Digital Financial Reporting

The European Securities Market Authority (ESMA) has published its Strategy on Sustainable Finance.

The ESMA will place sustainability at the core of its activities by embedding Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors in its work. Other terms for ESG that have been used are sustainability reporting and triple bottom line.

Triple bottom line is a term that was coined in the 1990's by John Elkington. Basically it means that organizations should not be measured by financial performance along, but rather on financial performance, social performance, and environmental performance.  The ideas have been tuned over the past 30 years.

Key priorities per the ESMA include: 

Great job ESMA!

Someone made me aware of one of the most interesting ideas that I have heard about in a long time.  Smart Media Tokens (SMT) are characterized as a new way for publishers of information/knowledge to monetize their online contributions within a community using block chain technology.

Steem is said to be the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward an unbounded number of individuals who make subjective contributions to a community. Steemit is such a community.

This white paper written in 2017 seems to be the beginning of Steem. This white paper seems to be an updated version of that first white paper. And this STEEM bluepaper seems to be more business professional oriented.  This 5 minute video gives a good, quick overview of smart media tokens. This 2 minute video explains how smart media tokens work.

Here is what I am thinking.  I have pointed out I have created a new, modern approach to creating financial reports.  The approach requires thousands of machine-readable business rules to be created and generally, these rules need to be created by professional accountants.  But, they need tools to create those rules.  Validation software such as XBRL Cloud and Pesseract use such rules.  Companies creating reports need the machine-readable rules and the rules engines that can process the rules.  Data aggregators need the same machine-readable rules to extract information from reports.  AI assisted audit software needs these same machine-readable rules to help see of the XBRL-based reports were created correctly.

I could go on and on.  Basically, what I am pointing out is an ecosystem.  What if something like a smart media token (SMT) offered a way to reward professional accountants for their brain power, software vendors for their brain power, etc.

This is a really good way to take high cost incumbents, inept middlemen that don't add value, and others that do not add value out of the process of accounting, reporting, auditing, and analysis moving into the future.  If everything is standards based then everything that can be a commodity will become a commodity.  Those that truly do add value can add to the ecosystem.  Bye-bye vendor lockin.  You are in charge of your reputation.

Interesting stuff.  I signed up for Steem, here is my blog.  This is a link to all stories that use the keyword "xbrl".

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This is an excellent comparison of Medium and Steem as a blogging platform.