Written by Mike Willis Posted on July 31, 2007

Mike Willis was the Founding Chairman of XBRL International and is a Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers.

CFOs face a long list of issues all marked top priority. The temptation to cross off “adopt XBRL for reporting” is strong. Here are three common reasons why XBRL often gets pushed off the list of CFO priorities, and why CFOs should know more before they do so.

1. You want to tell your own story, and XBRL won’t allow that.

CFOs want to control the company’s message. They want to present the facts as they should be viewed by investors. Some believe XBRL provides a one-size-fits-all presentation where the company’s unique story messages get lost. It is important to company management that unique company messages be communicated to the market in an efficient manner.

What CFOs should know is that although most firms do not tag their reports, intermediaries do tag all company reports without input or guidance from CFOs. Company-reported information is tagged in accordance with each intermediary’s proprietary standard reporting template, rather than concepts agreed to and defined by the CFO.

Market intermediaries normalize, distort, omit, or simply change company reported information for distribution and resale to analysts, ratings agencies, auditors, regulators, and others. The result is a distortion of company information delivered days after it is reported. The data provided by intermediaries is incorrect as often as 30% of the time and incomplete 100% of the time.

CFOs can readily assess the level of intermediary alteration by attempting to reconcile their reported information with that obtained directly from intermediaries or at the publicly available finance pages at Google.com, Yahoo.com, or MSN.com. Talk with analysts who purchase intermediary data about the accuracy, granularity, completeness, and timeliness of company information purchased from intermediaries and you’ll hear their complaints. Compare the volume of information provided by intermediaries with that contained within company reports, and you’ll see how much is left out.

If CFOs really want to tell their own story, they should tag their reports themselves. Companies can thus be assured that their company-specific, unique information is being used and interpreted as intended.

2. You do not want to use a standard reporting template, which is what XBRL is.

Forcing unique or company-specific concepts into a standard reporting template restricts communication and inappropriately normalizes, aggregates, or otherwise homogenizes information, thereby diminishing its intended meaning and value.

What CFOs should know is that they unwittingly let their company’s information be forced into the intermediary standard reporting templates. CFOs have no input, access, or visibility to the tagging of their reports by these third parties.

XBRL US GAAP Taxonomies look like a standard reporting template, since they contain a robust listing of mandatory and commonly used reporting concepts. However, appearances are deceiving. XBRL taxonomies are ‘extensible,’ i.e., they can be extended or customized to meet unique company reporting needs.

US GAAP Taxonomies are also designed to express required and commonly used reporting concepts. They are not designed to express every single reporting aspect occurring in every company report. Extensible taxonomies are a beginning point that companies can repeatedly leverage and extend to express their unique reporting concepts (e.g. unique revenue or expense items, unique company segments, etc.) at the lowest cost possible.

The extensibility of XBRL taxonomies provides CFOs with the flexibility to articulate unique and highly distinguishable company information. As a standardized language, XBRL enables communication of individual company concepts well beyond the scope of standard intermediary reporting templates.

If CFOs do not want to use a standard reporting template, they should consider extending the XBRL GAAP Taxonomies to express their unique company-specific reporting concepts. By leveraging the commonly used reporting concepts articulated in the taxonomies, CFOs can focus on differentiating their story by creating unique company-specific concepts, or extensions.

3. You want to reduce your reporting costs, and XBRL raises them.

The tagging of company financial reports takes time and increases costs. When tags are applied after the fact to completed company reports, incremental time, costs, and processes are incurred. CFOs should not, and do not have to, sustain incremental reporting costs to increase the accuracy, completeness, and timeliness of reported information for access and reuse by investors.

What CFOs should know is that XBRL enables significant reporting process cost and time reductions. John Stantial, Director of Financial Reporting at United Technologies Corporation (”UTC”), outlines in “ROI on XBRL” how to realize a 20%-plus reduction in reporting process time and costs. John has been tagging UTC company reports in XBRL for two years and understands the additional costs incurred by carrying out this tagging after the fact. As a result, he is moving tagging further back in the reporting processes to eliminate extra costs, enhance reporting processes, and reduce overall time and expenses.

Cost savings can be realized by moving standardization further back in reporting processes and not incrementally tagging completed company reports. Savings result from enhanced report production and review processes. XBRL Taxonomies can be imported into reporting applications and directly mapped to company reporting concepts. Further, rather than circulating multiple draft versions of company documents among reviewers, the review is conducted directly within the original reporting application (e.g. Hyperion Financial Management, Cartesis, etc.) and the final version of company information is exported in the XBRL format.

If CFOs want to reduce their reporting costs, they should embrace standardization earlier in their reporting processes and not defer tagging of completed company reports as an incremental effort.

Summary

The current business reporting supply chain is highly manual, consistently inefficient, and painfully costly for companies and investors. CFOs are well served to actively participate in development, use, and extension of XBRL taxonomies for reporting in order to:

1. More effectively tell their own story;
2. Ensure that unique reporting concepts are clearly articulated; and
3. Reduce reporting costs.

CFOs can further minimize the risk of reporting in XBRL by participating in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Voluntary Filing Program (VFP). Information about the VFP and the SEC’s other interactive data initiatives can be found at the XBRL Spotlight page.

UPDATE�August 2, 2007

A recent decision by the SEC to allow companies to broadcast their quarterly results via RSS feeds will work to further reduce distribution and analysis time and costs. A recent article at the Register includes the following remark:

Embracing new technologies this week was Sun Microsystems, which – after months of lobbying SEC chairman Christopher Cox – got the OK to broadcast its quarterly results via RSS feed and through its website, in addition to the usual routes of filings and calls with Wall St investors.

This further standardization of the supply chain distribution platform adds to the cost effectiveness of the prospective reporting and analysis processes.

Written by Bob Schneider     Posted July 25, 2007

In a recent post, I gave an overview of a KPMG report that presents the thoughts of 11 financial leaders on key accounting issues (most notably, for our purposes, XBRL). A few days ago, I noted my disagreements with the thinking of one of the leaders, Philip Broadley, Group Finance Director of Prudential. If I can restate his points I hope impartially they are:

(1) XBRL will bias users against half-yearly statements and toward the shorter time-span quarterlies;
(2) XBRL will make users focus on the numbers alone, rather than explanation of the numbers;
(3) XBRL will exacerbate reporting differences among various financial jurisdictions by accentuating their different accounting cultures and traditions.

In my previous post, I dealt with item (1). In this post, I’ll discuss item (2), and follow up with a final post on (3).

Here’s how the authors report Broadley’s thoughts on XBRL and company numbers:

“The concept of XBRL, with its ability to pluck figures from a set of accounts and compare them with those from another company, doesn’t fit with the Broadley approach.  Accounts should be for explanation rather than information. You need to report what management thinks, not just the numbers. I’d rather focus on getting the narrative reporting right than follow the XBRL approach.”

I don’t agree with any of this. Analysts will always compare the numbers of one firm with those of another; it’s what analysts do. The question is how well the numbers reflect actual business conditions and performance, and how comparable they are among different companies.

These are tasks for which interactive data is perfectly suited. If, in fact, there is an “XBRL approach” to financial reporting, it means that — by providing data that is more accurate than what has been historically offered by data aggregators, and by eliminating data re-keying and the inevitable accompanying errors — analysts will have much better data to work with, and much more time to refine those numbers to reflect business reality.

Not only will XBRL give analysts more time for focusing on “explanation” rather than “information,” it will also be integral to both the creation and analysis of the narrative reporting Broadley prefers.

Like many accounting terms, narrative reporting is defined in various ways. It commonly includes the Management Discussion & Analysis (MD&A) section of the 10-K. It can take in such items as the CEO’s letter in the annual report; discussion of strategy, objectives, legal proceedings, uses of capital, segment reporting, intangibles (such as the value of brand names and company reputation), and risk factors; and assessments of environmental, employee, and social conditions as they pertain to the company. Notably, it often encompasses the disclosure of key performance indicators (KPIs), which can be defined as “quantified measurements that reflect the critical success factors of an entity.”

In a speech last year to the SEC Government-Business Forum on Small Business Capital Formation, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute addressed the value of XBRL in narrative reporting:

“We shouldn’t leave the impression that interactive data is only useful for financial statement numbers. Interactive data, or XBRL, can also be used for text disclosures, and in the same way. As long as a text disclosure is consistently defined, it can be searched and displayed as easily as a number.

For example, many oil companies disclose their oil and natural gas reserves in their financial reports. This number usually appears in a footnote text discussion of the issue. As long as all companies define reserves and identify the text as a discussion of reserves, XBRL would allow a computer, in seconds, to compare all their reserves.

In the same way, XBRL will also make MD&A discussions in the prospectus more useful to investors by facilitating comparison between companies. For example, if an MD&A contains a discussion of market share, this data will also be searchable in all filings and displayed in seconds in a spread sheet. This will also make things easier for issuers, because the company’s data system can be structured to keep track of data on market share or reserves, and plug it in automatically as the 10-K is being prepared.”

Let’s look at narrative reporting in another jurisdiction: Britain. The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is the UK’s “..independent regulator responsible for promoting confidence in corporate reporting and governance.” The Accounting Standards Board (ASB) is the operating body of the FRC responsible for issuing accounting standards. In January, the ASB published a review of narrative financial reporting by listed companies in the UK. In their press release on the study, the ASB cited four areas that required improvement, including (a) better disclosure of forward-looking information; and (b) better identification of KPIs, both financial and nonfinancial.

In my previous post questioning any bias of XBRL toward quarterlies over the half-yearly interim, I cited the essay of the leading audit chiefs and their call for a new reporting model with forward-looking information, versus the historical data now provided in financial reports. The audit chiefs see XBRL as central to this change:

Just as the Internet is rapidly changing the way individuals and businesses engage in commercial and social activities, a major project under way in the financial arena the Global XBRL Initiative promises to revolutionize the way investors, governments and companies themselves use, analyze and generate information. This global XBRL initiative, or perhaps other reporting-related technologies, are likely at some point to revolutionize the entire company reporting model what information is presented and how, and how it is audited. Clearly, a range of intangibles that are not well measured, or not measured at all, under current accounting conventions are driving company performance. Investors and other stakeholders in business information understandably want to know what those intangibles are, and how they might plausibly affect how businesses perform in the future.

Let’s look specifically at KPIs. Robert Eccles, an advisor to the Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium (EBRC), has written on this blog about his meeting with Chairman Cox in December 2006 “to talk about how XBRL could be extended into broader narrative reporting, such as for the MD&A and 10K, and for industry-specific key performance indicators.” Mr. Wallison does a nice job of portraying the importance of XBRL in EBR and the role of KPIs:

Finally, there is enhanced business reporting. I would be surprised if many of you have heard much about enhanced business reporting, or EBR, since the idea is still in the germination stage.

It’s an effort to make up for the deficiencies of GAAP that I described earlier by identifying the elements that drive increases in company value in each industry, and developing metrics that will measure a company’s performance with respect to each of these elements.

The value drivers are called key performance indicators (or KPIs), and once they are in place for an industry it will be possible to compare companies on this basis as well as their financial performance in GAAP terms.

The relationship between XBRL and EBR is very close. XBRL is about format; EBR is about substance. If the substance — the information about companies that goes beyond the financial statements — can be developed effectively, XBRL provides the format through which this information can be quickly and inexpensively searched and used.

In summary, I feel comfortable stating that:

(a) XBRL does support explanation, not mere information;
(b) XBRL can report what management thinks, not just the numbers; and
(c) When it comes to narrative reporting, XBRL is not part of the problem, but part of the solution.

Despite my strong feelings on the topic, I know other readers may well feel differently about these matters. I encourage you to post your thoughts by clicking the Comments link below.

Written by Bob Schneider     Posted July 18, 2007

In a recent post, I recommended a KPMG report that summarized the views of 11 financial leaders analysts, regulators, CFOs, standards-setters on global accounting issues. I promised to respond to their comments on XBRL, about which the leaders were specifically asked and were quoted at some length.

In a field as intellectually fertile as XBRL, it’s not surprising that I didn’t have to read very far to find remarks that demanded extensive reply. The first leader presented is Philip Broadley, Group Finance Director at Prudential; here are his thoughts on interactive data as offered by the reporter:

He is less convinced that technologies like XBRL have yet found a place in the financial reporting world.  It is a question of what should the frequency of reporting be?  he said. He is a strong supporter of EU internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy’s oft-repeated view that quarterly reporting will not be introduced in Europe.  It would simply increase the possibility of manipulation, said Broadley.  Let’s fix half-yearly reporting first. And the concept of XBRL, with its ability to pluck figures from a set of accounts and compare them with those from another company, doesn’t fit with the Broadley approach.  Accounts should be for explanation rather than information. You need to report what management thinks, not just the numbers. I’d rather focus on getting the narrative reporting right than follow the XBRL approach. It is down to the culture again.  Will XBRL information from a company in Malaysia say the same thing as the information from a company in France?

I’m always wary of criticizing the edited remarks of an interviewee, especially when an hour’s worth of someone’s utterances with their stops and starts, twists and turns are summarized in a single paragraph. Still, none of Broadley’s remarks seem on target. If I can restate his points — I hope not tendentiously — they are:

(1) XBRL will bias users against half-yearly statements and toward the shorter time-span quarterlies;
(2) XBRL will make users focus on the numbers alone, rather than explanation of the numbers;
(3) XBRL will exacerbate reporting differences among various financial jurisdictions by accentuating their different accounting cultures and traditions.

In this post, I’ll deal with item (1) and follow-up shortly with a second post on (2) and (3).

Quarterly financial statements have a long history in US financial reporting. The NYSE has required quarterlies for listed companies for over 60 years. In 1970, the SEC mandated the quarterly 10-Q. Although globalization of world capital markets, the speed of information delivery, and the convergence of accounting standards may put the quarterly versus half-yearly argument in greater focus, it certainly predates XBRL and much of the computer revolution. This year the EU issued new requirements for quarterly reports which, although not as comprehensive as the SEC 10-Q, do seem to indicate a trend toward interims of shorter duration.

If we limit the debate to the impact on investors, the tradeoffs between quarterly and half-yearly statements were summarized nicely in The Capital Market Implications of the Frequency of Interim Financial Reporting: An International Analysis, a study published last year by Rutgers University:

"More frequent interim reports could mean that security prices reflect the latest firm-specific information, leading to more efficient security pricing. [However] to the extent that more frequent interim reports force firms to make estimates in situations where more informed estimates are available only with the passage of time, the more frequent interim reports may be subject to more error (as viewed from the annual report standpoint)." Thus, investor response to the more frequent interim reports may induce greater volatility in security prices."

Thus it’s the competition between timeliness and accuracy that’s key to the debate. But where’s the impact from XBRL? At the margins, interactive data might improve "informed estimates," and that might push users toward interims of shorter periods, i.e., quarterlies. But as the authors note, more informed estimates for allocating operating costs, income taxes, etc. are "available only with the passage of the time." Whatever stunning powers XBRL may have, trying to make the hands of a clock move faster is best left to the likes of Uri Geller and his paranormal cohort.

Indeed, I can think of two ways XBRL may strengthen the case for the half-yearly. First, XBRL speeds the closing process. Thus, if the half-yearly closing can take as few as six days, financial officers who prefer the longer time-span but sense investors think the interval between reports is too long can point to a fast closing in support of the six-month interim.

Second, as John White made clear in his presentation at the SEC Interactive Data Roundtable in March, XBRL will make the analysis and distribution of the information contained in interims much faster. "Not only preparers, but investors, analysts, journalists, etc, will all have instant access to the same documents once filed." Again, users who think the 180-day reporting period is just too long may be assuaged by the fact that, once published, the statements can be quickly analyzed and reviewed.

None of this is to imply that XBRL cannot deliver much more company financial information much more quickly. The term "continuous reporting" is a bit ambiguous; however, it comprehends releases of financial information on a weekly, daily, hourly, or even real-time basis. The concept has been around for a long time. Indeed, a Forbes article dated February 11, 1985, on "continuous computerized reporting" includes a prediction by Sandy Burton, former chief accountant of the SEC, that investors  "could be tapping into a steady, computerized stream of information via their personal computers in only 10 or 15 years."

Certainly XBRL brings continuous reporting much closer to reality. In an essay published late last year (and which I commented on in December 12 and December 15 posts), the CEOs of the major audit firms declare that a "brave new world of company reporting is already visible." For the accounting chiefs, the key issue is not the length of time covered by interim statements. In fact, they’re rather dismissive of all periodic reports, which they view as mere historical statements lacking predictive information:

"Financial statements are backward looking documents. They tell how a company has performed in some recent period. Perhaps some of the information contained in the financials is indicative of future performance, but much of it is not.In an environment of user-determined customization, users are likely to care less about the formats that have historically dominated the disclosure of company information balance sheets, income statements and statements of cash flows and far more about new formats that could be developed by our profession, analysts and users themselves."

Their argument, in fact, is that the continuous reporting made possible by XBRL will reverse the short-term outlook of investors:

Finally, and perhaps counter-intuitively, more frequently reported information may reverse some or much of the short-term-ism about which corporate managers and others have long complained. Once investors have almost real-time access to financial and other information about companies, forecasting quarterly profit numbers will no longer be relevant, while forecasts of daily or weekly profits will be pointless.

Whether this "brave new world" is in fact a utopia of transparent financial reporting or an Orwellian nightmare of information overload can and will be fiercely debated. But clearly the battle will be fought on terms much different than whether interims should be 90 or 180 days.

Written by Conor O’Kelly     Posted on July 10, 2007

Conor O’Kelly is the Chairman of XBRL Ireland and represents Ireland on the International Steering Committee. He is currently 1st Vice Chairman of XBRL International. He has ten years’ background in global IT managed services, global project management, and strategic IT business planning with Hewlett-Packard and Ericsson. Mr. O’Kelly is a Chartered Accountant with an MSc in IT Management and a past member of the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland.

Thursday 14th June 2007 saw the surprise re-election of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern as Ireland’s Prime Minister for an unprecedented third term. The Teflon Taoiseach, born and reared on Dublin’s modest working-class north side, had survived public scrutiny of his failed marriage and his personal finances in the days before the Irish election by his parliamentary partners, the Progressive Democrats (PD). The result? The collapse of the PDs as a political force in Ireland. Why? Because after 20 years of economic prosperity, Ahern had led Ireland to be the economic envy of Europe. The people were happy with Bertie and why fix what isn’t broken?

Ireland’s high profile prosperity has been built on successive Irish government policies in the 1980s and 1990s of public-private partnership, investment in infrastructure, attracting inward US multinational investment, a favorable tax regime, building a world class technology sector, and resolving thorny Constitutional claims to Northern Ireland with the UK. Flagship firms answered. Dell, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, and Vodafone committed multibillion-dollar investments in European facilities servicing the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) regions from Ireland. Coupled with this was European Union-sponsored investment in road, rail, and telecommunications infrastructure and a policy that embraced the Information Society.

The highly successful XML-based Revenue Online Service (ROS) was launched by the Revenue Commissioners (the Irish Tax Authority) as was REACH, the agency reporting to Ahern’s Department of the Taoiseach, to develop Ireland’s information society. Electronic filing of tax returns through http://www.ros.ie/ has proven a role model in electronic tax administration.

However, recent developments have cooled the Celtic Tiger’s roar. The 10 new EU member states welcomed by Ahern at the European Union Enlargement Ceremony in Dublin in May 2004 now seek to emulate Ireland’s success. Attempts to introduce electronic voting during the last round of elections proved spectacularly unsuccessful and the voting machines were mothballed. The government-sponsored Digital Hub, developed with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has failed to make its mark. The highly anticipated Dublin Port Tunnel, the second-longest urban underground tunnel in Europe linking Dublin Airport to Dublin Sea Port, opened late and over budget (cost $1 billion), having failed to anticipate the size of new Super Trucks which now don’t fit into the tunnel. Mounting house price inflation has placed housing all but out of reach of the young population.

The days of US President Bill Clinton and Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern swiping smart cards in the multilingual Gateway EMEA Support Centre to digitally sign inter-government agreements in September 1998 are now a distant memory. The Gateway factory has closed and Clinton is gone.

So what has happened to the promise that XBRL ushered in, when, in the same year, XBRL Ireland took root within working groups in the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland?  Forging ahead on a wave of enthusiasm that the information society offered, XBRL Ireland developed a number of proof on concept v1 taxonomies. Spurred on by the wave of confidence flowing over the country, the band of merry men (and women) generated proof of concept instance documents using Microsoft Notepad. Further development continued on a series of v2 taxonomies as the limitations of v1 became known and further recruits were enrolled.  XBRL Ireland launched one of the first XBRL jurisdictions in Europe in 2004 with good buy-in from the main regulators, tax agency, companies registration office, Big 4 accounting firms, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland, a jurisdiction and thought leadership seen as being ahead of its time.

Prevailing sense amongst Irish government decision makers now call for proven business cases, evidence of widespread market adoption, ease of use, and a well documented cost benefit analysis. Projects not meeting these requirements are off the agenda. So Ireland has adopted a “wait and see” strategy. Keenly watching developments in neighbouring UK where the UK Government has mandated filing from 2011 and regularly exchanging notes with the Dutch Government’s NTP (Netherlands Taxonomy Project), project policy makers are happy to let others do the heavy lifting in bringing XBRL to the market . At the moment, XBRL Ireland is a solution without a problem.

The XBRL Ireland team, happy to wait it out, have exported their knowledge and best practice to emerging jurisdictions. Irish attendees were amongst the best represented of the May 2007 CEBS COREP/FINREP in Munich Germany. They contribute regularly within the working groups of the XBRL International Consortium and took the lead at training workshops during the 15th XBRL International Conference. Behind the scenes Irish members have been vocal in their support of XBRL amongst several European Community regulators to drive regional efficiencies in electronic reporting. Indeed, XBRL Ireland currently occupies the Vice Chair of XBRL International and is currently driving emerging policy within Europe.

With Irish government attention focused on ensuring the economy doesn’t overheat nor lose its enviable economic position in Europe, XBRL is a solution without a problem. But that doesn’t stop the small island nation punching above its weight on the international XBRL stage.

Written by Mike Skutinsky Jr.     Posted on July 3, 2007

Mike Skutinsky Jr. is Executive Director of RIXML.org.  He can be reached at Skutinsky@rixml.org

This post will be a brief, high-level entry about RIXML (Research Information eXchange Markup Language) and XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).  While both groups have similar DNA in their structure and objectives, there are distinctive differences and focuses within both organizations.  I will assume that anyone reading this blog understands the XBRL organization and technology, so I will focus mainly on RIXML the Organization as well as RIXML the Technology.

RIXML.org was founded over seven years ago as a consortium of sell-side, buy-side, and associate (vendor) firms that today account for 23 fee-paying members. While our schema is an  open source  product and can be used by anyone free of charge, the RIXML.org members are the ones who make the decisions and participate in the design of the schema.  RIXML was created to address the tagging, distribution, and retrieval of the investment research product nothing more and nothing less.  We have stayed true to our initial purpose, and today RIXML represents the standard for tagging the investment research product.

The use of XML technology is prevalent throughout the financial services industry:

• RIXML (Research Information eXchange Markup Language)
• XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language)
• MDDL (Market Data Description Language)
• FIXML (Financial Information eXchange Markup Language)
• NewsML (NEWS Markup Language)
• FpML (Financial Products Markup Language)

Each technology addresses a specific part of the financial services mosaic and seems to exist well within its own environment.  For this initial entry I will focus on RIXML and XBRL only.

How would you define the use of XBRL and/or RIXML? XBRL is used for the tagging and definition of financial data, while RIXML is used for the delivery/distribution/retrieval of the whole research report product.  We at RIXML do not attempt to define financial data; we will use the definitions created by the XBRL organization.  Similarly, if we ever need to use market data elements, we would defer to the standards established by the MDDL consortium.

A simple analogy would be this: Picture the gift you get for your birthday. The present in the box would be XBRL data (financial data); the box itself, the wrapping paper, ribbon, bow, and To/From card would be RIXML (research tags).  They are separate and distinct, but both serve to deliver and define elements of the research product.

RIXML and XBRL Collaboration
Both organizations have strong points and structures that the other can benefit from.  RIXML.org has recently become a provisional jurisdiction in the XBRL International (XII) organization, and we look forward to a long and prosperous partnership.  RIXML now will have a more global footprint, access to a bigger and stronger support structure, and exposure to a fantastic standards group.  XII will now have access to Wall Street firms, the ability to work the XBRL standard into the world of the research analyst, and the capacity to further advance the use of the XBRL product through the pipeline to the ultimate end-user/consumer.

I look forward to expanding on these themes in another entry in the very near future.