Morningstar Office Introduces Report Studio for Customized Investment Report Communications

CHICAGO, Sept. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Morningstar, Inc. (Nasdaq: MORN), a leading provider of independent investment research, has launched a new tool to help independent financial advisors quickly and easily create their own custom investment performance reports.

Morningstar Office(SM) Report Studio is a new feature within Morningstar Office that allows advisors to create their own custom performance reports, either as a single, personalized report for an individual client or as a report template for use across their entire practice. The new tool offers the ability to build a new report from scratch or to edit one of Morningstar's pre-designed templates. Advisors have access to hundreds of Morningstar investment data points, colorful charts and graphs, as well as pre-built data tables to highlight performance, risk, return, investment style and other important concepts to their clients.

A drag-and-drop interface makes it simple to select and position key charts and data tables on the report layout, and report elements resize automatically to the advisor's specifications when they are placed on the template. Morningstar Office Report Studio can also incorporate an advisory firm's logo, outside images and charts, custom disclosure information, corporate color palette, and fonts to create materials that fully align with the firm's identity and branding. Advisors can save all reports and templates as Adobe® PDF documents or Microsoft® PowerPoint® files.

"Morningstar Office has long been known for providing high-quality research and client reports that help advisors effectively communicate with their clients and prospects, but now advisors have the ability to build their own custom reports that combine the research and analytics of Morningstar with their firm branding and style," said Hailin Li, Morningstar's senior vice president of advisor software. "Report Studio is the result of responding to feedback from independent advisors, because they know that the most useful report is often the one they create specifically for their own client base."

Morningstar Office is a complete global practice and portfolio management platform for independent financial advisors and wealth managers. Designed so advisors can run an entire practice effectively on its single, all-inclusive system, Morningstar Office features the most current Morningstar research and data on approximately 325,000 securities. The platform also includes sophisticated investment planning tools, complete portfolio accounting and performance reporting capabilities, practice and client management tools, e-mail and calendar functions, billing, batch reporting, regulatory document archiving and a client web portal. Morningstar® Back Office Services(SM), an optional offering from Morningstar, allows advisors to outsource the daily task of importing and reconciliation so that the advisors and their staff can focus on serving their clients and prospects while Morningstar handles the firm's back office tasks. Both the solo practitioner and multi-advisor firms can use its practice management tools.

Launched just four years ago, Morningstar Office now has more than 2,000 customers, placing it among the three largest portfolio management solutions in the RIA market. Nearly 200 customer firms have undergone full data conversions to the Morningstar Office platform from other advisor software systems, and Morningstar is now serving nearly 200 customer firms with its back office services.

For more information about Report Studio or to view a demonstration video, please visit http://global.morningstar.com/reportstudio.

About Morningstar, Inc.

Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent investment research in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The company offers an extensive line of Internet, software, and print-based products and services for individuals, financial advisors, and institutions. Morningstar provides data on approximately 360,000 investment offerings, including stocks, mutual funds, and similar vehicles, along with real-time global market data on more than 4 million equities, indexes, futures, options, commodities, and precious metals, in addition to foreign exchange and Treasury markets. The company has operations in 21 countries.

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