In a press release distributed today, regional brokerage firm Janney Montgomery Scott announced an exclusive joint venture with indie research and consulting firm Vintage Research. The exclusive joint venture was established to distribute a co-branded version of Vintage’s specialized media and telecom research through JMS’ sales and trading platform.
Janney’s Director of Equity Capital Markets commented, “The exclusive joint venture is the first step in adapting to a changing Institutional environment and to address our client’s need for unbiased, thought provoking, action oriented research. The joint venture will allow Janney to leverage our extensive sales and trading capabilities including our significant investment in our NYSE Floor operations.”
Of course, numerous broker / dealers have signed with indie shops like S&P in the past to distribute research to their retail client base. This deal is a little unusual as it is the first one that we can recall where a substantive brokerage firm established an exclusive relationship with an indie firm to distribute research to their institutional client base.
Is this deal an anomoly or is it a harbinger of things to come? It certainly would be consistent with our own belief that in the future, a number of brokerage firms may be forced to consider outsourcing discreet research coverage to independent providers in an effort to lower the cost of their research operations. I guess we will just have to wait and see.