New Research Rules for Banks

Ross Mayfield is blogging from the Red Herring Fall Converence about a presentation from Lawrence Calcano, co-head of technology group of Goldman Sachs. (Red Herring: Lawrence Calcano)

Here is an interesting part:

_New research rules. The research settlement mandates the seperation of banking and research (can’t even send an email between them). Research decides what to cover and can’t co-participate in pitches. Research will be less critical for entreprenuers in selecting banks than previously._

This is actually wonderful. I didn’t know it went that far. The thing is that previously, you could almost buy a good research paper on your company when your public offering was handled by the bank the researcher worked at. This is why the good researchers came to the pitch. This was about to stop but I kind of missed the changes in the laws governing it.

I presume the e-mail part is just something the lawyers cooked up to not be in trouble later as every conversation would be in writing and archived for always ;)

If you want to read more about what got presented at the event, you can read tons of stuff on Ross’ blog starting here.