Machine Readable Financial Reports for EU Issuers
It has been a busy week, with the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) submitting its final draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) for the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF) to the European Commission. This publication moves European public companies one significant step closer towards digital financial reporting with Inline XBRL. Alongside the final draft, ESMA has published a reporting manual and a set of web pages dedicated to ESEF.
It is pretty clear that ESMA and the European Commission see Annual Financial Reports as the first step along the road to making a much broader set of information digital and discoverable. For now, there is a significant amount of work to do for national regulators, for the accounting profession, (both inside industry and within the audit firms) for users of this information, and for software vendors. What’s needed? Co-ordination, collaboration and innovation.
Read the full ESMA announcement and reference documents here. We are in the process of analysing a range of these materials and will have more on the RTS in the New Year.
