Digital Financial Reporting

ACTUS (Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards) is doing some very interesting work related to standard financial contracts. The basis for this work is the book Unified Financial Analysis: The Missing Links of Finance.

The stated goal of ACTUS is:

The goal of ACTUS is to break down the diversity in financial instruments into a manageable number of cash flow patterns – so called Contract Types (CT).

This standardization work is based on the same observation that I had related to financial reporting: patterns. What Dr. Willi Brammertz observed is that 98% of all financial contracts can be represented by a small number (about 30).

What they call "contract types" is very similar to my notion of "reporting styles". Here are the similarities that I see: 

• Contract types (these are Structures)
• Taxonomy (these are Structures)
• Data dictionary (these are Terms)
• Applicability (these are Rules)
• Demo application (these show the Associations)
• Technical specification (these are Rules)

You can look at all this information within an Excel spreadsheet here. Here is their blog.

What would be interesting is to convert all this information into XBRL.  This is somewhat of an example of a financial instrument in XBRL.  Maybe I will do that.

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Ariadne