EDGAReView

With the financial markets under siege and experts agreeing that we are not through the tumult yet, everyone sees how critical the need is for greater transparency into business and financial information. XBRL may not be a magic pill, but it steps us closer to a cure for financial complexity and overload, says EDGAR Online’s CEO Philip Moyer.

Moyer has been speaking on the topic of transparency and the value of XBRL for analyzing asset-based securities and companies’ financial reports. In this video interview with Steve Gelsi for MarketWatch, he explains that that information on toxic assets is actually available; but the documentation (thousands and thousands of pages) is nearly impossible to put into analytical models.

In brief, XBRL (eXtensible Business reporting Language) is an open-source global standard for more transparent, reusable, interactive data. It brings regulators, CEOs/CFOs, the accounting profession, investors and the financial analyst community together around a common set of data elements that represent the health and potential of a business.

Over the next decade, we expect XBRL to move through three phases of adoption in the marketplace. The first, in response to the SEC’s mandate, is that companies start generating XBRL data. The second phase is the response of analysts as they discover the speed and capabilities of automated analysis. The third phase is the widespread adoption of interactive data by the entire financial supply chain. (Read the full article “XBRL: A Magic Pill?”)