Matt Kelly is editor-in-chief of pliance Week, a magazine and online newsletter on rporate ernance, risk, and mpliance. Prior to his role at pliance Week, Kelly was a reporter and ntributor on rporate mpliance and technology issues for magazines such as Time, Boston Business Journal, eWeek, and numerous other publications.

Now that the U.S. Securities and Exchange mission has put a mandate in place for rporations to start filing financial statements in XBRL, rporate America is dutifully churning away. We can expect the first instance documents to start appearing sometime in July, but the curiosity and drama surrounding XBRL and U.S. financial reporting has faded to a dull background noise.

Thankfully, other voices in the XBRL world are turning up their volume.

A new wave of XBRL enthusiasts has now begun a campaign to bring that same promise of XBRL — transparency and homogeneity — to business risks in the banking sector. Yes, many leaders of this movement are XBRL software vendors who have a vested interest in its suess; and no, the path to achieve this new XBRL taxonomy isn’t yet entirely clear. But the idea has merit, especially with the banking system going down the tubes like it is these days.

Start with the IBM Data ernance uncil. The uncil has begun holding seminars and webcasts on its vision of an XBRL risk taxonomy, which would identify risks in the banking sector the same way XBRL’s taxonomy for U.S. GAAP identifies data in financial reports. Such a system might, for example, allow a regulator to peer through a bad-debt line item and see the individual loans feeding it; that would take hours of diving through spreadsheets today.

Other parties throwing their support behind the XBRL risk project include the Enterprise Data Management uncil and a variety of XBRL vendors.

Unto itself, the idea of applying XBRL to risk management makes plenty of sense: risk management is still much more art than science even at the best of mpanies, and the financial sector has proven to be a disaster at knowing what its risks are. Sometimes that has manifested as a mpany whose risks suddenly explode and wreck the balance sheet; just as insidious is the drag it places on truly healthy mpanies now too scared to dabble with markets they no longer trust. The end result is less liquidity, less clarity, and less prosperity. We are in dire need of a solution to that problem, and XBRL seems to be an attractive candidate for the job.

Still, this idea needs to travel a long road before it reaches the same nclusion as XBRL in financial reporting. In that instance, we had a reasonably well-understood realm of data (U.S. acunting terms) to match to an XBRL taxonomy. We had a single authoritative regulator (the SEC) that would lead the way for mpanies and investors to follow. We had clarity of goal and leadership.

That clarity is still severely lacking here. Financial institutions are overseen by many regulators — the Federal Reserve, the Federal Depositors Insurance rp., state banking mmissions, and even state insurance mmissions — and Washington is poised to overhaul that whole system, dramatically, in the near future. And finding a taxonomy of risks in this realm strikes me as nearly impossible, nsidering how fast and furious new risks emerge in this sector.

How will this effort all end? I don’t know. But it’s a nversation worth listening to.