DrKW Announces Launch of Prime Brokerage Capability.

Business Editors

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is pleased to announce its Prime Brokerage service is now fully functioning, offering a full range of financing and support services to hedge funds and alternative investment funds, under the leadership of Managing Director, Martin Keller.

The Prime Brokerage team(a) has spent the last year building a proprietary system and dedicated support infrastructure for Prime Brokerage at DrKW. As a result, DrKW's Prime Brokerage service went live in April and now boasts an expanding portfolio of money managers, primarily hedge fund, clients.

The core package of services provided by DrKW's Prime Brokerage unit includes: margin lending/portfolio financing; securities lending; custody services; account risk/margin management; execution and consolidated reporting; and cross margining between cash equity or stock lending positions and synthetic equity products such as Contracts for Differences and Equity Swaps. These services can be accessed via http://primebrokerage.drkw.com.

In addition to financing and securities lending for hedge funds, DrKW also offers custody and support services such as processing of corporate actions and dividends, facilitating cash payments and other back office functions. DrKW's front-end team is supported by dedicated operations, risk management and IT resources to enable this full service capability.

DrKW believes its Prime Brokerage service is further differentiated from competitors by several factors:

- A strong balance sheet and financing capability

- A solid Principal and Agency Lending pool

- State-of-the-art technology systems across order routing, trade tracking, custody and settlement (front to back end)

- Sophisticated and flexible leverage models

Martin Keller, Head of Prime Brokerage at DrKW, comments, "I am tremendously excited by our platform and the market opportunities ahead of us. The indications are that the growth in alternative investment and hedge funds has only just started in Europe. I believe we are well positioned to be a leading Prime Brokerage player servicing this constituency in the next three years. "

The Prime Brokerage unit at DrKW now sits with other equity financing and fixed income repo teams in the Principal Trading unit reporting to Ulf Bacher and Walter Kraushaar. The Principal Trading unit is placed within Short Term Products and Treasury headed by Eric Pohl, within its Capital Markets business line.

Eric Pohl, also deputy head of Capital Markets, comments, "With our Prime Brokerage unit fully established and the recent arrival of our Agency Lending team, we now have all the necessary blocks in place to drive forward a total securities finance capability across equity and fixed income products and to realize our ambitions in this area."

Notes for editors

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the marketing name for the investment bank within the Corporates and Markets Division of Dresdner Bank AG, a member of the Allianz Group since July 2001. Headquartered in London, Frankfurt and New York and with an international network of offices, DrKW provides a wide range of investment bank products and services to European and international clients through its Investment Banking and Capital Markets business lines.

(a) Background on DrKW's Prime Brokerage team

Martin Keller joined DrKW in March 2001 from ING Barings with five colleagues experienced in the Prime Brokerage business in order to establish DrKW's Prime Brokerage capability. Prior to ING, Martin Keller's background includes seven years spent at UBS from 1993-2000 where he set up and grew the bank's global Prime Brokerage offering. Martin's team at DrKW includes Director Gary Francis, who worked with Martin at ING and UBS; Andrew Brown, ex Nomura; Jesper Bang, ex Merrill Lynch; Simon Murray, ex Morgan Stanley and Michael Posylkin, a Quantitative Analyst, ex Royal Bank of Scotland.