You might be thinking: Does the Web really need one more place to get stock quotes? Well, not really, but does the United States really need 100,000 bank/CU branches, 3,000 mutual funds, or checks with bunnies on them? No, but consumers use them, so they live on.

Online users love stock quotes. America Online has 13 million portfolios registered in its Personal Finance Channel and is delivering 60 million quotes to 630,000 users each day. So, why fight it?

Contact one of the quote engines such as Quote.com products.quote.com/fq/products/banks.html  and get this service added to your Web in 1998. It’ll set you back a few grand, but your customers will use it, and more importantly they won’t be logging on to Yahoo! or Microsoft Investor seeing your competitor’s ads every day.

For a list of major stock quote providers refer to www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Finance_and_Investment/News/Quotes/ Try to license a service that allows users to set up a portfolio of companies/funds so they don’t have to key in ticker symbols each time. If you haven’t recently used an online quote service, take five minutes and build a portfolio at quotes.yahoo.com