XBRL to play significant role in cutting corporate actions costs and risks, industry experts agree

New podcast featuring SWIFT, SIX Telekurs and WMDatenservice explores impact of standardisation on corporate actions processing

The initiative between SWIFT, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and XBRL US to enable issuers to tag corporate actions announcements using XBRL for easier downstream standardisation will overcome one of the major remaining hurdles to corporate actions STP, enabling the industry to eliminate further costs and risks from this historically manual, error-prone area of the back office.

This is among the key findings of a discussion about standardisation for corporate actions, broadcast in the latest podcast from Reference Data Review, featuring Karin Deridder from SWIFT, Markus Heer from WMDatenservice and Nanda Kumar from SIX Telekurs, and moderated by Reference Data Review editor Virginie O'Shea.

The discussion explores the need for XBRL to be extended beyond its "traditional" use in financial reporting to encompass corporate action issuance - a development that is already under way, and being spurred on by the SWIFT/DTCC/XBRL US initiative. It also explores the need for this initiative to be extended beyond the US market, an expansion that is also under way, and made easier by the fact that XBRL already has a strong foothold in other major markets around the world.

The participants in the discussion agree that to truly fulfil their potential, corporate actions standards need to be adopted in a wholesale fashion, industry-wide. Differences in national market practices related to corporate events also need to be harmonised if full automation of corporate actions processing is to be achieved. 

Karin Deridder points out that SWIFT is working to get its community to commit to standards adoption in the asset servicing area, as well as providing tools to make that adoption easier for customers - including the self-testing environment STaQS for Corporate Actions, which is supporting firms in adhering to Securities Market Practice Group-defined rules when using standardised corporate actions messages, helping to iron out national differences in event interpretation.

Tune into the discussion in full by registering on the Reference Data Review website and listening to the whole podcast.