XBRL International Calls for Global Working Group to Define Standards for Corporate Actions Reporting
Goal: To Reduce Costs and Enable Straight Through Processing On A Global Scale
The XBRL International Standards Board (XSB) has issued a call to financial regulators and listed company filers to form a global “Corporate Actions Working Group” to define XBRL taxonomies for standardizing the transmission and consumption of corporate actions events allowing straight through processing through the world’s financial systems.
Information about the working group is available at. Individuals with the following interests and expertise are strongly encouraged to visit the corporate actions working group and express their interest in participating by filling out the available online form.
- Corporate Actions Product Management
- Corporate Actions Business Analysis
- Corporate Actions Technology
- Corporate Actions Operations production and consumption
- XBRL and ISO 20022 standards
- Data intermediaries
- Investors/consumers of corporate actions messages
This project will build on the work initiated by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), SWIFT and XBRL US in 2009 that resulted in development of a draft taxonomy and business plan.
The mission of the XBRL Corporate Actions Working Group will be to define a global standard for corporate actions documents that can be tagged at origination by the issuer or the issuers agent and allow straight through processing of this information to the security holder, tightly integrated with relevant ISO20022 messages.
“The standardized reporting of corporate actions data will eliminate many of the costs associated with manual entry, reconciliation and operational errors that plague institutions that must use corporate actions data, ” said John Turner, CEO of XBRL International.Development in a newly formed working group would build upon the American Depositary Receipt (ADR) pilot project conducted in the United States that standardizes the communication of corporate action information originating from Depositary receipt issuers such as BNY Mellon, Citi, JP Morgan, and redistributors such as GlobeTax.
Corporate actions are events that impact shareholders or debt holders of a company, such as stock splits, reverse splits, dividends, stock dividends, share buy backs, mergers, exchanges, name changes, etc. The distribution of such information has traditionally occurred via a press release issued by the company or a filing submitted to securities regulators, made available to processors and investors in a format that is not computer-readable. Transforming these messages into XBRL-format eliminates the need to rekey the data, thereby improving timeliness, accuracy and functionality of the information.
Over the last two years the XBRL community has worked on prototype taxonomies to standardize corporate action events modeled on US requirements. The Corporate Actions Working Group would be formed as an XBRL International Working Group to develop a truly global taxonomy that integrates with other international standards such as ISO 20022.
