The Bankers’ Almanac And LexisNexis Join To Offer Exclusive Anti-Money Laundering Solution
Web Portal Provides Tools and Content to Investigate Money-Laundering Schemes

WASHINGTON, DC, October 28, 2002 - LexisNexis™ and The Bankers’ Almanac today announced an exclusive strategic alliance to include BANKERSalmanac.com as part of the LexisNexis Anti-Money Laundering Solutions web portal. This agreement merges the LexisNexis Web-based tools for anti-money laundering investigations with one of the leading industry standard resources for data about the structure of banks, locations, branches and their correspondent banking relationships.

“We are very pleased to announce this agreement,” said Norm Willox, chief officer for privacy, industry and regulatory affairs at LexisNexis.  “Adding The Bankers’ Almanac allows LexisNexis Anti-Money Laundering Solutions to offer our clients a full suite of authoritative investigative and due diligence tools in one place.”

Bankers throughout the world have relied upon The Bankers’ Almanac since its first publication 157 years ago.  The Web-based version of the guide, available at BANKERSalmanac.com, provides up-to-date banking details on the world’s leading financial institutions.  Search tools allow users to find related information or to link directly to a bank's Web site.

“This partnership represents a unique combination of two great resources: one of the  world's leading reference sources on international banks and the comprehensive content of LexisNexis,” said Maureen Milne, product development director for The Bankers’ Almanac. “It will greatly improve the speed and effectiveness of anti-money laundering investigations.”

The LexisNexis Anti-Money Laundering Web portal contains extensive identity verification and validation tools and provides direct access to information sources such as OFAC; local, regional and national news sources; information about assets such as vehicles, real property, personal property; as well as comprehensive databases of liens, bankruptcies, judgments, inmate records, civil and criminal filings and national financial institution sanctions.

The LexisNexis Anti-Money Laundering portal also incorporates sophisticated technology, such as LexisNexis™ SmartLinx™, to assist with anti-money laundering investigations.  SmartLinx instantly scours over 1.6 billion public records and quickly and accurately locates and associates links between people, businesses, assets, and locations that would normally take hours or days to gather and cross-reference.

About LexisNexis

LexisNexis™ is the global leader in providing comprehensive and authoritative news, business and legal information solutions to academic, corporate, government and legal markets, and is a member of Reed Elsevier plc [NYSE:  ENL; NYSE:  RUK].  The LexisNexis services combine searchable access to over four billion documents from thousands of sources with leading-edge systems and tools for managing and evaluating this content.  The LexisNexis family of products includes the award-winning nexis.com^® for the information profession and lexis.com^® for the legal profession, as well as numerous customized products delivering both job-specific and enterprise-wide industry-leading knowledge solutions.  For more information, visit www.lexisnexis.com.

LexisNexis recently was named one of KM World magazine’s “Top 100 Companies in Knowledge Management.” LexisNexis™ at lexis.com and lexisONE^sm are winners of the 2002 Codie Awards sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), which also awarded LexisNexis its prestigious Corporate Achievement Award. The Codies recognize the software and information industry’s finest products and services and honor excellence for corporate achievement and philanthropic efforts.

About The Bankers Almanac

The Bankers’ Almanac has been providing one of the most reliable single sources of international banking information since 1845.

The comprehensive database of The Bankers’ Almanac provides the information required daily by bank departments and other finance professionals to conduct their business in the international markets.  Stringent criteria for inclusion of banks, which mean that only authorized banks are listed, have supported a global reputation for The Bankers’ Almanac as one of the most reliable sources of information on banks across the world.