About a year before the credit crunch started, people were convinced that the phenomenal growth in private placements would continue, which set up an interesting battle among the likes of Nasdaq's Portal, Goldman Sachs' GSTrue and the consortium-owned Opus. But the credit crunch has really brought activity in the market to a halt, along with lots of other stock and equity issuance activity. In March, participants got the greenlight to connect the systems. The latest: Nasdaq just received regulatory permission to spin off the Portal Alliance to a separate company. The launch has been delayed until November. The big issue is the underlying market itself. While the technology no doubt works, for now it represents a solution in search of a problem. At some point, we can only hope that private placement activity will pick back up.

For more:
- here's the Securities Industry News article [1]