives, announced today that it has integrated credit derivatives data from Markit Group Ltd. Markit is the world's first integrated daily pricing service for global credit derivatives, cash credit instruments and syndicated loan pricing. The incorporation of Markit's credit default swap data is a significant enhancement to Principia's automated credit derivatives trading and operations platform. Markit provides daily credit default swap composite and contributor level data on over 2,600 individual entities and tiers of debt, gathered from over 45 contributing organizations used to construct more than 13,000 credit curves by entity, tier, currency and documentation clause.

The Principia System's flexible analytic framework has enabled credit derivatives users to price and risk manage products using a variety of available market data. "Integration with Markit's data enables us to deliver a more robust, turnkey credit derivatives platform to a wider user base, helping us to provide a comprehensive solution to users who require third-party contributed data sources," states Dr. Douglas Long, Product Marketing Director at Principia Partners. Principia serves a wide range of customers in the insurance, fund management, banking and structured finance markets with its leading trade lifecycle management solutions for a broad host of financial instruments, ranging from vanilla to highly structured.

"Markit's broad asset coverage and reference data is a good fit with the Principia lifecycle management solutions," said Mark Hunt, Director of Product Development at Markit. " As customers increase their exposure to credit derivatives they will benefit from our partnership through enhanced STP, reduced operational costs and an improved regulatory environment and risk profile."

The integration of Markit's data further enhances Principia's commitment to delivering key market data for the broad array of asset classes that the system manages, which include credit derivatives, cash securities, ABS/MBS, and FX. The ability to provide accurate and consistent data is a major component of the company's mission to provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution that can flexibly serve multiple market segments.

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About Principia Partners

Founded by a group of finance and technology professionals, Principia Partners offers a fully integrated front to back office solution for management of financial assets, liabilities and derivatives. The Principia System covers fixed income (including ABS/MBS and GICs), interest rate, foreign exchange, credit and equity indexed products. The sub-ledger facilitates full compliance with both FAS 133 and IAS 39 accounting regulations. Principia's target market consists of capital markets groups requiring sophisticated and flexible processing capability on a robust, yet customizable platform. For more information about Principia, see www.principiapartners.com.

Principia Partners is headquartered at the Harborside Financial Center, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA with an office at 1 Cornhill in London, UK.

About Markit

Markit is the leading industry source for asset valuation data and services supporting independent price verification and risk management in global financial and energy markets. Founded in 2001, the company is an independent enterprise with which the world's leading financial institutions and energy traders work strategically to create price transparency. Today, Markit enjoys the sponsorship of 13 financial institutions who manage assets in excess of $10 trillion, and data contribution relationships with over 45 dealing firms. Markit has designed, launched and acquired over 20 financial data services, which are now used by over 300 institutions globally. Areas of product expertise and service include an independent valuation perspective on credit default swaps, syndicated loans and OTC derivatives (credit, equity, FX, rates, energy, power, metals and structured products), as well as dividend forecasting and index and ETF management. For more information about Markit, see www.markit.com