Following the agreement between XBRL and the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) earlier in the year to cooperate on corporate actions standards, Donald Donahue, chairman and CEO of DTCC, has joined XBRL US’s board of directors. XBRL US, the non-profit consortium for XML business reporting standards in the North American marketplace, says that DTCC is also becoming a member of its consortium.
Donahue is a 20 year veteran of DTCC and the Depository Trust Company (DTC), and previously served as DTCC’s chief operating officer, head of customer marketing and development and DTC’s chief information officer, among other roles. Donahue comments: “As members of XBRL US, DTCC will provide the subject matter expertise to the development of data standards – usable by issuers as well as market professionals – that will be more accurate, better defined and easier to process.”
XBRL US is responsible for the development of the collection of business and financial terms (taxonomies) for US GAAP reporting, developed under contract with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to the consortium, its mission is to develop these collections of terms for private and public sector business reporting applications and to promote the use of the XBRL standard.
Alfred Berkeley, chairman, Pipeline Financial Systems and chair of the XBRL US board, explains the strategic decision to move to into corporate actions: “The expansion of the XBRL US work programme into reference data is a logical next step to making XML-based information for business information reporting ubiquitous.”
XBRL reckons the use of structured XBRL data for corporate actions can enable the direct flow of electronically tagged corporate action announcement information to all parties, thereby improving the efficiency, timeliness and accuracy of the communication between issuers and investors. XBRL US and DTCC are in the process of developing a prototype collection of terms, or taxonomy, for use with corporate actions data.
