XBRL US is hoping a $20,000 grand prize will entice some creative thinkers to develop an open source analytical tool for mining financial data that will help ignite greater utility for XBRL.
The nonprofit consortium for XBRL business reporting standards in the United States is calling on any company, team, or individual developer to submit its most inventive and useful application leveraging XBRL-formatted data from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database. XBRL US will provide tools and support to any prospective developers, including access to a database of XBRL financial fundamentals form all public companies and documentation on how to work with XBRL data. The consortium also promises to provide access to XBRL expertise through in-person and web-based meetings and to encourage collaboration between developers and end user communities.
John Rogers, president and CEO at CFA Institute, which is a sponsor for the contest, said the idea is to foster a variety of innovative applications that will demonstrate the power of XBRL to deliver greater insight into financial data. "Corporate data in XBRL format will clearly benefit investors, analysts, and a host of others by making more accurate, actionable data available in ways not even imagined today," he said.
The submissions will be judged by a panel of experts who are always keen for new ideas on how to gather and use financial data, including: Alfred Berkeley, chairman of Pipeline Trading Systems and former president of NASDAQ; Marc Donner, head of Google Finance; Eric Gillespie, managing partner at Viano Capital; Vijay Khanna, general partner at early stage venture capital firm GIV Ventures; and Paul Ratnaraj, director of advanced initiatives at Wharton Research Data Services, which also is sponsoring the contest.
All publicly traded companies in the United States are now required, to varying degrees depending on their market capitalizations, to tag financial data and submit it to the SEC through XBRL. The SEC requires it to make financial statement data more accessible and easier to analyze, but tools to enable such access and analysis are still developing. The consortium is hoping the contest will flesh out some new ideas that will drive XBRL accessibility and utility for prospective consumers, in addition to building awareness about the wealth of data that is available via XBRL.
XBRL Spain is operating a similar contest, with entries due Aug. 25. There, XBRL leaders are planning to award five prizes of 1,000 euros each. The contest seeks entries in one of five specific categories intended to develop ideas that could potentially be developed into open-source software through public fundraising. The winners are scheduled to be announced Sept. 9.
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