Digital Financial Reporting

Financial InterGroup wrote an An Open Letter to President-elect Donald J. Trump on Financial Reform and a research paper Trumpeting in the New Era of a Lean Technology-Driven Financial System".  Seems like the proposal is to create something similar to Dwight D. Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System for the U.S. and global finance system.

I agree with this vision and I believe that Near Zero Defect XBRL-based Financial Reports and Intelligent XBRL-based Digital Financial Reporting can play a major role in turning that vision into reality.

Here are a few excerpts from the open letter and the research paper:

"This is a call to President-elect Trump, an acknowledged master builder, as he ushers in the lean era of financial regulation. We encourage him to establish a new executive-level office to inform his administration on how to rebuild an essential infrastructure component of our economy - the financial system and its regulatory apparatus, on the road to lean, transparent technology driven regulation."

"It's incredulous to many inside the financial industry and truly amazing to those in other industries that after six decades of automation of financial transactions there are no global standards for the identity of financial market participants nor their financial products. Imagine if every supermarket had a different barcode for the same product on its shelves or a different code for the producer or supplier of the product. Walmart, FedEx and Amazon could not exist. Imagine a shopper buying groceries and being asked to return three days later to pick it up. This is the current state of finance, no standards and waiting days to own financial products bought days before."

"The Office of Financial and Regulatory Technology (the OFRT) is to be a new executive branch agency, a research and standards setting body. It would be the center of research and innovation to evaluate new technologies and build links between evolving technologies and new regulations. It would enable more effective and transparent oversight of financial institutions, amongst financial regulators, and between the two in a digitized financial and regulatory environment. It would also enable less regulators and less third-party data and infrastructure intermediaries."

"The OFRT would follow in the footsteps of the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, the 1960's era government agency responsible for creating a packet switching time-sharing network of computers known as ARPANET, the precursor to today's Internet and World Wide Web. A similar ground breaking technology, distributed ledger technology (DLT) has entered the world of finance. DLT is an outgrowth of the Blockchain. Both were developed to support the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin. DLT works like a huge, decentralized ledger which records every transaction and stores this information on a global network to prevent tampering. It needs standards and a center of gravity, much like the ARPANET provided for the Internet."

 This is a great opportunity for the United States!  Here is how to make it work.