ESMA Preps for Machine-Readable Financial Reports for 2020

All EU-domiciled issuers must use the new standard, dubbed the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF), from 2020. ESEF leverages an extension of the IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standard) Taxonomy and XHTML, an extension of the HTML language used to code web pages, and embeds inline XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language to tag any consolidated financial statements reported in IFRS format, making the statements structured, machine readable, and able to be transformed and used in other formats, such as SQL or Microsoft Excel without needing to re-key data.

“The draft RTS published today is a significant step forward in the digitization of financial information of European issuers. The introduction of the new reporting format in 2020 will make financial statements more accessible and more easily comparable for investors across the EU, supporting transparency and contributing to increased investor protection,” says ESMA chairman Steven Maijoor in a statement. “The single electronic format detailed in the RTS allows the analysis of large amounts of financial information without extensive nad burdensome manual processing, and will provide users of financial data with financial information that can be easily compared and transformed to other formats.”