24 Jan 2003: Researchsummary Launches RIXML Research Portal

Researchsummary, an electronic distribution facility for broker research, went live last week with Researchsummary Professional (RSPro), the first web-based portal to provide access to research produced using the Research Information Markup Language (RIXML). The introduction of RSPro follows hot on the heels of the reissue of a report by Accenture that concludes that buy-side institutions would be much better served by research that is tagged using XML.

In its initial incarnation, RSPro will receive research contributions from 11 brokers: Bear Stearns, Cazenove, CIBC, CLSA, Credit Lyonnais Securities, HSBC, ING Financial Markets, Lehman Brothers, MTS, UBS and WestLB Panmure. Researchsummary plans to add research from a further 20 brokers within a month. Currently, coverage extends to some 15,000 corporations.

The use of RIXML allows Researchsummary to offer a higher degree of functionality via RSPro than through previous services. For a start, RIXML allows tagging at a more granular level than before. As a result, searches of the entire RSPro report population rank found documents according to the relevance criteria of individual users.

RSPro also allows users to compare research on the same subject provided by different brokers, via the service’s DataGrid Views facility. Data can be imported to Excel and other Microsoft Office applications. Similarly, the Word2RIXML authoring tool can allow research contributors to convert documents produced in Microsoft Word into RIXML files. Contributors can also use Researchsummary’s Navigate Depth software to tag contributed research using the RIXML protocol.

Researchsummary reckons the use of RIXML will make research distribution and consumption more efficient, yielding benefits for both the sell side and the buy side. The company claims that firms spend $3 billion producing research and that much of it is unread by its intended recipients. It says this is due to information overload, with more than 100,000 research reports issued each week.

The Accenture report, originally published in late 2001 but reissued this month, goes further still. Based on a survey of some 30 financial institutions, the report says the financial services industry is currently spending some $13 billion per year on development and distribution of research and related services.

Accenture claims that as much as half is due to the high cost of packaging and delivery of services. Among the survey’s findings are:

• Research analysts and institutional salespeople waste up to 30% of their research-related time manually re-purposing existing content for a specific client’s needs or developing research that is never published.

• As much as 90% of research goes unread by its intended recipients, primarily due to information overload.

• As many as 70% of buy-side consumers of research say they receive the same content through multiple formats, including e-mail, physical mail and third-party electronic distributors.

• Between 10% and 20% of all developed research goes unpublished, mainly because the market conditions had changed before the content could be packaged and distributed to recipients.

Accenture believes firms could save between $50 and $100 million per year by adopting standards-based network technologies used by news and media organizations. In particular, the adoption of XML-based standards could help integration and management of research distribution.