Thomas Verdin is Chair of the XBRL Europe Business Registers Working Group and CEO at THEIA Partners. He can be reached by email.

Business registrars in Europe have published millions of XBRL files and the number continues to grow. This trend started with companies’ annual accounts and is now spreading to companies’ various legal filings, affording new opportunities to increase transparency, share information among national registers, and facilitate benchmark analysis by end users.

The first XBRL projects in Europe were related mainly to the banking sector, initiated by the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS) using the Common Solvency Ratio Reporting framework (COREP) and the Consolidated Financial Reporting framework (FINREP) regulatory templates and taxonomies.

Now, however, another use of financial information’s universal language has appeared in Europe, concerning business registers. As business registers operate independently in each country, the push to embrace XBRL has been less coordinated. In fact, at the 2007 XBRL International Conference in Eindhoven and in the months following the conference, it came as something of a surprise to each national business registrar to learn that their neighbor countries also had started XBRL filing. The movement has quickly taken form, however: registers of major countries deal with more than one million national accounts each year, so projects focused on companies’ annual accounts quickly generated hundreds of thousands, then millions, of XBRL files.

On this front, the National Bank of Belgium’s Central Balance Sheet Office is considered among the pioneers. In April 2007 the NBB introduced free online software for drawing up annual accounts in the form of an XBRL file. The NBB now collects more than 92% of Belgian annual accounts in the XBRL format. A recent study estimates the net savings in 2008 of the introduction of online filing of annual accounts in the form of an XBRL file to be 17.3 million (23% of all filing charges) for Belgian enterprises and 0.5 million (45% of all filing charges) for nonprofit organizations.

Other European business registrars providing XBRL services include the following:

l              In the Netherlands, the Kamer van Koophandel has adapted its system to accept XBRL filings for financial statements from the year 2005 and further. Accounting software editors have been associated so that it is possible to send instances directly from their tools.

l              The German BunderAnzeiger offers choice among different filing formats including XBRL with the local GAAP taxonomy.

l              Infogreffe now publishes the XBRL financial statements of French companies.

l              In Italy, it is mandatory to deposit an XBRL instance as a signed annex to the annual account folder for companies closing their fiscal year after February 16, 2009.

l              Swedish, Danish, Serbian, and British registrars, among many others, have displayed a strong interest in the XBRL language or already benefit from its advantages.

As it is adopted by an increasing number of business registrars and annual accounts publishers across Europe, XBRL appears as their common language. This represents the first time that the same standard is used by so many registers, and opens opportunities for more efficiency and transparency. Even if local GAAPs remain local, and local regulations differ, it now becomes possible to produce consolidated data of cross-border companies, define transnational sector analysis, and offer new benchmarking capabilities by sharing the same technology.

With these opportunities in mind, some registrars are starting to exchange XBRL information with their neighbors, sharing annual accounts figures but also other economic or legal information like companies’ name and address updates. Making these first cross-border contacts develops new synergies, which may yet lead to defining widespread taxonomies and joining forces on IFRS consolidated accounts, whose quantity is reduced at each national level and therefore are worth a collaborative treatment.

To encourage such interactions, a Working Group has been created within the XBRL Europe association. XBRL Europe connects European jurisdictions and continent-wide organizations like the European Federation of Financial Analysts Societies (EFFAS) and the Global Trust Center (GTC). Its XEU Business Registers Working Group, created in late 2008, offers a place for business registrars and company information publishers to combine efforts and share ideas about XBRL projects and taxonomies.

During its first meetings, the Group prepared an overview of existing initiatives, based on an initial survey with answers from nine project leaders and completed with data from various studies undertaken by the Group’s members. For the next XBRL International Conference in Paris, the EU BR WG wants to transform this overview into a concrete “mapping diagram” showing the similarities and differences that exist across Europe for annual accounts filing with XBRL. This diagram should help identify and establish common and best practices, and consequently increase interoperability.

XBRL affords financial registrars common language and an opportunity for collaboration. Now we must seize the opportunity to speak this language, so that XBRL’s advantages widely enjoyed at national levels become a working reality at the level of all of Europe.