At the recent annual Corporate Action conference in New York this week the hot topic was the significant progress being made by the DTCC and SWIFT with XBRL to standardise Issuer data. The audience was made up of mainly Investment Management firms but with a good sprinkling of all the great and the good banks. It was remarkable how warmly the XBRL project was received. The DTCC can take great comfort that this vitally important project appears to be gatherring a broad ground swell of support from both buy side and sell side.

The question of how to motivate Issuers to take part has also been addressed with the recent publication by the DTCC of the business case. Its compelling and even the most unaware company secretary has to see the good sense of XBRL. It has virtually no cost and may even  be simpler and less risky to operrate than the current free format text.

Corporate advisors within all banks must have a standard corporate strategy to educate the Issuers of the benefits of XBRL market data standards and start developing corporate actions utilising XBRL, even though it is still some time away for live running. I dont think it would hurt to use XBRL structures within the existing industry framework.

XBRL will succeed in the USA and it's now up to all the other major markets to get onboard. Start now, by building XBRL projects for each market and learning from the US experience. This could be the start of something big! Very big! Finally bringing solutions and STP into the corporate data chain and massively reducing industry costs and risks accross the board.

So contact the DTCC and get involved and be part of the solution.