XBRL US, the consortium charged with the development of the XML based extensible business reporting language and its promotion in the U.S., is aiming to standardize the delivery of corporate actions data and proxy statements, and possibly information on mortgage backed securities.

Originally introduced in 1999 as an accounting standard, XBRL has been gaining momentum as a tool in regulatory reporting. The Securities and Exchange Commission has called for all public companies to file their 10K reports in XBRL by 2011.The Depository Trust  ＆Clearing Corp., which became a member of XBRL US last month, and Swift have been working with the organization to establish semantic interoperability between XBRL and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) message types for corporate actions.

“An aspect of XBRL that attracted ISO's interest was its strength in tagging and ability to tag narrative text as well as numbers,”said Mark Bolgiano, president and CEO of XBRL US, the Washington, D.C. - based branch of non-profit XBRL International. “One of the important aspects of XBRL is that it has common ways to represent filings regardless of whether it's text or numeric. “But, said Bolgiano, having a standard is key—What you don't want is so many different flavors of documents that you can't match them up.”

Jamie Shay, head of standards at Swift, the registration authority for the ISO 15022 and 20022 standards, said that XBRL can"provide the structure, if you will, to the issuer data to allow us to put it into structured messages when it reaches the financial space."

Structured Messages

Every corporation has its own way of managing corporate actions data, pointed out Shay."The XBRL US taxonomy can tag the text using the 20022 dictionary, which would allow us to finally get corporate data into structured messages. ……It's going to be easy for the industry if we can put this information in a structure rather than dump narrative text on them. Whether it's in XBRL or ISO syntax won't be relevant as long as the same data dictionary is used."

In essence,said Shay, the business investment road map,a plan unveiled earlier this year that calls for increased cooperation between FIX Protocol Ltd., Swift and across asset classes and the trade life cycle, is being amended.”We’re, in effect, adding something else to that investment road map by putting the XBRL syntax in the corporate issuer space, where it will be the XBRL syntax and the ISO 20022 dictionary,” she said.

Swift has been wrestling with a solution for corporate actions since at least 2003, when the ISO 15022 format replaced ISO7775, which was designed to accommodate free-format text.The manual processing required for the 7775 messages led in part to the development of 15022 and later 20022, which was intended, among other things, to automate corporate actions data.

Those involved with the effort to apply XBRL,which can be used to tag large blocks of text, to corporate actions have stressed that it will ultimately normalize the information.

“We will be using the business concepts defined in the ISO repository in the XBRL taxonomies so that they are identical," explained Campbell Pryde, chief standards officer of XRBL US." We will identify gaps in that repository and will contribute items to it…If there are situations ISO can’t handle today and we solve those, they will be used as the basis of an ISO solution." At the end of the day, he said, companies will save millions of dollars by dealing with one standard.

Mortgage-Backed Securities

XBRL is expanding in other directions. Attendees at XBRL International's annual conference in Washington last month suggested that the standard could be applied to mortgage-backed securities(MBS) to shed some light on which institutions own what assets.”Some of the people here have developed taxonomies for mortgages and the essence of mortgage-backed securities,” said Tony Fragnito, CEO of XBRL International. “This may be an important implementation tool for the policy decisions that have been made in the banking crisis.”

It is not clear how far development has progressed, but a solution would not likely overlap with the financial products markup language, which is overseen by , a part of the International Swaps ＆Derivatives Association. “FpML has specific coverage for credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities，but not on MBS directly,” said Brian Lynn, founder and CTO of Stone Ridge, N.Y.-based Global Electronic Markets, which offers a tool that matches and validates over-the-counter instrument trade data.

For FpML, which is used in OTC derivatives messaging, “the industry focus, through various committees, has been more on agreeing on the fields and their meanings,”said Lynn.”Even a simple format like a CSV[comma-separated value] flat file can be used to report on the positions once this is agreed upon. However, this is more likely to be driven by the presence of service providers providing portfolio reconciliation…than by the existence of XML standards.”

XBRL can be used to simplify reporting in numerous areas,noted Patricia McGinnis, research director in Framingham, Mass.-based Financial Insights’ corporate banking practice. “There are common data elements between Swift and XBRL and I think it makes sense that Swift would take the same kind of data elements that the SEC wants to…be used for filing documents,” she said.

While there is generally resistance to any new standard, XBRL has been something of an anomaly, according to McGinnis. “It hasn't been the same kind of standard in that way, and it's not a closed group,” she observed. “You have to belong to Swift to do Swift messaging, but anybody with a browser can access XBRL information. It's meant to distribute information in broadcast mode that lots of people can get access to.”

McGinnis isn’t the only one who says that XBRL adoption has not run a typical course. “Ordinarily, a national regulator 1ike the SEC would just issue its requirements and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do, comply with it.’”said Alfred Berkeley, chairman of XBRL US and chairman of Pipeline Trading Systems. “What’s unique here…is the effort the SEC is putting into directing XBRL as a contractor and getting engaged with these global efforts.”