NORTHSTAR 4.0 ENHANCES NORTHSTAR SUITE OF SOFTWARE.

NorthStar has unveiled NorthStar 4.0. This release increases the out-of-the-box functionality of the suite of NorthStar Solutions, and continues to enhance the seamless, integrated workflow for the financial advisor.

NorthStar's suite of software is comprised of five solutions that empower financial advisors and their teams with full lifecycle advisory capabilities to acquire, implement and manage client assets in a holistic and compliant manner. The solutions, and modules within them, can be seamlessly integrated with each other to support the functionality and phasing which meet the specific challenges of the firm. The five NorthStar Solutions are:

Sales & Proposals -- Capture investor profile information, quickly analyze current investments (including external assets), run hypotheticals, and easily produce professional, compliant proposals.

Planning -- Analyze an investor's portfolio, their financial situation and prospective wealth scenarios to quickly design a tailored investment plan and comprehensive Investment Policy Statement.

Product Catalog & Research -- Access a comprehensive, open-architecture product catalog to easily find, compare and analyze investment, banking and insurance products.

Portfolio Construction -- Construct and implement highly customized portfolios using eligibility and suitability rules, sophisticated analytics and expanded screening and filtering capabilities.

Client Wealth Management -- Manage an entire wealth management practice with 360-degree client views and portfolio reporting tools that facilitate browsing, analysis, monitoring and reporting on and across client relationships.

NorthStar's Solutions have been packaged to add value at every stage of the wealth management process, guiding the management of client relationships from client acquisition to client implementation to client management. They help financial advisors and their teams establish immediate credibility, win more new business and build deep, lasting relationships with clients, resulting in improved retention and more referrals.

"Wealth management firms are moving away from a brokerage, security- centric, application-island environment, and are focused on deploying integrated advisory functionality in 2006," said Juergen Dittgen, vice president of Product Management and Field Services. "NorthStar 4.0 directly addresses the functional needs we hear from our clients and prospects, and will allow those firms to gain an edge in the increasingly competitive wealth management industry."

Sample NorthStar 4.0 enhancements include:

An enhanced wealth management Client Profile within a relationship hierarchy model, allowing the advisor and their firm to consolidate client information across disparate systems, to provide information in an enterprise scale environment, and to trigger alerts based on deviation from the client profile. NorthStar's relationship hierarchy model implements the association between accounts, portfolios, related parties and clients.

A single, unified Asset Allocation process guides the financial advisor to the most appropriate asset allocation technique -- model-based, rules-based or optimized model, and is integrated into NorthStar's planning capabilities.

An enhanced Investment Policy Statement workflow allows the financial advisor to create a complete investor profile. Additionally, compliance departments can monitor constraints expressed in the Investment Policy Statement, such as minimum and maximum restrictions for operational cash limits, asset class, sector, and industry and security-type exposure.

Increased Investment Selection capabilities improve the integration of the planning process with investment selection. As proposals are created and/or implemented, investor preferences and suitability and eligibility constraints outlined in the Investment Policy Statement or financial plan are enforced. A financial advisor can use enhanced product search capabilities to create proposals containing multiple portfolio options.

NorthStar's Dashboard Center centralizes the information most critical to financial advisors in the day-to-day management of their practices. In addition to market data and business news, the Dashboard Center features a To-Do list of activities, a Quick Report Summary that highlights portfolios that most need the financial advisor's attention, and an Alerts section that notifies the financial advisor when action is required.

The NorthStar Solutions leverage the industry-leading NorthStar Wealth Management Technology Platform, which is based on a services oriented architecture. The Platform is designed to allow firms to leverage their existing or desired systems, analytics and content, to enable collaborative workflows within a team, and drive down the total cost of ownership. In NorthStar 4.0, JBoss has been added to the suite of supported application servers, including the ability to cluster JBoss servers for large-scale, resilient enterprise deployments.

"Our focus as a company is to provide a meaningful ROI to the wealth management firm and significantly improved productivity for the financial advisor," said Collin Cohen, president of NorthStar. "Importantly, we continue to add key functionality within our core offering, building a scalable, proven enterprise product. Because of the technology underlying our platform, clients retain the ability to configure the Solutions to meet their specific needs. At the same time, they can leverage an offering that accommodates evolving market needs and provides a clear, efficient upgrade path."

About NorthStar Systems International, Inc.

NorthStar is a provider of enterprise wealth management software solutions to financial services institutions, including broker dealers, banks and trusts, asset managers, and service providers to Registered Investment Advisors. NorthStar provides a suite of software solutions that empowers financial advisors and their teams with full lifecycle advisory capabilities to acquire, implement and manage client assets in a holistic and compliant manner. NorthStar is backed by venture capital firms Benchmark Capital, H.I.G. Capital, and Chess Ventures, as well as Silicon Valley Bank, and leading financial services institutions including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch.

NorthStar Systems International can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.northstar.com.

For more information, call 415/344-6140.