Parent Firms End MarketNet Trial Venture

After two years of tests and largely unsuccessful marketing, International Business Machines and Merrill Lynch & Co. have pulled the plug on International MarketNet, their joint venture designed to provide sophisticated financial information and transaction execution to investors.

The computer company and the brokerage said Wednesday that the venture, started in 1984, would be phased out during the next four months.

Of its 289 employees, 15 who were lent by IBM and 16 by Merrill Lynch will return to their respective companies. The others, all hired especially for Imnet, as the service was known, will lose their jobs four months from now.

Imnet was designed to compete with such market information services as Quotron but at a more sophisticated level and at a higher price.

Customers were theoretically able to program the service to automatically execute securities trades at given prices from their homes or offices. The transactions were handled through Merrill Lynch.

A Merrill Lynch spokesman said the service had about 50 customers, most of them individual investors.

Attempts to line up a large financial services firm as a customer were unavailing; one source said a reason may have been that many such firms consider themselves competitors of Merrill Lynch. The brokerage firm itself was still “testing” the program for use in its own business when the parents decided to end the venture.

Neither parent company would release information about its investment in Imnet, although the termination will not have a material effect on either’s financial results.