At the recent "International Symposium on Standardization of Securities and Futures Industry", the promotion of localization of XBRL standard by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) won lots of praises from experts. According to the SSE General Engineer Bai Shuo, the SSE will expand XBRL application, develop a series of information products and build the XBRL industrial chain.

The Global Chair Kurt Ramin of XBRL International Steering Committee and the Vice President Ms. Liv Watson of Global Strategy at Edgar Online Inc. explained that they would like to help China build a XBRL jurisdiction upon this visit. They said that the SSE, one of the earliest users of XBRL technology in the world, set a good example in the global promotion of XBRL.

According to Deputy Director Huang Hongbin of the SSE Listed Company Department, all listed companies on the SSE realized reporting in XBRL format. In this June, the China Fund Company Information Disclosure Taxonomies developed by the SSE became the first of its kind ever acknowledged by the XBRL International.

Bai explained, "At present, the value chain based on the XBRL is not linked up in China. The listed companies' information in XBRL format, after being processed by different users, should return to the market for boosting the transparency of listed companies. More analytical and demonstrating instruments are in demand to help market participants get their needed information for higher efficiency." According to Bai, the SSE should, based on the existing texts, set up a whole set of instruments to get the data value known and used by the market as soon as possible.

So far, financial reports of China's listed companies are often published in such formats as PDF, DOC and HTML. Because of different disclosure methods, diversified technical standards of caliber and text formats as well as the barriers of non-internationalization, domestic regulators and intermediaries have to re-enter the data. Moreover, investors, especially overseas investors, can't comprehend the data or are unable to directly extract the data, thus deciding to invest elsewhere. Besides, some listed companies capitalize on the uncompetitive data analysis and check to release false information to misguide the market.

XBRL is the latest standard and technology in current non-structural information processing, especially in the financial information processing. It can realize the international sharing of financial reports and prevent, to some extent, the disclosure of false information.