The CFA Institute is a global, not-for-profit association of investment professionals that awards the CFA and CIPM designations. The Institute’s Centre for Financial Integrity recently published a survey of members’ views on XBRL, given that XBRL has the potential to substantially change the way a financial analyst collects and analyses company data.The survey results reflect the responses of some 6% of the CFA’s 23,500 members. The good news is that awareness of XBRL is up 4% from the previous survey in 2007, and that respondents recognize both the dangers of allowing taxonomies to be ‘polluted’ with custom tags and the importance of global taxonomy convergence to help compare apples to apples. This last point is quite important for financial analysts with a global perspective and the potential problems and dangers of taxonomy divergence are nicely discussed in this Hitachi blog post by Nomura Research Data Analyst, Chie Mitsui.
The bad news from the survey is that really nothing much stands out in the minds of the respondents that indicates a compelling driver for financial analysts to adopt and embrace XBRL, other than to ‘upload data into your financial analysis models’. This attitude only looks like changing when the volume of XBRL data out there is sufficient to stimulate the delivery of new ways to visualize and analyze company data that are truly ‘game changers’. But according to this survey at least, we appear to be some way away from that tipping point.
Tags: CFA
