XBRL: One standard – many applications 46 by Bruno Tesnière, Richard Smith and Mike Willis the journal • Tackling the key issues in banking and capital markets Bruno Tesnière Richard Smith Mike Willis Partner, Global XBRL Co-leader Director, Global Risk Global XBRL Co-leader and Founding Management Solutions, UK Chairman XBRL International Tel: 32 2 710 72 26 Tel: 44 20 7213 4705 Tel: 1 813 351 2795 Email:
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[email protected] 47 XBRL is a universal information format and formatting of the information needed in these formats (html, pdf, doc, etc). which offers tremendous opportunities for for running the business can be slow, The link between format and content can the financial services industry in terms of prone to error and extremely costly. only be broken by manual parsing (search cost reduction, efficiency gains and data and retrieval) processes, which are labour- analysis. XBRL can be used by banks to Proprietary data standards are often put intensive, time-consuming and prone to radically reduce the time and costs in place for internal purposes but they inputting errors. These factors can drive associated with key business processes require proprietary data translation the cost of producing information up to such as credit analysis and monitoring, schemes so that back-end systems are able a level where, although the information and streamline their own business to retrieve that information. Even less is available, it is effectively redundant. reporting processes. XBRL also allows efficient, electronically delivered disparate information systems to information on the web is today just a XBRL provides a solution to many of communicate seamlessly with each other digital duplicate of a paper report; it is not these problems by making the reported over the internet.