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Join the Data Coalition, Thomson Reuters, and government guests to explore the modernization of U.S. federal financial regulatory reporting!

Yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted 4 to 1 to adopt Inline XBRL for corporate financial data disclosure. The move to Inline XBRL will end duplicative documents-plus-data financial reporting and transition to data-centric reporting.

For over four years, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and the leadership of the House Financial Services Committee have been trying to pass a bill that would prevent the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission from collecting searchable financial data from most public companies. Fortunately, it is probably never going to become law. But why are the biotech industry and the Financial Services Committee leadership so fixated on the Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act?

The House Financial Services Committee will mark up the Small Company Disclosure Simplification Act, H.R. 5054. The legislation was first introduced in 2013 and the bill will exempt a majority of public companies from the obligation to file financial statements in a searchable and standardized data format with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

A more efficient, 21st Century approach is to retain all the data in “machine-readable form” rather than converting it into and the back out of a print format. The primary technology that enables the transfer of financial data from statement filers to users is eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).

The inaugural RegTech Data Summit’s thesis was that regulatory rules, technology, and data must be modernized in a coordinated fashion. If all three areas are modernized in tandem, new RegTech solutions will flourish, reducing reporting duplication, minimizing reporting errors, and enabling automation.

Progress in RegTech has been seen in the private sector as access to quality data improve. This progress has not been mirrored in the private sector here in the United States, but the potential to improve government efficiency is not far off.

Last week the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed its first expansion of open corporate data in nearly nine years. Here's where the new proposal came from, what it means, and why it matters.

Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), and Randy Hultgren (R-IL) headlined our third annual Financial Data Summit last week - and their new proposal in Congress is going to transform financial regulatory reporting.

Twenty-eight Members of the House of Representatives, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), have reintroduced the Financial Transparency Act (H.R. 1530). If enacted, the Financial Transparency Act would be the nation’s first RegTech law. The bill would modernize the U.S. financial regulatory reporting process from unstructured documents into fully searchable, standardized, and machine-readable data.