E*TRADE FINANCIAL, SunTrust and Wells Fargo Win Inaugural Keynote Performance Awards

In online trading, E*TRADE FINANCIAL (NYSE:ET) is the winner of the Keynote Performance Awards for both Best Transaction Speed (avg. 4.17 seconds) and Best Transaction Reliability (avg. 99.55% reliability). In online banking, SunTrust is the winner of the Keynote Performance Award for Best Reliability (avg. 98.69% reliability) and Wells Fargo is the winner of the Keynote Performance Award for Best Transaction Speed (avg. 8.56 seconds). The determination of the award-winning financial services companies is based entirely on the weekly aggregated results of two of Keynotes seven market-leading Web transaction performance indices: The Keynote E-Banking Transaction Performance Index and the Keynote Web Broker Trading Index. Keynotes transaction benchmark indices for the financial services industry are the only two of their kind and provide the ideal solution for understanding and improving the transaction experience from the end user perspective. To determine the online banking awards, Keynote aggregated data from the E-Banking Transaction Performance Index collected between July 2003 and April 2004. For the online trading awards, Keynote aggregated data from the Web Broker Trading Index collected between March 2003 and April 2004. In the coming months, Keynote will announce the fastest and most reliable sites for performing transactions on leading e-commerce and travel and hospitality sites. Background on The Keynote Performance Awards Enterprises spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year and untold human effort and ingenuity building their Web sites, keeping them up and running optimally 24/7 and hopefully driving an increasing number of visitors to their Web sites. Online performance is a critical factor for competing successfully in todays tough business environment and Keynotes performance awards are the first of their kind to encourage, recognize and honor the efforts of the many people within an organization who work so hard all year long to run a high performance Web site. The Keynote Performance Awards are based on Keynotes market-leading Web transaction performance indices in which Keynote specifies a common end-to-end business process or task that can be measured reliably and accurately at each of the sites selected for inclusion in a vertical transaction index. Speed and reliability measurements are taken on an hourly basis from the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. Measurement Infrastructure The foundation for Keynotes measurement and monitoring services and its indices are an extensive network of over 1,600 measurement computers strategically located in over 100 locations around the world and connected to the major Internet backbones. These computers accurately represent the performance that may be experienced by actual end users in over 50 metropolitan areas worldwide. Keynotes sophisticated operations center constantly monitors the health and security of these computers. How Keynote Determined the Winners Keynote aggregated its weekly transaction index data and determined the fastest and most reliable Web site in each vertical category for a discrete period of time. Two separate awards are announced in each vertical category: one for Fastest Web Site and one for Most Reliable Web Site. Keynote uses discrete periods of time over which the data for the sites on the transaction indices are evaluated. In order to be considered, sites need to have published data for at least 90% of the weeks during the discrete time period. A straight arithmetic average is used to determine both transaction speed and transaction reliability. The site with the fastest time (in seconds) is recognized for the speed award and the site with the highest success rate (out of 100%) is recognized for the reliability award.