Financial services begin to see the benefits of RIXML

New York -- If you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. But for RIXML, the industry has yet to even knock. Designed to fight the information overload faced by financial analysts who receive research reports through a variety of electronic and physical formats, the Research Information Extensible Mark-up Language (RIXML) is supposed to provide a standardised method of tagging that improves the dissemination and manipulation of financial research. But while other XML-based standards such as FIXML (the XML version of the Financial Information Exchange [FIX] protocol) are taking off, Wall Street is not clamouring for RIXML.

The major stumbling block when it comes to adopting RIXML is that research departments, unlike trading organisations, are cost centres. Liberating resources from the IT budget to make a qualitative change in a cost centre is a much tougher sell compared with a quantitative change in a profit centre.

“Rolling out FIX eliminates a lot of manual resources for trade delivery and broker confirmation,” says Paul DeLuca, assistant vice-president of fixed income trading, compliance and research systems