The MIX chooses Panopticon's product to visualize microfinance industry data

Stockholm, Sweden, December 15, 2004 – Panopticon, the leading supplier of real-time visualisation tools to the financial markets, today announced that the Microfinance Information eXchange, (the MIX), has launched Panopticon's Enterprise Web Solution on MIX Market, a global professional web-based information service. MIX MARKET started as an UNCTAD project (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). Publicly launched in September 2002, MIX MARKET is a key component of MIX, a not-for-profit private organization supported by CGAP, the Citigroup Foundation, the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Rockdale Foundation, and other private foundations.

Microfinance seeks to meet the financial needs of those populations excluded from formal financial services, especially the poor. Through small loans, savings, access to payment facilities, insurance or other financial services, microfinance institutions (MFIs) help the poor reduce their vulnerability to external shocks, increase their incomes and build businesses. The tangible benefits of increased income and economic security for the poor and their households are real and many—including better medical care, increased educational opportunities and greater food security.

With Panopticon's visualization technology The MIX can now offer its users a way of performing interactive analysis in an easy to use format. "The heat map enhances the functionality of the site, creates stickiness, and allows users to do a more comprehensive analysis than before. Now we can finally show several dimensions of our data in one view, which is an attractive feature for our users," said Didier Thys, executive director of The MIX.

Says Willem De Geer, CEO of Panopticon, "It is a very significant endorsement of our visualisation technology and we consider it a privilege to be involved in such a worthwhile initiative."

The MIX, incorporated in June 2002, aims to promote information exchange in the microfinance industry, offering data sourcing, benchmarking and monitoring tools, as well as specialized information services.

The MIX intends to address one of the key challenges of the microfinance industry: the lack of reliable, comparable and publicly available information on the financial strength and performance of MFIs, which underpins the development of the market for microfinance services.

About Panopticon

Panopticon offers Visual Business Intelligence software for financial institutions, telecommunications firms and other organizations that must make decisions based on very large datasets and real-time streaming data feeds. The company offers a variety of enterprise and desktop products as well as a comprehensive SDK that allows clients to integrate Panopticon’s visualization technology with their own systems and workflows. Panopticon and its clients have won several technology awards from Euromoney and The Banker for their implementations of Panopticon technology. Clients include JP Morgan, Fidelity, Reuters, and Citi. The company has offices in New York, London and Stockholm.

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For more information, contact:

In Europe:
Robert Ekström, CEO, email: robert.ekstrom _at_ panopticon.com, Tel: +46 (0)8 53 480 480
Panopticon Software AB, Brunnsgatan 9, SE-111 87 Stockholm, Sweden

In the US:
Sam Giertz, President, email: sam.giertz _at_ panopticon.com, Tel: +1 212 907 6420
Panopticon Software USA, The Chrysler Center, 405 Lexington, 26th Floor
New York, NY 10174 USA