New York – In the accelerating world of online research distribution, the leader in data structure protocol is RIXML. The RIXML.org organization represents a group of buy-side and sell-side firms that are setting the open standard for categorizing and tagging research for the global marketplace. The group contains many of the bulge bracket firms and 3 of the top money management firms, as well as having a growing number of Associate Members.
Members List: (http://rixml.org/newsite/documents/Membership_07.pdf).
For more information about the organization click the link on the above advertisement.
In South Africa, an early adopter of the RIXML standard has been the mutual fund manager Old Mutual Investment Group. The eLibrary accepts research from 10 major brokers using RIXML protocol. Essentially, the base language XML (extensible markup language) is a substitute for html. RIXML stands for Research Industry Extensible Markup Language.
Below we include a case study from Old Mutual:
RIXML @ Old Mutual Investment Group (South Africa) (OMIGSA)
OMIGSA's Implementation of RIXML
South African fund manager Old Mutual Investment Group (South Africa) (OMIGSA) has recently
introduced a world-first electronic library for broker research that will provide the largest indexed
and centralised investment database in South Africa and one of the most comprehensive in the
world.
"Up to one thousand pieces of broker research are generated per month in South Africa alone,"
says OMIGSA Chief Investment Officer Peter Linley. "The eLibrary instantly places massive
volumes of indexed research at the fingertips of investment professionals, making it a powerful
tool in investment decisions."
Ten major broking houses are delivering investment related research to OMIGSA using RIXML
and brokers have agreed to email only one research report to the centralised eLibrary. Research
from non-participating brokers is catalogued internally using Greenjar, a software product from
South African IT shop Peresys.
"It had to be a player the size of OMIGSA to negotiate this kind of standardisation," said Linley,
"and we are now seeing the beginning of an industry standardisation in South Africa."
OMIGSA expects huge industry cost-savings as RIXML is introduced throughout the South
African market as the use of paper and bandwidth are dramatically reduced. Broker reports
produced on paper typically come through the door with a big 'thud' value to differentiate
themselves from competing brokers.
In addition, emailed reports use vast volumes of resources. A typical research report could be up
to 2 megabytes (many are bigger) and be sent to at least 20 people at OMIGSA. Investment
professionals would each have their own system of saving that data, either on the desktop or on a
central server, using another chunk of an expensive resource.
The eLibrary is part of OMIGSA's significant investment in technology to deliver superior
investment service cost-efficiently and represents a small IT investment compared to the value
delivered.
OMIGSA's active investment process is underpinned by the research received and generated
internally. OMIGSA's research database is unparalleled in South Africa with close on a million
'time series', everything from company financial data to inflation statistics to currency fluctuations
that have been recorded for decades. Information is power and the depth of our data puts us in a
very strong position. "The eLibrary simply boosts the firepower of our arsenal," says Linley.
The eLibrary will enable OMIGSA to quantify and evaluate broker research and uses a system of
alerts to provide instant notification of research in selected fields of interest in such a way that
investment professionals can receive the salient bits of information at a glance.
The database structure of the eLibrary is the mark-up language RIXML. OMIGSA isolated 40
fields, roughly equivalent to RIXML Level One, that effectively describe the content of the
research and convinced its brokers to adopt these standards, making it the first asset manager in
the world to do so exclusively.
Submitted by John Morris, Old Mutual Investment Group (South Africa) Ltd
