Max Mansur is a Global Market Manager in Securities Markets at SWIFT. He works in the asset servicing domain addressing the needs of custodians, securities market infrastructures, broker/dealers, investment managers, issuers, and their agents. Mr. Mansur has 31 years of information technology experience including system design, program management, quality, and financial solutions.

It is not often that something as deeply geeky as XBRL gets onto the front page of Wired magazine. Daniel Roth’s superb article about radical transparency raised the profile of those four letters

December 8 NIRI Dinner Panel to Discuss Immediate and Future Strategies Necessary for eXtensible Business Reporting Language.

XBRL US, the nonprofit consortium for XML business reporting, announced highlights from its national conference, “XBRL Financial Reporting: Advancing Transparency, Transforming the Dialogue” that was held on November 17-18, 2009 at the Marriott Marquis in New York City.

XBRL Japan held a workshop in February on “How to Use XBRL for Analysis,” which I discussed in an interview with this blog. The attendees — analysts, data intermediaries, and representatives of securities firms — focused on how users can analyze statements using the XBRLized earnings digests that the Tokyo Stock Exchange has been providing on the Web since last year.

EDGAR Online is the only company that has created a historical XBRL data set – including 10 years of history of every U.S. public company at more depth (6,000 data elements) than anyone in the world.

When reporting financials in XBRL, companies need to take responsibility by documenting the reasons items are tagged the way they are and allocating ample time for management review—even if they outsource the data tagging to a third party, according to panelists at the 2009 XBRL US National Conference that took place in New York this week.

We hear a lot about “complexity” as a contributing factor to the financial crises. Steven Schwarcz (Duke) pins blame on the complexity of financial products like asset-backed securities.

XBRL US today issued a Call for Research Partners to expand research and development projects already underway to develop taxonomies (digital dictionaries) for corporate actions, proxy and governance, and asset-backed securities. XBRL US is a nonprofit consortium for XML business reporting standards in the United States and developer of the XBRL US GAAP Taxonomy required by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for public company financial statements.