Chris Church, the chief executive for the Americas at the global financial cooperative Swift and its global head of securities, has joined the board of the XBRL U.S. Consortium, a trade group promoting the extensible business reporting language.
Swift, formally the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, uses a similar language, ISO 20022, for cross-border automated clearing house transactions in the Single Euro Payment Area.
XBRL and ISO 20022 are both members of a family of extensible markup languages used to tag data elements in a standardized way to facilitate straight-through processing. The banking industry's taxonomy for these tags is different from that used by thrifts or credit unions.
There is growing momentum to use XBRL more widely to make it easier for financial companies to work together. For example, U.S. financial institutions have submitted their quarterly call reports using XBRL since the third quarter of 2005 under a mandate by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. And the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted rules in January to convert corporate financial reporting to the machine-readable XBRL format; the phased process will begin for the largest public companies June 15.
