Last December, Julie Nickoley, senior manager of
commercial paper operations at DaimlerChrysler, agreed to work with Prescient
Markets to develop a Web-based subscription technology service to help companies
price and manage their commercial paper issuance. The goal: a system to provide
real-time flow of short-term prices and a way to track investors and competing
issuers. At the time, the global automaker and long-time direct CP issuer saw
the possibilities as interesting, but not necessarily a priority.

All that changed two months later, when
DaimlerChrysler's CP was downgraded to A2/P2. Suddenly, big money-market funds,
which once constituted 85% of DaimlerChrysler's market, were no longer buyers.
Nickoley had an immediate need to figure out what other buyers existed out in
the market to take their place, but it took her a day or two to get investor
information out of the mainframe-based system she used to manage CP issuance.

In October, the kind of capability Nickoley sought finally became available with
the introduction of Prescient Funding Desk. Now we know for all customers
what time of day they trade, what size of trade they normally do, if they come
in through cpmarket or on the phone, says Nickoley. The customer analytics
was the key.