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 |
