Long term investment requires structured non-financial data
Japan is moving towards the mandatory filing of a range of Environmental reporting measures in XBRL format, drawing on both the CDP and GRI taxonomies. Leading member of the Japanese XBRL community, Yoshiaka Wada, (now with NTT Data) provided an update on the operating proof of concept that currently collects data from more than 260 companies on a voluntary basis. It is expected that the Ministry of Environment will mandate this reporting from 2020. The initial work demonstrates that the volunteer group achieves above index stock market performance. Perhaps more importantly, the work shows the utility of structured data, not just for numeric disclosures, but also for text based ones. The project has demonstrated that the “block tagged” text can be successfully used for a variety of AI augmented analytics in a way that larger, unstructured documents are unable to assist with.
With large parts of the world moving to require the provision of ESG or “Non Financial” reports, with many moving towards the Integrated Reporting framework, it’s important that the various non-financial reporting projects work together to maximise the comparability, utility and discoverability of this information in structured form. See Wada-san’s presentation for inspiration, or get in touch with XBRL International to discuss.
