The beginning of standard XBRL has come from the hand of the Bank of Spain (Banco de España) that chose seven most important banking organizations among the country, within its project SIIF, whose objective was to begin to send to the Bank of Spain the eight public financial statements under standard XBRL.
One of the chosen organizations was the Popular Bank (Banco Popular), "when the Bank of Spain starts up project SIIF they choose us because our organization always has a high degree of confidence and the experiences that we initiated to have good results. The obtained answers serve for concrete problems as an example", assures Francisco Carrasco, person in charge of Financial statements within the area of Computer science of Group Popular Bank.
When the major business principles were defined already, at this moment of the project, it’s a good timing to choose the provider for the implementation of the technical architecture, the functional services and technical infrastructure. The selected provider was Fujitsu España Services because of his tool Interstage XWand that is a part of the Interstage Suite Products, and Integrate with XWand Manager that allows the development of the services of necessary technical infrastructure for the processing of the XBRL documents.
Basic objectives
"When we initiated the project we had basic objective, that is to say, finish it on time, six months, that is requested by the Bank to us of Spain", affirms Francisco Carrasco. The main objective that the group Popular Bank marked itself was that the implanted solution covered its basic necessities to send to the Bank of Spain the eight public financial statements in XBRL, maintaining the idea in the mid term to approach a global solution XBRL that gave answers to the future necessities of process of data and to the exchange of information.
Main characteristics
The modules that integrate Interstage XWand and that is provided to the Popular Bank include a viewfinder to validate the reports in XBRL that allows them to review the financial statements generated before the submission to Bank of Spain. The conversion of the financial statements to XBRL is made by means of the converter that the Bank of Spain has facilitated to the financial organizations. The viewfinder / validater that Fujitsu has provided conform to the norm CBE 4/2004 that provides the visualization of taxonomies and XBRL report. The bank has been able to make the validation of XBRL report based on the taxonomy of the SIIF, through Interstage XWand, that allows them to visualize XBRL report with orientation to the end user. These services, implemented in technology .Net, will provide the programming interface adequate to the development of the XBRL projects within the organization, having reduced the development time, having supported an interface and APIs that make it possible to work in the application layer without considering the layer of the XBRL. Also the Popular Bank, with XWand, could encapsulate the functionalities, making sure also its evolution.
Benefits for the user
There is a series of evident benefits that have improved the reporting systems as well as the later development of applications XBRL, for example, the possibility of obtaining a high functionality for the manipulation of the financial data, the development of new applications, encapsulating the functionalities so that the developers of the bank do not have to be specialists in XBRL. "XBRL Language is a very powerful system that allows to manage and to capture data of simple and comfortable form and to export them to any tool, because it has a great potentiality in the exchange of information that had been dispersed before. It offers a common frame to all the information which facilitates the work ", Francisco Carrasco. Also, it guarantees the maintenance of the applications against the changes in XBRL or on the basic technologies. Finally, the solution provided by Fujitsu to the Group Popular Bank has been designed for the purpose of future development in the complete project including the function of Universal Converter to XBRL.
