Porvenir Online.

Aleading financial portal for Latin America, Porvenir (www.porvenir.com) delivers comprehensive emerging market intelligence to professionals around the world. "Our goal is to help professionals involved in Latin American business work more effectively," says Christopher Tilley, founder, president and chief executive officer of the San Francisco-based company. "We deliver information that they wouldn't get anywhere else in a form that is easy to integrate into their own research." As a result, Porvenir serves a wide range of institutional clients, including many Fortune 500 companies, in such important areas as business development, investment analysis, credit risk assessment, consulting and strategic planning.

Says Giovanni Sanchez of the Investment Banking division of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in New York: The enhancements to Porvenir Online have made it easier than ever to find company-specific financials, market news, and industry reports. It has become a work solution for my team and helps us save time in finding information that would otherwise take hours to locate. I am very comfortable with the service and enjoy its ease of use."

Porvenir provides "one-click' access to information on more than 3,000 Latin American companies and over 30 industry sectors in the region's seven largest economies. Current industry studies, economic analyses and forecasts are provided from a wide range of highly respected sources. Porvenir then uses its team of experts to organize, filter and prioritize hundreds of thousands of web pages. The company has developed a proprietary software system, which allows it to monitors and track changes to that information. Porvenir has staffers in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and the United States who are highly experienced in their regions. "They serve as an intermediary, indicating what data is most relevant, and which might be coming from a questionable source," Tilley says. "As a result, Porvenir's clients save enormous amounts of time gathering information and often have access to timely, useful research that their competitors lack."

Porvenir integrates this enormous flow of data with brokerage reports, mergers and acquisitions transactions and other high-end business information provided daily by its parent company, Thomson Financial, as well as other third party sources. "Thomson is very active in Latin America, building up an enormous database of industry and company financial information, along with information from regulatory agencies and government sources," says Tilley. "That gives subscribers to Porvenir's services an extra benefit from the total wealth of information available."

In addition to delivering proprietary, localized content, Porvenir provides clients with an up-to-date view of all the useful information on the Internet related to key companies, industries and economies. The service is updated by 7:30 a.m. EST each morning, with hundreds of new items published daily.

In the next several months, Porvenir will launch new services for emerging markets in Asia and Europe, based on the model developed for Latin America. These new product offerings, coupled with enhancements to the Latin American search and language functionalities, clearly position Porvenir as the research tool of choice for the emerging markets professional.

Established in 1995, Porvenir is led by principals with more than 10 years experience working in Latin America on business and investment related projects with leading international investment banks and management consulting firms.

Porvenir and Thomson Financial are part of The Thomson Corporation, a leading, global e-information and solutions company in the business and professional marketplace with 1999 revenues of US$5.8 billion. The corporation's common shares are listed on the Toronto and London stock exchanges.