Companies with experience in XBRL are asking some legitimate questions about who is making good use of the data they’re so meticulously producing in interactive format. Rest assured, says a representative of consortium RIXML.org, analysts are getting up to speed and putting XBRL to work.
In a recent PwC webcast on a broad range of XBRL issues, 22 percent of respondents said they assume very few people are using their XBRL reports based on traffic to their web sites, and an equal number said very few of their retail analysts are using their XBRL reports based on their discussion with those analysts. Only 10 percent of the webcast participants said they are using XBRL internally to analyze their peer companies.
Yet deep in the back offices of buy-side and sell-side firms, analysts are toiling away building and supporting firm models, says Sara Noble, interoperability chair for XBRL and RIXML at the research consortium. RIXML.org is a consortium of buy-side and sell-side firms and vendors that are working to define an open standard for categorizing, tagging, and distributing global investment research.
RIXML uses XML to facilitate data sharing between internet applications. The RIXML standard is to analysts what XBRL is to public companies. It enables firms to tag research content with sufficient detail that analysts can quickly search, sort, and filter aggregated research data.
Companies may get halting or unsteady answers about XBRL utility from their retail analysts because those analysts typically are not accessing company-specific information from company-specific websites, Noble said. Rather, they’re getting it in aggregated fashion from the firm’s back office, or they may be accessing company-specific XBRL data from RSS feeds rather than corporate websites. SEC’s EDGAR RSS feeds immediately and automatically broadcast exhibits directly to analysts, sparing them the trouble of fishing through corporate websites to manually download posted XBRL exhibits, Noble said.
Noble said there are a number of XBRL-enabled analytical applications in the market that are being used by analysts and companies alike, and analysts are networking and collaborating with respect to what they’re finding in XBRL exhibits. They’re especially speaking up about company-specific extensions that have gone too far, she said. She suggests companies troll the XBRL US web site for a listing of other XBRL-enabled analytical applications to get a sense for how analysts are getting up to speed on the utility of XBRL and how companies can even put it work for their own competitive analysis.
As it continues to develop, XBRL is becoming a little like social media for financial data, she said. Information can flow directly from the provider of the information to the consumer, with no intermediaries, she said. It’s a perfect opportunity for companies to use XBRL to highlight what’s truly unique about them.
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