New mandatory rules for regulated reporting were published in the Policy Statement (PS04/9) on Wednesday 31st March, and stated that as of 1st April 2005 all firms involved in mortgage, general insurance or retail investment activities must provide all data relating to regulatory returns electronically to the FSA. For the first time the FSA has defined a technical reporting language that financial organisations must use to submit this data – XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language).
Focus’ new product, called MCA:reporter, will enable organisations to collate their sales information from multiple client administration systems, irrespective of the data format, and translate it into XBRL to provide a single data feed directly back to the FSA.
Focus was invited to become a member of the FSA Software Suppliers Advisory Panel back in 2003 to ‘“…support both the FSA in developing practical plans to introduce XBRL based electronic reporting and the ISV community in the implementation of those plans within the proposed timetable.”
Nigel Smith, Director of Market Propositions, Focus Solutions Group commented;
“Financial organisations have to start collecting their data from 1st April 2005, so they have just 12 months to transform their business processes to be able to comply with the new FSA requirements. Large companies with multiple business units and product databases in particular will find this a challenging task.
We believe at Focus that we are well placed, through a combination of our financial services knowledge and our XML expertise, to provide a product that will support both the regulated entity and the FSA to implement XBRL as the industry standard for regulatory reporting.”
MCA:reporter is built using Focus’ XML toolkit, goal:technology that is currently used by the top ten leading life and pensions providers* for electronic trading.
