Corporate Credit Analysis

This Financial Insights report discusses the potential challenges and benefits to banks considering the use of XBRL to facilitate the gathering and analysis of corporate financial data from commercial customers. The U.S. rate of adoption of XBRL will be boosted by the 2008 determination of the Securities and Exchange Commission that 10K reports should begin to be filed in HTML format in 2009. U.S. commercial banks have significant experience with XBRL because they have been required to file federal

"call reports" in that format since 2008. Nevertheless, neither they nor the commercial credit origination vendors have pursued using it for capturing financial information from corporate customers.

"Banks should be exploring this opportunity, and pushing vendors to incorporate the needed XBRL functionality in existing applications," asserts Patricia McGinnis, research director for corporate banking. "Those banks that lead in the adoption of this new technical standard will significantly reduce their costs in collection and analysis of commercial credit financial statements."