Lambert: Research deliveryman

So now that he’s retired as Merrill Lynch’s co-head of equity research, the 55-year-old Lambert is aiming to fix those shortcomings.

So now that he’s retired as Merrill Lynch’s co-head of equity research, the 55-year-old Lambert is aiming to fix those shortcomings. Next month he will be joining a London-based systems developer , Researchsummary , that purports to be able to harness technology to separate kernels of wheat from the chaff of analyst reports. “All the financial industry has done is take a paper product and put it on screens,” complains Lambert. Researchsummary, by contrast, publishes and stores documents using “extensible markup language,” or XML, allowing investors as well as analysts to sort through online databases with great precision by applying specific performance and other criteria. Eight institutions , including ABN Amro and HSBC Group , have begun posting research in the XML format. As an executive director and head of Researchsummary’s consulting business, Lambert will run a 25-person tech unit that offers implementation assistance. “This is cutting edge,” says Lambert. Next: an all-computer research team?

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