A system and method for creating financial markets research reports. An architecture is provided for managing and processing research data, comprising: an XML ingestion engine for receiving XML source files, wherein the ingestion engine breaks each source file into a set of XML elements, wherein each XML element includes a data item and metadata that describes the data item, and wherein each XML element includes a link to a document type definition (DTD); an information management system for storing each XML element in a predefined schema, wherein each XML element is searchable via a search engine; a template manager for managing a set of document templates that are used to create research documents; and a workflow system that manages a workflow amongst a set of users creating a research document.