Top Honors to Barclays Capital, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley - Webinar on Winning Transactions Set for March 22nd

New York, NY – March 16, 2011 - The U.S. Structured Products Association (SPA) announced four winners of the Second Annual Structured Innovation Awards at a press event this morning. The 2011 Awards commemorated sixteen of the best Structured Investments transactions issued to U.S. investors in 2010 across four distinct categories. The awards recognize those firms and products that excelled in terms of performance, innovation, strategy and overall financial engineering.

The selection committee reviewed a total universe of 3,000 individual structured products issued in the US market in 2010. To be considered, a transaction had to demonstrate superior performance and demonstrate market-leading innovation (e.g. new structure type, unique underlying index or some other feature benefitting investors.) The selection committee included independent pricing and valuation provider Numerix and research and analytics provider for structured products, Structured Edge.

Other nominated firms rounding out the selection process were: Bank of America, BNP Paribas, Citi Bank, Credit Suisse, HSBC, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Wells Fargo.

The following four firms received the top awards:
• Barclays Capital — S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Index and S&P 500 VIX Mid-Term Futures Index (Category:  Innovative Structured Trade of the Year )
• Goldman Sachs – Buffered Equity Index-Linked Notes (Category: Equity)
• Merrill Lynch --- Capped Leverage Index Return Notes (Category: Commodity)
• Morgan Stanley — Range Accrual Notes (Category: Interest Rate Product of the Year).

This year’s winning transactions will be highlighted in a post-awards webinar sponsored by Numerix and Structured Edge on Tuesday, March 22nd at 10:00 AM EST. The webinar will provide insight into the award-winning strategies and innovations exhibited by this year’s winners. To sign up for the webinar please visit: http://www.numerix.com/Event-Details/r/EVENTS-754.

“Innovative investment strategies for uncertain markets are a hallmark of the structured product investment class," said Keith A. Styrcula, Chairman of the Structured Products Association. "The sixteen structured investments selected as finalists and the four winners, demonstrate the exemplary value that these instruments can add to investor portfolios."

Steven R. O'Hanlon, President and COO, Numerix said, “We are extremely pleased to be a leading part of an awards program recognizing those institutions that represent excellence and best in class in the structured products industry. It’s an honor for Numerix to heartily congratulate all the winners recognized here in the Structured Innovations Awards.”

Tim Mortimer, Managing Director, Future Value Consultants added, “Through the Structured Edge research service we analyzed thousands of deals last year. We believe that the US market is moving in the right direction and the winners represent best of breed in each of the four categories."

The awards for the top-four winners in each category were presented during an Awards Luncheon at the SPA's Eight Annual Spring Conference on March 8, 2011 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York.
 

About Structured Products Association
The Structured Products Association (SPA) is a New York-based trade group whose mission includes positioning structured products as a distinct investment class; promoting financial innovation among member firms; developing model "best practices" for members and their firms; identifying legal, tax, compliance and regulatory challenges to the business. With 9,600 members from around the world, the Association’s members include market participants from the exchanges, self regulatory bodies, legal/compliance community, financial media, investor networks, family offices, and both buy side and sell side structured product firms.

About Numerix
Numerix is the award winning, leading independent analytics institution providing cross-asset solutions for structuring, pre-trade price discovery, trade capture, valuation and portfolio management of derivatives and structured products. Numerix offers clients a highly flexible and fully transparent framework for the pricing and risk analysis of any type of OTC derivative financial instrument. From vanillas and "semi-exotics" to bespoke derivatives, structured products and variable annuities, Numerix allows users to calculate prices and manage risk using any data set.

Since its inception in 1996, over 700 clients and 50 partners across more than 25 countries have come to rely on Numerix analytics for speed and accuracy in valuing and managing the most sophisticated financial instruments. With offices in Australia, Beijing, Chicago, Dubai, Hong Kong, India, London, New York, Singapore, South Korea and Tokyo, Numerix brings together unparalleled expertise across all asset classes and engineering disciplines. For more information, please visit www.numerix.com.

About Structured Edge
Structured Edge -- powered by Future Value Consultants -- provides research, valuations and analytics that serve the issuer and broker-dealer community in the US structured product market. Structured Edge is committed to providing research tools and analytics that serve the issuer and broker-dealer community in the US structured product market, helping to bring transparency and real time pricing capabilities to all market participants. This service is launching fully in 2011, leveraging off the experience and methods of its UK counterpart which has been operating successfully for the last eleven years. Structured Edge already has a database of over 10,000 products and will cover virtually the entire US market product by product. For more information, visitwww.structurededge.com.

Media Contact:
Todd Swearingen
Numerix
+1 646-898-1294
tswearin@numerix.com

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