The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), SWIFT and XBRL US announced the creation of a Stakeholder Group as a part of its Issuer to Investor: Corporate Actions initiative, which was launched in May 2009, to improve the processing of corporate actions data in the U.S. Composed of key players from the industry, the U.S. Issuer to Investor Stakeholder Group will represent the needs of the corporate actions reporting and processing supply chain.
The Group will be divided into three subgroups – Issuers, Intermediaries and Investors – and will provide input, make recommendations and help articulate the pros and cons for electronically capturing data directly from issuers and their agents in a standardized format at the point at which a corporate action is announced. Each group will be tasked with providing input to the current process as well as determining what changes would be required if issuers produced corporate actions messages in XBRL format aligned with ISO 20022.
The Issuers are represented by AGL Resources, Duke Energy, ENGlobal, Pfizer, Inc. and United Technologies and by issuer agents including Merrill Corporation, NYSE Euronext and PR Newswire, among others. The National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI) has also joined the group to observe and to provide an investor relations perspective.
United Technologies has been submitting financial statement filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR system for years and we understand how a technology standard can vastly improve accuracy, transparency and usability of corporate data, says John Stantial, Assistant Controller Financial Reporting & Analysis at United Technologies. Corporate actions information, submitted today in free-form documents like press releases and prospectuses, is a logical next step for the use of XBRL. The cost of implementation is low, given that all public companies are now required to file in XBRL format, the downstream benefits to analysts and investors could be high.
Financial intermediaries are represented by DTCC and other custodians and broker dealers.
Investors are currently represented by AllianceBernstein, Goldman Sachs Asset Management, State Street Global Advisors, T. Rowe Price, and Vanguard.
D.C.