With the return of the IPO mar­ket the dis­cus­sion of research and bank­ing has started to come up again. For those who were not around for the last one there were a num­ber of research-oriented invest­ment banks like Ham­brecht & Quist, Robert­son Stephens, Alex Brown and Sound­View Tech­nol­ogy Group that led most of the emerg­ing com­pany IPO trans­ac­tions. This was true in large part because the banks actu­ally under­stood the com­pa­nies and the mar­kets they served in great depth and detail. So much so that insti­tu­tional investors relied on their exper­tise to invest in com­pa­nies. At Sound­View the bank­ing process was totally research dri­ven. Not to take any­thing away from the out­stand­ing invest­ment bank­ing team that made it hap­pen but the research ana­lyst had the pri­mary respon­si­bil­ity to gen­er­ate the research, call on com­pa­nies and then rep­re­sent the trans­ac­tion to insti­tu­tions through the sales force. If the com­pany didn’t per­form well, the ana­lyst took an earn­ings hit and got a black eye. Of course all these com­pa­nies are long-gone now. As the IPO mar­ket returns one won­ders where the high qual­ity research comes into play now. Of course bank­ing orga­ni­za­tions have hired their own ana­lysts but they are lim­ited in terms of what they can do with investors. Recently San­ford Bern­stein announced that they were relaunch­ing their cap­i­tal mar­kets busi­ness to lever­age their still-world-class and much respected research capa­bil­ity. San­ford Bern­stein isn’t exactly into emerg­ing tech­nol­ogy but their announce­ment is a har­bin­ger of things to come. Research is essen­tial to the invest­ing process and needs to be har­nessed for the IPO mar­ket to func­tion best. Today there are some other poten­tial struc­tures to make this hap­pen which we tested suc­cess­fully in the last two years and the com­ing solid IPO mar­ket for tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies is encour­ag­ing for research providers who have remained true to their craft. We will pub­lish some of our research bank­ing guide­lines for those ana­lysts who may find them­selves back in the fray of cov­er­ing newly-public companies.