Lora Bentley spoke with Michelle Savage, communications VP for XBRL U.S., a non-profit consortium formed to promote wider adoption of the XML-based data format for business information. The group is preparing for its annual conference, slated for November in New York City.

Bentley: The Securities and Exchange Commission has required public companies to file their financials using XBRL tagging starting this year. From what you have seen and heard, how is that going?

Savage: Our conversations with filing agents indicate that most companies in the first wave of the SEC mandate are ready to go. And we believe many other companies in subsequent waves are getting geared up. We hold monthly educational webinars and typically get between 100-150 registrants, so most companies are getting educated, testing out tools and services and getting prepared to comply.

Bentley: Your annual conference is scheduled for November. What's on the agenda?

Savage: We have confirmed two keynotes so far: Donald Donahue, Chairman and CEO, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., and Jamie S. Miller, VP and Controller, General Electric Co. Topics we will be covering include US GAAP reporting case studies, convergence of standards (e.g., accounting standards, data and technology standards, etc.), using XBRL for analysis, using XBRL for internal purposes within the public company, what’s next for XBRL – corporate actions, proxy statement reporting, asset backed securities.

We also plan to hold filer training modules that participants can attend covering mapping elements to your financial statements, validation, creating extensions, tagging, etc. The goal of the training modules is to let registrants attend the specific sections that will be helpful to them given their stage in the process. The objective of the conference is to focus on the dialogue between issuers and investors, not just with SEC compliance – to set the stage for future developments in XBRL and to give companies and investors an idea of where XBRL is going, how they can leverage it and benefit from it.

Bentley: How does the joint effort between XBRL U.S.' and the DTCC figure into what's next for XBRL?

Savage: DTCC, SWIFT and XBRL U.S. put out a joint statement of direction to work together towards getting XBRL used for corporate actions data from creation to processing to analysis. Corporate actions are events that happen in the life of a company that a shareholder may need to base a decision on -- dividend announcement, stock split, merger, tender offer, etc. Today, companies announce these events through press releases and/or prospectuses submitted to the SEC, which typically do not follow any particular format or standard. Each “message” is picked up by custodians, clearing houses, data intermediaries and investors, interpreted/translated and rekeyed into a data standard followed by everyone in the industry EXCEPT the issuer (the standard is called ISO20022).

Investors who need to use this information often purchase multiple feeds of corporate actions data from custodians, data intermediaries, etc. and compare them to see if there’s a match. If there’s a match, they then feel confident that the data is correct and act on it. As you can imagine, this is time-consuming and error-prone. If the issuer were to follow the same data standard everyone else follows and were to put this in XBRL format, the chance for error would be virtually eliminated and timeliness vastly improved. The three organizations are working together to promote this process and application of XBRL.

Bentley: Isn't there legislation pending that would require the federal government to use XBRL as well?

Savage: HR3292 is a bill that was jointly introduced by representatives on both the Democratic and Republican sides of the House. The bill would require the use of XBRL for collection, dissemination and analysis of business information.