For more information, please contact:

David Johansen
SciComp Inc.
(512) 451-1050

Merrill Lynch, SciComp Extend Relationship

Austin - October 12, 1999 - SciComp Inc. announced today that Merrill Lynch has purchased additional licenses for its SciFinance™ software synthesis technology. SciComp Inc., an Austin-based company, focuses on providing solutions for the financial services industry. It created SciFinance, a software package that empowers quantitative analysts and financial engineers to quickly and easily develop complex pricing models for derivative securities.

Merrill Lynch, one of the world's leading financial services firms initially purchased licenses to use SciFinance in January 1999. Merrill Lynch will use codes generated by SciFinance to price, value and hedge equity derivative instruments. The software allows users to decrease turnaround time for derivative model prototyping and enable analysts to move on to more complex problems.

"Now that we have successfully integrated SciFinance generated code into our risk management system and our quantitative analysts now regularly use SciFinance for problem solving, demand has grown naturally for more licenses. It is in response to this demand that we have increased our commitment to SciComp," said Jim Gatheral, head of quantitative analytics for the Merrill Lynch Global Equity-Linked Products group.

Elaine Kant, SciComp's founder and president, said, "By bolstering their existing commitment to SciFinance, Merrill Lynch is showing others what we already know - the water is safe. Option pricing models can be extremely complex, but SciFinance is a tool for analysts to quickly implement pricing solutions that solve a wide range of problems."

SciFinance allows financial modelers to state their conceptual option structures in about a half page in a concise Algorithm SPEcification Notation (ASPEN). From this formal ASPEN specification of the desired financial and mathematical features, SciFinance automatically generates thousands of lines of C code, which is then validated by a variety of consistency checks.

Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading financial management and advisory companies with offices in 43 countries and total client assets exceeding $1.5 trillion. As an investment bank, it is the top global underwriter and market maker of debt and equity securities and a leading strategic advisor to corporations, governments, institutions and individuals worldwide. Through Merrill Lynch Asset Management and Merrill Lynch Mercury Asset Management, the company is one of the world's largest managers of financial assets. For more information, visit the company's web site at http://www.ml.com.

Founded in Austin, Texas in 1994, SciComp is the leader in technology that empowers its customers to produce complex, mathematical software, eliminating the need for manual computer programming. SciComp's software synthesis techniques can be applied in a wide range of industries, including finance, electronics, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, automotive and aerospace. SciComp's development team has more than one hundred years of combined experience in mathematical modeling, computer science, applied mathematics, physics and engineering. For more information, call David Johansen at (512) 451-1050, or visit the web site at http://www.scicomp.com.