Geoffroy de Urtasun is nsultant at THEIA Partners, a nsulting mpany based in Paris, helping banks, investment firms, and financial departments to set up and maintain their business and regulatory information supply chains. Guillaume Fénelon is Business Development Director at Infogreffe, the mputer platform for French registers.

The first XBRL project in France has been FINREP, launched by the Bank of France as a national implementation of the European reporting frameworks REP and FINREP.

XBRL’s implementation in France ntinues with the development of a new global banking regulatory reporting regime called SURFI, mplemented by the business register platform Infogreffe, which uses XBRL for mpanies’ financial statements.

SURFI Regulatory Reporting to the Bank of France

Within the French territory, the Banking mmission, hosted by the Bank of France, is in charge of supervising banks and investment mpanies. The mmission expects from financial institutions that they periodically transmit various risk and acunting statements on their activity.

These institutions are required to produce reporting in three frameworks: REP, FINREP, and BAFI. REP and FINREP are based on European inspiration, while BAFI reporting includes information necessary for local risk and acunting supervision per French rules as well as moary indicators for European Central Bank statistics.

Begun in 1993, BAFI has undergone an important overhaul: the SURFI Project. SURFI — Système Unifié de Reporting Financier / Unified System of Financial Reporting — aims to ensure ntinuity in supervision while simplifying institutions’ reporting burden by rationalizing the circuits of llection and using the XBRL reporting standard.

By using streamlined taxonomies to rce the required volume of reports, SURFI aims to enurage institutions to ncentrate more on the reports’ ntents, and enable them to devote more time to analyzing their regulatory indicators. The quality of the reports will be reinforced and the supervisory system may beme more aurate.

Currently, French financial institutions have started their own projects to prepare to send their first SURFI reports in July 2010. This again raises the importance of XBRL for the banking sector, already used to produce quarterly REP and FINREP reports.

XBRL Filing to Infogreffe

Infogreffe is the electronic platform for the 135 French registrars. It leads various dematerialization projects to facilitate aess to official data and juridical services: Infogreffe proposes a notification service ncerning the establishment of mpanies, and changes or deletions have been filed electronically since 2007.

As well, Infogreffe recently has developed a filing service for mpanies’ annual acunts (financial statements) using XBRL.

The project started in late 2007 using the XBRL France taxonomy for French Annual Acunts (“taxonomies mptes annuels”) based on the General Acunting Plan. This taxonomy has been enhanced with mpany identification data and information added by the registrars to obtain TCA-G and TCA-GI taxonomies — respectively used for the deposit and the publication of French Annual Acunts by Infogreffe.

Since this project was based on XBRL, it went well and fast. After only one year, the French mpanies’ 2007 financial statements can be downloaded as XBRL instances from the Infogreffe web Work is now in progress on further developments of taxonomies for other types of annual acunts like banks and insurance mpanies, and to include nsolidated statements and additional fiscal information.

Infogreffe has prepared an Inter portal for electronically filing annual statements. Moreover, Infogreffe is making offline software available to produce annual acunts in the XBRL format.

Guillaume Fénelon mments:

On the Infogreffe web, visitors can find mpanies’ legal information. Additionally, moving forward, Infogreffe also proposes dematerialized electronic deposit for formalities like registrations and annual statements on an additional portal. Through both of these portals, XBRL bemes the standard of reference for displaying elementary financial information.

Until now, the annual statements were digitized with pies or an extract of some key figures. Now,

With XBRL, the digital statements beme more and more detailed. New elementary data items can gradually be mpared with each other, and some other legal information will be included, like the identity of the mpany, or preferential rights and pledges.

The initiative gives rise to the first interactive database of French mpanies’ legal and financial information.

In June 2009, XBRL projects for acunting software mpanies are about to start. And each mpany now can send its annual acunt reports using XBRL and analyze financial statements from its clients and partners with this technology. XBRL, which had appeared in France through two large regulatory projects (and driven through international initiatives like SEC reporting) now is spreading to every French mpany.