Lipper forges deal to produce fund reports; Teams with UpTick to focus more on intermediary market.(News)

Investment News, September, 2004

Byline: Rick Miller CHICAGO - To compete better in the intermediary market, Lipper Inc. in New York has forged a deal with an automated-text-generation firm to produce new mutual fund reports for advisers and their clients. Under the recently announced collaboration, UpTick Data Technologies in San Francisco will use Lipper analytical data to produce multipage reports that include computer-generated commentary on more than 17,000 mutual funds.

Such reports are new territory for Lipper, which previously offered one-page fact sheets on funds and longer analyst reports on market sectors and asset classes. "Historically, Lipper has not done qualitative fund reviews at the individual-fund level,'' said Robin Thurston, a Lipper vice president...