Tony Fragnito has acquired over 20 years experience managing finance and operations within for-profit and tax-exempt anizations. He has worked with volunteer leadership for over 15 years in both the cational and biomedical research fields. Throughout his career he has managed financial, ernance, business service and technology issues both from an operational and strategic perspective. Tony joined XBRL International, Inc. as the anizations first CEO in 2007.

Mr. Fragnito graduated from Gee Mason University in Fairfax, VA and earned his CPA in 1988.

It is known that the most important mission of XBRL International (XII) is to drive adoption of XBRL. How do you evaluate previous adoptions of XBRL around the world?

We are seeing XBRL adoption in a broadening arena of business and financial reporting, which has always been part of the mission of XII, to have XBRL regnized as the business reporting standard worldwide. Most of the earliest adoption of XBRL focused on reflecting the reporting elements required for regulated financial reporting, which is nsistent with the early requirements gathering process and implementations of the XBRL technology. The facts that the US SEC, JFSA and IASCF, along with numerous other untry specific acunting requirements, are reflected today in XBRL shows a strong mmitment to the benefits of standardized reporting using the XBRL specification.

What we see today are broader uses of XBRL in the areas of banking regulation and reporting, risk assessment, ernance, sustainability and extra financial information. What is particularly exciting is that adopters of the specification are starting to realize the benefits of inrporating XBRL earlier in their reporting cycles. The beneficial aspects of standardized reporting elements, so valuable to the regulatory mmunity, also have great value internally. We at XII are most enuraged by the trend to utilize XBRL within the internal reporting processes of anizations. This is part of an evolution in the understanding and aeptance of the technology and approaches the true potential of XBRL to enhance reporting processes, not just improve data validation.

What is your greatest achievement (or the most significant event) in the previous two years, since you are leading XII?

XII has achieved great suess through the dedication of a large number of mmitted volunteers over many years. The individuals and mpanies involved with XBRL are truly visionary. They have mmitted untold hours and dollars to realize a vision of a more efficient system for sharing business information globally.

To work with these dedicated individuals, to expand the global work of XII and to evolve the ernance and staff to support these individuals has been an honour.

Currently, there is a 24 full jurisdictions, mostly from developed untries. How do you expect to run the process of establishing new jurisdictions when the focus is going to be transferred to less developed untries? Whether the whole process may slow down or based on experience of predecessor untries the whole process may run faster?

XII has direct membership options for mpanies in developing untries – and we are seeing increased interest in this membership category. XII also has the ability to define “jurisdictions” as a untry or region, providing options for developing regions.

There are a variety of membership models using by international standards bodies, and we have looked at them all. Because XBRL is an international standard which often is applied to untry specific reporting requirements (i.e. untry specific reporting standards) our model works very well to advocate and support adoption.

What are the key moments in the process of adoption of XBRL in some untry?

The key is finding that decision maker or influential individual who is willing to challenge the status quo and who is aware of the international trends in business reporting and regulation. XBRL adoption is a fundamental shift in the transparency, and efficiency, of business reporting. To be effectively implemented it requires llaboration, mmunication, openness and partnership between the reporting, regulatory and vendor mmunity.

Currently, there is XBRL mandate in progress for first 500 mpanies in the United States. How do you evaluate progress of this project so far?

The XBRL adoption project by the US –SEC is really a model for the elements I mentioned above – llaboration, mmunication, openness and partnership. The US SEC, along with XBRL US and a broad range of other ntributors, has implemented a significant adoption of XBRL in a very transparent and suessful project. I predict this particular implementation of XBRL will be looked at as a model for best practices worldwide.

Is there some project, currently in progress, that you can highlight as very interesting?

I personally find the projects related to the rction of regulatory burden particularly interesting. Within the herlands and Australia these projects are being referred to as “Standard Business Reporting”. The XBRL specification is a major mponent of the technological aspect of these projects.

The basic idea is to rce the regulatory burden to the reporting entities through a llaborative effort between regulators and businesses. To identify the re information needed and to work, again llaboratively, with the vendor, regulatory and reporting entities to define and llect only those data elements required – using a standardized format – XBRL.

What are the key innovations and benefits which XBRL will ntribute to the acunting in the future?

The acunting profession is generally struggling with the idea of denstructing standardized forms and the implications for assurance with the idea of standardized data – which can be nsumed as individual data elements. I am nfident the assurance issues will be resolved.

Acunting information, at its heart, is information for mparison and analysis. Most nsumers of business information use a variety of sources, both financial and “extra financial” in their analysis and judgments. XBRL will bring these data sources under the same standard and allow more efficient and higher quality analysis. XBRL will also help to facilitate nvergence by making mparison of reporting under different acunting standards more efficient – hopefully driving further nvergence – again benefiting global mmerce.

XBRL is known as a standard for financial reporting. Are there projects from other specific areas that are based on the adoption of XBRL?

Many. XBRL is being used for mutual funds research reports, sustainability reporting, statistics, banking, tracking of money laundering, insurance, business registries, MD&A disclosures and many other areas in business reporting. XBRL certainly has a stronghold in the area of financial reporting – but it clearly can handle a broad range of reporting requirements.

One of inevitable question when we talk about XBRL is software support. What do you think about the quality of software solutions that are currently on the market?

This is one of those questions that can always be answered, “it uld be better”. A large number of international and regional software vendors are mmitted to providing XBRL capabilities and are active participants in the XII anization. As with any technology trend historical business models can be challenged and nsumer demand drives investment and innovation. To this point XBRL adoption has been lead by the regulatory mmunity. Many of the solutions to date have focused on this market and the reporting entities with solutions geared toward development of taxonomies, llection and reporting of data in XBRL format. As more data beme available we will see higher demand for analytical tools and XBRL enabled ERP and even transaction level systems.

The maximum benefit of standardizing data will be realized when that standardization mes at the transaction level. We see growing demand and tools to acmplish these objectives.

Does XII and in which way (uld) support software start-up projects in with respect to XBRL?

Our focus is to understand and evaluate the business requirements for the specification, evolve the specification to meet aepted requirements and provide the support resources to facilitate adoption of XBRL.

The software mmunity is driven by nsumer demand, which has been steadily growing as adoption expands globally. Our position remains that the market will drive the demands and requirements for software tools and solutions. Through the XII nsortium we bring together members from the entire supply chain, and each party benefits from those interactions.

There are some opinions that the disadvantage of XBRL is that it is primarily mputer readable language. Do you think that Inline XBRL may be the answer for this?

Some might say it is a disadvantage, I would say it is the advantage. The fact is mputers are very good at sorting through huge amounts of information, based upon human instruction, and returning the data we are interested in. Just think of the amount of information available today on the inter. Without some means to “search” this huge store of information it would really be worthless. I view XBRL in a similar fashion. Business information, prior to XBRL, was not easily searchable and therefore not very valuable.

Inline XBRL, along with other technologies which will surely be developed, will provide the functionality to display and link data from within XBRL instances directly to documents and webs. This is, yet, another example of improved functionality as a result of market requirements, which will ntinue to evolve both the standard and software tools.

At the end, does it seems to you that everybody are still more focused on the filling of XBRL instance documents, but not so much on using their benefits in report analysis?

Yes – but this is really a function of the adoption curve and the volume of data available today in XBRL. I expect this will change rapidly.

We also anticipate, and are experiencing, greater interest in moving XBRL back further in the anization – to the transaction layer. Up until recently XBRL was viewed as a “report then nvert” idea. Individual mpanies are starting to realize the benefits and value to their internal information systems and reporting through the use of XBRL. I predict this will create another wave of adoption in the near future.