Digital Financial Reporting

I mentioned LEI (Legal Entity Identifiers) in a prior blog post.  Seems like the LEI folks have made some very significant improvements in their offerings.

First, they created an ontology.

Second, they already had the ability to search for legal entities (not sure if this changed).

Third, they have provided a bunch of data formats.  I counted 15 different data formats!  (See the EXPORT button on the left hand side)

Fourth, this is a really nice HOW TO USE page.

Here is an example using Microsoft:

• Search: This is the search page results.
• Human readable: Click the FOURTH ITEM, Microsoft Corporation, and you get a human readable representation of information about that legal entity.
• Machine readable: Go to the EXPORT button and you can download information in machine readable form.  Or, just put ".xml" on the end of the LEI, and you get machine readable information.

I don't know how things are going in terms of getting relationships between legal entities entered into the LEI repository.  My personal wish list is that:

• The FASB and IASB come up with a common description of the components of an entity and use those terms consistently within US GAAP and IFRS.
• The SEC starts allowing or requiring LEIs in XBRL-based financial filings to the SEC.
• The SEC starts requiring public companies to report exhibit 21, the schedule of subsidiaries, in machine readable form rather than in HTML. LEIs should be used to identify registrants and the subsidiaries of the registrant.
• The IFRS and US GAAP XBRL taxonomies coordinate their XBRL dimensions or [Axis] for breaking down an entity into components such as "Business Segments" and "Geographic Area" and such.  Preferably, those dimensions would be defined by XBRL International or mapped from US GAAP to IFRS using XBRL definition relations such as "essence-alias".

This is a great step forward for Fintech and Regtech!