A research publication is worth reading only if its readers can trust three things: that nobody paid for its conclusions, that its claims trace to documents they can check, and that it says so when it gets something wrong. This page sets out the rules the Journal follows on each. They are published so that readers can hold the Journal to them.
Who pays for the research
The Journal is funded by individual and enterprise subscriptions. That is the whole of its revenue from the research. It carries no advertising and no sponsored content, and it has no commercial partners whose products appear in its papers.
Investment Operations Insight LLC also undertakes a limited amount of commissioned work for individual firms, such as briefings and custom research. Commissioned work is confidential to the client, is never published as Journal research, and gives the client no say over what the Journal publishes.
No pay-to-play
The securities technology market runs on sponsored content: vendor-funded "research," paid placement in market maps and rankings, sponsored award categories, and papers written to a conclusion the sponsor chose in advance. The Journal does none of this. Specifically:
• No firm can pay to be covered, to be included in a comparison, or to be left out of one.
• Vendors, infrastructures, and regulated firms are welcome to brief the Journal, and those briefings inform the research. A briefing buys no coverage and no review of what is written.
• No subject of a paper sees the paper before publication. Where a paper states a specific fact about a named firm, the Journal may check that fact with the firm; it does not share the argument, the conclusions, or the surrounding text.
• An enterprise subscription is a license to read the research. It confers no influence over what the research says, including what it says about the subscribing firm.
• The Journal does not publish vendor-written material, and it does not accept articles offered on condition of placement or payment.
Naming vendors
Papers name product categories rather than favorites. A vendor, platform, or infrastructure is named where a specific example makes a point concrete, and the naming implies no endorsement. Where the public record on a subject clusters around one provider because that provider publicizes its work and its competitors do not, the paper says so and names counterexamples, because a market picture assembled from press releases misstates the market.
Conflicts of interest
Where the publisher, an analyst, or a contributor holds a commercial relationship with, or a financial interest in, a firm discussed in a paper, the paper discloses it. Analysts do not write about firms in which they hold a direct financial interest material to them.
How papers are sourced
Papers are built from primary sources first: regulatory texts and releases, rule filings, legislation, the published procedures of infrastructures, issuer and infrastructure announcements, and annual reports. The Journal ranks its sources and applies the ranking consistently:
1. Primary sources carry any claim they support.
2. Trade press of record carries a claim where a primary source does not yet exist, and is replaced when one appears.
3. Law-firm and consultancy summaries are acceptable secondary references.
4. Vendor blogs, aggregators, newsletters, and promotional interviews may inform the analysis but never carry a claim on their own.
Where a vendor reports what its customer said, the claim is attributed to the customer, not the vendor. Every specific factual claim drawn from an outside source is endnoted with the organization, the document, its date, and a link where one is public. Practitioner interviews are conducted on a non-attribution basis unless the interviewee agrees otherwise, and are used for judgment and context rather than presented as verified fact. The Journal does not invent statistics; where a paper uses an illustrative figure, it says so.
How papers are written
Papers are produced through a proprietary research framework that combines analyst direction, structured primary-source research, practitioner interviews, and AI-assisted drafting and verification. Artificial intelligence is an instrument in that process, used to organize evidence, draft against an analyst's specification, check claims against their sources, and hold the house standard for terminology and style. It is not a source. Every factual claim traces to a cited document or to analyst research, every judgment in a paper is an analyst's judgment, and every paper is reviewed and approved by the Content Advisory Board or Chief Research Officer before publication.
What the date on a paper means
Every paper carries a date, and the date is the boundary of its claims. Nothing that happened after that date is treated as fact in the paper, and every source it cites is checked against it. A paper about a moving regulatory position is only useful if the reader knows when the analysis stopped looking; the date says so.
When a rule, a deadline, or a market fact changes after a paper's date, the paper is not silently rewritten. A development that changes a conclusion materially is handled by a dated editor's note at the head of the paper or by a successor paper, depending on its weight.
Positions, and what they are not
Papers take positions on what is likely to happen, what will break, and what a firm should do. These are professional judgments made before the outcome is known, and some will turn out wrong. They are not investment, legal, tax, or financial advice, and nothing the Journal publishes should be relied on as such.
Corrections
Errors of fact are corrected as soon as they are confirmed. A correction that changes a conclusion is noted at the head of the paper concerned and recorded in the log below. A correction of a figure, a date, a name, or a citation that leaves the argument standing is made in the text and recorded in the log. Nothing is removed from the log.
The log covers errors. It does not cover the ordinary aging of a paper: a rule that changes after publication makes a paper dated, not wrong, which is what the date is for.
To report an error, write to research@ioinsight.net with the paper title, the passage concerned, and what you believe the correct position to be, with a source if you have one. Every report gets an answer, including the ones the Journal judges to be disagreements about judgment rather than errors of fact.
Corrections log
No corrections have been recorded