"Dozens of Firms" Respond to SEC Request for Information on XBRL Utilization

WASHINGTON, DC - The US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC), which sent out a request for information (RFI) on applications for utilizing data in XBRL format this summer, has received responses from a large number of vendors, Inside Reference Data has learned.

The SEC mandated the use of XBRL - a data tagging standard that makes data discoverable - for company information last year, and in June, the commission received filings from the 500 largest companies in the US that use it.

Washington DC-based David Blaszkowsky, director, office of interactive disclosure, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who heads the XBRL initiative at the commission, says the SEC sent out the RFI as it is looking for an application to use internally to be able to analyze for its own benefit the XBRL data that has now started to come in.

Previously, it has seemed software firms were cautious about developing XBRL applications. There are now many countries around the world that have adopted XBRL for company information, but some cover limited data sets, and the US implementation differs in scale and complexity.

"I don't think software firms were going to make the investment before there was a sense it was going to pay off," says Blaszkowsky, adding that even despite the push by the commission to implement XBRL, there seemed to be a sense in the market that it was not going to happen, until the rules were actually adopted last December.

Still, now that the implementation has started, the software developments have also taken off. In the RFI process, the SEC received responses from dozens of vendors, including some large companies and some start-ups. "I was very happy with the number of responses as a first indicator of the size of the market," he says, adding that it exceeded expectations.

Most of the companies that took part in the RFI already have products, while others are looking to build applications. "We've been very pleased to see a number of vendor applications coming to the market for user tools as well as tagging tools," he says.

Yet, it is still early days. The SEC has only received the first 500 filings, and Blaszkowsky says the industry is just starting to use this information. "I have heard there are hedge funds and some other investors that have started using XBRL information, but no-one is sharing what they are doing," he says.