Regulators Hail Launch of XBRL

When hurricanes and downturns in real estate prices raise risk-management issues for banks, the feedback will come much quicker now with the universal adoption of a new Bank Call Reporting System hailed by federal regulators.Members of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council attending a Jan. 18 meeting in San Jose, Calif., gave high marks to the new system, now in use by 100% of the 7,200 regulated financial institutions that make quarterly reports to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Thanks to eXtensible Business Reporting Language, the FDIC is expecting to enjoy an estimated 70% savings in time spent handling information in quarterly reports from regulated lenders, according to Martin Henning, associate director of the FDIC's statistics branch. Before XBRL, Mr. Henning told MortgageWire, there was often a three-week lag in the time it took reported data to be made available to regulatory analysts. Now there is instant data validation. With XBRL tagging, data used for multiple purposes and analysis in different software formats no longer has to be rekeyed.