RIXML is both a standard and an organisation. Its goals are focussed on improving the process of consuming and creating investment research through the pursuit of a common language to provide a rich metadata vocabulary describing both textual and quantitative content.

The organisation started as a partnership between brokerage firms that create large amounts of research and investment managers that both consume brokerage research and create their own content. The protocol that they collectively produced has now been publicly available for over a year and is being adopted as the de facto standard for the industry. This progress has led to the organisation expanding its membership, which is now made up of 4 major constituencies: investment managers, brokerage firms, aggregators of research, and software firms.

The words "information overload" are particularly poignant for the average portfolio manager or analyst at an investment management firm. They are charged with analysing companies and making investment decisions, and in this process extract ideas and competitive advantage from documents written by analysts at brokerage firms. The problem is that 1.8 million documents of this nature are published every year, and managing the flow of this information, as it is increasingly delivered in electronic format, relies on accurate classification of content into the appropriate company, region, industrial sector, type of insight etc. This task is extremely onerous when each publisher uses different 'vocabulary' and 'grammar' to describe their own documents.

RIXML offers the possibility of competitor brokers focussing on the quality of their ideas, and investment managers being able to find those ideas and action them. As a protocol, RIXML is not standing still - it is in the process of working on releasing version 2.0, and collating ideas for the future.