Details of the inaugural euromoney.com internet awards were made available through the homepage of euromoney.com three months before publication of the results. We listed the main categories – such as fixed income, equities and foreign exchange – in which we would be judging sites, along with the contact numbers and email addresses of our researchers. Companies that we expected to be major players in a number of categories were also contacted directly.
We reviewed almost 100 sites. For each site we were either given a demo or were provided with a password to view the site in our own time. End-users of the sites were also interviewed. Based on this research we dropped categories in which there were no credible sites and split other categories into a number of sub-categories such as fixed-income research and fixed-income bookbuilding.
We surveyed sites run by banks, sites run by non-banks and sites run by any type of consortium.
For the overall awards – Best wholesale internet bank and Best retail internet bank – we interviewed market analysts and our company’s own staff who had written about e-commerce during the year. For the wholesale award we also took into account the awards won in the separate product categories and our researchers’ impressions of banks’ strategies and services formed during the site demos.