For all parts of the
investment research lifecycle

The RIXML Research Standard is designed to improve all parts of the investment research process.

Build tools

Create content

Describe content

Efficiency
built in
from the beginning

Before investment research can be created, the tools needed to do so have to be built.

Some buyside, sellside, and independent research firms build their research creation tools in-house, others purchase third-party products created by vendors who specialize in creating these tools and customize them to meet their firm’s needs.

Templates

ensure a consistent format is followed, and provide guidance the ensures that the firm’s processes and procedures are followed.

Dropdown menus

provide a consistent set of terms used across all of the firm’s research.

Data integration

pulls in additional financial data based on the ticker, simplifying the process of populating the research report with needed information and reduces the chance for error.

These tools are designed to make the process of creating investment research more efficient and accurate.

Create content

Investment professionals, independent research creators, and others producing research content for investment professionals use these tools to create research. Templates automate much of the process, such as populating the author’s contact information, inserting financial data based on the company ticker, and selecting the relevant sector from a drop-down menu.

All formats

PDF and other static file formats

Interactive and static models

HTML5 content

Audio

Video

All types

single-company reports

industry, country, or region overviews

macroeconomic analyses

ttopic-based thought pieces

All reasons

initiating coverage

in-depth analysis

quick take on news

change of rating, weighting, or outlook

With a small number of required tags and a large number of optional tags designed to describe research regardless of asset type or purpose, the RIXML Research Standard was designed to accommodate all types of investment research.

Describe content

The features that make it easier for investment professionals to create their research reports also facilitate the process of capturing RIXML metadata behind the scenes.

Some firms integrate RIXML tagging throughout their entire research creation workflow, while other firms’ systems create the RIXML tag file once the research report has been approved for publication.

Metadata is a critical part of publishing, aggregating, and finding research content.

Not familiar with metadata? Read an overview

Distribute content

Research content is usually published to multiple places, including to the firm’s own institutional research platform, to a variety of aggregation vendors, and often via direct feeds to institutional clients.
When research content is published, a RIXML tag file travels along with it, allowing the publisher to clearly indicate important information about the research, including authorship and copyright information, subject matter, and publication details.

Without RIXML

content producers need to create and maintain entirely separate mechanisms to send their research content and its associated tagging information to each research aggregation vendor and client that receives their research.

With RIXML

RIXML Research enables firms to create and maintain a single process for transmitting their research content to all of their data aggregation vendors and clients, greatly improving efficiency and reducing maintenance costs.

The RIXML Research standard’s extensibility means that publishers can add any additional tags an aggregator may need, such as a proprietary company code, author code, or entitlement code.

Aggregate
content

After publication, research begins traveling to the systems that will help the end users find it. Generally, this means that it is commingled with other research content. Internally, this may mean research content from other departments or divisions; externally, this will mean research from other firms.

The things that make RIXML a more efficient way for publishers to transmit their content to multiple aggregators also make it a more efficient way for aggregators to collect research content from multiple publishers.

Major aggregation vendors have used RIXML for decades, and their content aggregation systems are built to parse the structured data in each RIXML record to populate their metadata database. With all publishers using a common language to describe their research content, aggregators can develop products and services to help their clients find and make use of the investment research they need.

Benefitting from RIXML –
usually without even
knowing that it exists!

Because all research publishers who use RIXML are using the same set of tags to describe their content, and aggregators have developed their searching, alerting, and research discovery features based on this tagging, end users benefit from RIXML without even knowing it exists.

Develop insights

The metadata in a RIXML record is designed to meet the needs of both the humans and the systems that will be using it, and includes tagging that identifies the content of the report and makes finding it easier.

Artificial intelligence tools will have - and already has had - significant impacts to the ways that investment research is created, described, distributed, consumed, and analyzed. We will be adding a page to describe these in the near future.

In fact, the reason that artificial intelligence-powered content analysis tools need high-quality metadata is similar to the reason that the tools that power traditional searching, filtering, and alerting need it: accuracy and efficiency!