XBRL Symposium: "XBRL for Financial Services"


Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 16:56:53 -0400 
From: "Coffin, Zachary P" <zcoffin@kpmg.com>
To: ZacharyCoffin@email.com
Subject: [newsml] Sept.13, 2000 - 1:30-5:00 pm - New York City - XBRL Symposium: "XBRL for Financial Services"


Financial Services organizations interested in learning more about an
emerging
XML-based standard for business information, reporting and analysis, with
the
possibility of joining the Steering Committee and/or establishing a formal
liaison relationship, are invited to attend an important seminar on
September 13th
in New York City.

XBRL ("Extensible Business Reporting Language") benefits everyone who 
relies on timely and accurate reporting of business performance, from
management and finance to intermediaries to analysts, creditors and
investors.

EVERY COMPANY, IN EVERY INDUSTRY, AROUND THE WORLD will be able to use XBRL
to
improve their business reporting and analysis.  However, this "Liaison &
Outreach"
symposium, is specifically addressed to the Financial Services industry.

The symposium will provide an overview of XBRL, its methodology and
future, and the benefits and ultimate ROI to organizations participating in
its
development and adoption.  Please find below an agenda and details about the
meeting,
two news articles about XBRL for the financial sector, information about the
presenters, and a list of current members--over 60 leading companies and
organizations representing 15 countries.

We welcome and invite your participation.  Please also feel free to forward
this message to others you feel might be interested.  If I can answer any
questions you may have or assist in any way, please don't hesitate to
contact me directly.

Thank you for your attention and kind consideration.  On behalf of the
International Steering Committee, we look forward to discussing XBRL with
you, and to the possibility of working with your organization to define the
future of e-business reporting.  Thanks again.


Regards,


Zack Coffin


XBRL Liaison Chair
ZacharyCoffin@email.com


INFORMATION IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW

        *       Symposium Invitation and Agenda
        *       American Banker article on XBRL (August 28, 2000)
        *       Wall Street & Technology article on XBRL (July 1, 2000)
        *       List of current members in XBRL
        *       Presenters

-------------------------------------------------------------------------


XBRL "Liaison & Outreach" Symposium:
XBRL for Financial Institutions

New York - September 13

Wednesday, September 13, 2000 * 2:00 PM - 5 PM EST
Crowne Plaza Manhattan Hotel, 1605 Broadway Street, New York, NY 10019


"United Effort brings Financial, Accounting, Software, XML/Metadata,
Government, and Investor Information Communities Together."


Financial institutions interested in learning more about XBRL with the
possibility of joining the Steering Committee and/or establishing a formal
liaison relationship, are invited to attend one of two important seminar on
September 13th.

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) is a new XML-based standard
for financial information, reporting and analysis that has been jointly
developed by over 50 leading companies and organizations around the world.
This "Liaison Open House" will provide an overview of XBRL,, its methodology
and future, and the benefits and ultimate ROI to organizations participating
in its adoption.


POSITION YOUR COMPANY TO SUCCEED

"Every company and organization, in every industry, in every country, will
be able to use XBRL to improve its business reporting and analysis."

XBRL has the potential to revolutionize the communication of financial
reporting.  This symposium looks at the impact of XBRL on the financial
reporting industry and its users, and is addressed specifically to
decision-makers in your organization.


WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

The appropriate decision-maker(s) within your company or organization.

CFOs, CIOs; CTOs; Controllers; Vice Presidents of Finance, Marketing,
Strategy Planning, Investor Relations, Financial Research, or Information
Technology; Marketing and product development executives; Directors of
Finance or other senior-level financial executives; Credit/Equity/Risk
Managers; and other e-business/technology leaders, strategists and
evangelists in your organization.


LOCATION:

Crowne Plaza Manhattan Hotel, 1605 Broadway
Street, New York, NY 10019


DATE/TIME:

                                Wednesday, September 13, 2000 * 1:30 PM - 5
PM EST


COST:

                This seminar is free.


REGISTRATION:

                                REQUIRED.  There is limited seating; kindly
reserve your place ASAP.
                                To register, please e-mail Zachary Coffin,
XBRL Liaison Chair, at ZacharyCoffin@email.com
<mailto:ZacharyCoffin@email.com> with your name, title, company, e-mail and
telephone number.


For more information about XBRL before the conference, please visit our web
site at www.xbrl.org <http://www.xbrl.org>.

----------------------------------
AGENDA - XBRL Symposium for Financial Institutions

1:30 - 1:45 p.m.
Sign-In

1:45-2:45 p.m.
Overview
XBRL is an open specification for the exchange of financial reporting
information.  Financial statements created in XBRL can make investor
communication more effective and make financial comparison and aggregation
and analysis more efficient.  The scope of the XBRL open specification today
encompasses US financial reporting (US GAAP) but is flexible enough to
improve the transparency and usability of financial information everywhere.
In this presentation we will describe how the current members of the XBRL
steering committee have worked together to produce a multi-layered XML-based
specification that is comprehensive, substantive, flexible and powerful.  We
will present multiple cases describing the short-term return on investment
of implementing XBRL, as well as several future-state scenarios based on
XBRL's adoption strategy with other internet movements, across industry
sectors, internationally, and along the information supply chain, from
companies and e-marketplaces to intermediaries and aggregators to analysts,
creditors and investors.

2:45 - 3:10 p.m.
An XBRL Demo

3:10- 3:30 p.m.
Break

3:30 - 4:15 p.m.
Domain Group Taxonomy 
We discuss the concept of an accounting taxonomy and the framework for
creating taxonomies by industry and by country.

*       Discuss experiences creating our first taxonomy, which was created
for US GAAP commercial and industrial companies.
*       Demonstrate how this initial taxonomy is extended for the reporting
requirements of an individual company.
*       Discuss how this initial taxonomy will differ from the next taxonomy
being created for other industries and countries.

4:15 - 5:00 p.m.
XBRL-The Next Step
An open discussion among all participants, moderated by XBRL
representatives, to assess the role of the financial institutions in XBRL's
development and further growth.  Issues discussed will include:
        *       Membership responsibilities
        *       Taxonomy development
        *       Industry prioritization
        *       Liaison and adoption strategies
        *       Role of existing Steering Committee members
        *       Other requirements and issues
        *       XBRL's development internationally, particularly among
financial institutions
----------------------------
Copyright 2000 American Banker, Inc.  
   The American Banker
August 28, 2000, Monday

SECTION: TECHNOLOGY; Pg. 13  
LENGTH: 775 words  
HEADLINE: Consortium to Launch Web Business Reporting Standard  
BYLINE: BY CAROL POWER  

BODY: 

   A year-old consortium named XBRL.org is developing a standard for the
online preparation and exchange of business reports and financial data.  

   The group has representatives from 55 global companies and is trying to
enroll more banks. J.P. Morgan, Fidelity Investments, and Morgan Stanley
Dean Witter & Co. are members, and Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America
Corp. are considering using the consortium's standard, eXtensible Business
Reporting Language, for some projects.  

   XBRL.org expects to have 100 international members by yearend and to make
a formal launch of its standard in Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong
Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan, by year end.


   The launch in Germany is slated for late September and will be sponsored
by Deutsche Bundesbank.  

     XBRL.org's initial goal is to provide a new framework -- based on the
eXtensible Markup Language, or XML -- that businesses would use to create,
exchange, and analyze financial reporting information, including, regulatory
filings, general ledger information, and audit schedules.  

   The XBRL standard is an open one, and the consortium that created it aims
to simplify the reading of 10K and 10Q filings, cash flow statements, income
statements, and balance sheets by putting the relevant data into readable
spreadsheets.  

   The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants spearheaded the
formation of XBRL.org. Member representatives have been meeting once a month
for two days at a time since last September to build the framework.  

   Christy Reichhelm, B2B enterprise applications industry manager at
Microsoft Corp. and the software giant's representative in the consortium,
said XBRL.org is "bringing together the accounting, software, and financial
services industries around the world to build an eXtensible Markup Language
framework to transmit financial and business reporting data over the
Internet."  

   The group delivered the first beta of the framework April 6 and version
1.0 July 31. The specification can be downloaded from www.xbrl.org. "We're
one of the first consortia to create an XML language standard and to deliver
on it," Ms. Reichhelm said.  

   Zachary Coffin, XBRL liaison chairman and program leader of the digital
media institute at KPMG Consulting LLC in Los Angeles, said, "We want to
really communicate this to the banking industry, because no single industry
will benefit from XBRL in more ways than banking."  

   Mr. Coffin has recently been giving presentations about XBRL to financial
institutions in Europe and Asia. The consortium will host symposiums for the
financial services industry on Sept. 11 in Los Angeles and Sept. 13 in New
York.  

   The consortium has also briefed U.S. government agencies, like the
Department of Defense, about putting the language in place.  

   "XBRL will make it easier for companies to get the attention they deserve
from capital markets, and easier for creditors and investors to identify
true business performers," Mr. Coffin said. "Unite these two communities
with XBRL, and you have the most significant development in financial
reporting since the birth of the Internet."  

   The consortium has seven subgroups that each will target about 10
industries, including financial services.  

   "Within a one- to two-year time frame, we hope companies will be
reporting in XBRL," Ms. Reichhelm said. "We're trying to create one way to
standardize so as to create a document once and render it in lots of
formats. We're trying to make the hunting and gathering of data easier and
more accurate."  

   Mr. Coffin said the consortium's other priorities right now are to get
new members, hook up with other Internet initiatives and alliances, such as
the W3 consortium, and to get all industries to use XBRL. Elmer Huh, an
accounting analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and chairman of the
international domain user group within XBRL.org's steering committee, said
that while the consortium's focus right now is on financial statements, the
language will eventually be extended to credit processing and loan
approval-type reporting.  

   "This is the next step in applying XML to applications tailored to a
specific purpose, industry, or sector," Mr. Huh said.  

   He said XBRL will help financial institutions save money and make it
easier both for the investment community to carry out timelier analysis and
for the reporting community to lower the cost capital risk associated with
companies reporting results. "There is very little out there on an XML
platform that competes with XBRL," Mr. Huh said. 
 
Copyright c 2000 American Banker, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.americanbanker.com  

----------------------------
Copyright 2000 Miller Freeman, Inc.  
   Wall Street & Technology
July 1, 2000

SECTION: No. 7, Vol. 18; Pg. 28 ; ISSN: 1060-989X  
IAC-ACC-NO: 63699405  
LENGTH: 688 words  
HEADLINE: XBRL Will Transform Financial Reporting; Internet/Web/Online
Service Information  
BYLINE: Schmerken, Ivy  

BODY: 

    A new language for financial reporting called XBRL-eXtensible Business
Reporting Language--that's based on Xtensible Markup Language (XML)--has the
potential to revolutionize investment analysis for investors and
professionals alike, say members of an international committee that is
driving the project forward. XBRL for financial statements will allow
individual investors and professionals to extract data from 8Ks and l0Qs
into Web-based tools that can help them analyze comparable companies. Others
who will benefit from XBRL include companies who prepare statements,
analysts, investors and regulators, financial publishers and aggregators, as
well as independent software vendors.  

    The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), is one
of several sponsors that has been working with companies for more than a
year to develop the XBRL framework, which is comprised of a series of data
dictionaries for specific industries.  

      Over 35 companies, including leading accounting firms, software
companies and data aggregators, such as Reuters, Bridge, Standard & Poor's
and Edgar Online, are members of the XBRL Project Committee.  

    As soon as a corporation files in the Web system, this information will
be available in real time, says Greg Adams, the CFO of Edgar Online. People
can use "our software to do their comparisons for analysis [of] financial
information."  

    "It's going to revolutionize a lot of financial reporting," predicts
Adams "As a CFO I need to compare Edgar Online to multiple companies," he
says. "I could make a list of companies and ask for a list of criteria
[revenue per employee and gross margins] you want to show and do it in
seconds."  

    Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is the only Wall Street firm, so far, on the
XBRL Project Committee, but securities analysts will benefit a lot from the
project.  

    Today, for instance, analysts spend a lot of time rekeying data from
financial statements into spreadsheets. With XBRL, they'll be able to search
for a few characteristics and instantly flow the data from a company's
balance sheet into an online tool.  

    "XBRL takes a lot of inefficiency out of the process," says J. Louis
Matherne, the AICPA's director, information technology, who notes that
financial statements can be created one time and then published in multiple
formats--as printed reports, on Web sites as HTML and as Edgar filing with
the SEC.  

    Because each line of the financial statements is tagged, the information
will only be entered one time into the Edgar systems. This eliminates the
need for manually keying in information and it lowers a company's cost to
prepare financial statements, says Adams. From an accounting perspective,
says Adams, "XBRL will create standards, for instance, for trade
receivables. It'll be consistently inputted into a spreadsheet." By
establishing "uniform categories of data," he adds, "it facilitates and
enhances a comparison of reports in industries and sectors."  

    According to Christy Reichhelm, global mid-market ERP industry manager
for Microsoft Corp., the software giant is supporting XBRL because it
believes in an "open heterogeneous computing environment." Microsoft and
other software companies will make money by selling software tools that
analyze the financial data, she says.  

    In a demo designed as a joint venture between Microsoft and Edgar
Online, Reichhelm showed how a data aggregator can provide users with tools
for drilling down into data, using Coke and Pepsi as an example of two
competitors.  

    Though XBRL is starting in the U.S., it is truly an international
framework says Matherne, who adds that members are making sure the framework
is portable and already have the Australians on board, and the U.K. was
expected to deliver their spec at the end of May. Interest has come from the
French, Spanish, the Germans and an inquiry from India as well.  

    XBRL is currently under review for comments, and is expected to be
released to the market in July, though it may not show up on financial Web
sites until later this year. Go to xbrl.org for instructions on providing
comments.  

-----------------------------------

XBRL Steering Committee Members
(as of Summer 2000)


Investors, financial institutions, and investor services
        *       Bridge News
        *       Dow Jones
        *       Edgar-Online
        *       Fidelity Investments
        *       First Call
        *       Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
        *       Multex.com
        *       NEC Planning Research, Inc.
        *       Japan Digital Disclosure
        *       JP Morgan
        *       Reuters
        *       Standard and Poor's
        *       US Advisor
        *       Virtual Growth

Professional services:
        *       Arthur Andersen
        *       BDO Seidman
        *       Crowe Chizek
        *       Deloitte & Touche
        *       E-Partners (formerly Texsys RD)
        *       Ernst & Young
        *       First Light Communications, Inc.
        *       Grant Thornton
        *       IBM
        *       KPMG and KPMG Consulting
        *       New River
        *       PPA/Audicon
        *       Practitioners Publishing Company
        *       PricewaterhouseCoopers
        *       The Woodburn Group
        *       XBRL Solutions

Technology enablers:
        *       ACCPAC
        *       ACL Services
        *       Best Software
        *       Caseware
        *       E-Content (Interleaf)
        *       e-Ledger
        *       E-Numerate
        *       Epicor
        *       Financial Software Group SA
        *       FRx
        *       Great Plains
        *       Hyperion
        *       Lawson
        *       Microsoft
        *       MIP, Inc.
        *       Navision
        *       NetLedger
        *       Oinke, Inc.
        *       Oracle Corp.
        *       PeopleSoft
        *       Sage
        *       SAP

Accounting and Trade Organizations:
        *       AICPA (U.S.)
        *       CICA (Canada)
        *       CPA Australia
        *       CS-OEC (France) (pending)
        *       ECentre UK ICAA (Australia)
        *       IASC (International)
        *       ICAEW (U.K.)
        *       IMA (U.S.)
        *       NII Enterprise Promotion Association (CommerceNet Taiwan)

Formal Liaisons:
        *       Financial Executives Institute (U.S.)
        *       Financial Accounting Standards Board (U.S.)
        *       Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (U.S.)
        *       Association of Government Accountants (U.S.)
        *       Accounting Standards Board (U.K.)
        *       DRSC/Deutsches Rechnungslegungs Standard Committee (Germany)
        *       AIMR (Association of Investment Management Researchers)
        *       EDIFICAS (EDI Financial Reporting Europe) (pending)
        *       International Press Telecommunications Council (pending)

------------------------------------------

ZACHARY COFFIN - XBRL Liaison Chair

As Chair of the XBRL Liaison Committee, Zachary Coffin is focused on XBRL's
future-how it fits into the larger landscape internationally, across
multiple industries, with other internet standards and along the entire
chain of business reporting, from companies and e-marketplaces to
intermediaries and aggregators to end-users, analysts and investors.  He's
presented XBRL to audiences ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 50 and
from the White House Conference Center to audiences across Europe and Asia,
and can speak in detail to XBRL's benefits, applications, and adoption
strategy.
        Mr. Coffin also serves as KPMG's XBRL Lead.  He is responsible for
introducing XBRL to KPMG's services in consulting, tax, assurance, and
corporate finance for clients of every industry worldwide.
        Additionally, Mr. Coffin is Program Leader of the KPMG Digital Media
Institute, advising senior executives of industry trends, emerging
technologies and digital media best practices.  He has over thirteen years
experience in nearly every form of media and communications, and prior to
joining KPMG Consulting in 1996, was an executive at a production company in
Hollywood.
        A member of the International Standards Organization and of the U.S.
National Committee for Information Technology Standards, Mr. Coffin has
represented KPMG Consulting in several internet standards consortia,
including IPTC (news industry) and PRISM (magazines), and MPEG-21
(developing an e-commerce global multimedia framework).  He has been quoted
in publications internationally and is a frequent speaker on business and
e-business strategy, new media, internet integration, e-standards and the
future of the internet.
        Mr. Coffin graduated with an M.F.A. from the University of Southern
California, and with a B.A., magna cum laude, from Columbia University.  He
can be reached at ZacharyCoffin@email.com <mailto:ZacharyCoffin@email.com>.
Elmer H. Huh
XBRL International Domain Chair
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter
Equity Research - Global Valuation, Accounting and Tax Policy

        
Elmer Huh is an analyst who works with the Global Valuation, Accounting and
Tax Policy Team.  He works on the Apples to Apples project and covers the
accounting regulatory sector.  Apples to Apples helps investors facilitate
global sectoral valuation by focusing on the drivers of value creation and
exposing the accounting distortions existing between countries and
industries. In addition, Mr. Huh serves as co-chair of the Domain User group
of the XBRL.org Steering Committee.  
        Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in January 1998, Elmer was a
research associate at BancBoston Robertson Stephens covering the retail
apparel sector.  He also worked as a senior consultant for Grant Thornton's
Management Consulting Division concentrating on information systems,
manufacturing and operations research.
        Elmer graduated both with an MBA in finance and accounting and M.S.
in industrial engineering from Columbia University.  He received a B.S. with
Honors in mechanical engineering from Columbia University's School of
Engineering.

---------------------------------------------------

For more information, please visit www.xbrl.org
Thank you.