EDGAR Online Zeroes In On Mutual Funds for XBRL Business

EDGAR Online said Tuesday it struck agreements that will let it create risk-return summaries in the eXtensible Business Reporting Language for as many as 2,000 out of the roughly 8,000 mutual funds that must meet a new federal requirement for interactive financial filings.

The New York company, which in November completed a merger with XBRL software developer UBmatrix, said it firmed up strategic alliances with three financial printers and compliance specialists that will let it create interactive risk-return summaries for their mutual fund clients.

The three firms are: Merrill Corporation, a commercial printer and provider of technology-based document services based in St. Paul, Minn.; financial printer Vintage Filings, a unit of PR Newswire based in New York, and Issuer Direct, a compliance specialist based in Morrisville, NC.

EDGAR Online is the provider of XBRL filing creation services to these companies and their clients, which represent more than 2,000 separate mutual funds. These alliances signal EDGAR Online’s dominant position in the emerging mutual fund XBRL risk/return summaries market.

With the alliances, EDGAR Online hopes to extend to mutual funds the kind of “dominance” it has experienced in developing XBRL documents for public companies, which have already begun to file interactively tagged financial reports on a quarterly and annual basis to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Landing the three alliances “basically says it’s a very strong position,’’ said chief marketing officer Steve Levine. “This is an example of yet another opportunity for XBRL (service) providers.’’

Before the merger, EDGAR Online had focused on providing ‘outsourcing’ services to companies with publicly traded stocks, using software it developed inhouse called XLerate to change static reports into interactive ones that adhered to SEC standards. It has an agreement with RR Donnelly to provide XBRL services to Donnelly’s printing customers.

UBmatrix, by comparison, offers “insourcing” services. It licenses its software to organizations that want to create their XBRL documents inhouse. Enterprise software providers SAP and Oracle resell its software, for use in creating XBRL documents. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation uses UBmatrix software to collect and validate quarterly “call reports” from banks it oversees. The SEC, through an intermediary, uses UBmatrix software to validate XBRL documents, to make sure the fields in them adhere to the taxonomy and extensions that have been set up.

Beginning January 1, the SEC will require mutual funds to provide the risk-return summaries they typically show for one-year, three-year and five-year performance in XBRL format.

EDGAR Online has created more than 1,000 XBRL filings for 350 public companies since the beginning of 2008, according to John Connolly, Interim CEO of EDGAR Online. “We are extremely pleased to apply our experience to this new XBRL market, ‘’ he said.

The company, which started out supplying financial data to online services, is trying to leverage its experience in creating XBRL documents to double its size, by the end of 2012.

If your company is still deciding whether to “insource” or “outsource” the creation of XBRL filings, read this analysis.

 

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