“Are you ready for interactive data?” asks the website of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Companies do not have to be ready just yet, but anyone who has dealings with the regulator may soon have little choice.
The SEC, one of the world’s most powerful financial watchdogs, is one of the leading cheerleaders for XBRL – eXtensible Business Reporting Language – an interactive medium that promises to end the misery of trawling through pages of text by replacing the large blocks with easily searchable “tags”.
