Successor to SEC’s EDGAR announced
The new system will be called IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications.
Security and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox today outlined the agency’s new vision for a successor to the regulator’s EDGAR corporate reporting system.
The new system will be called IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications.
It will incorporate data technologies such as extensible business reporting language (XBRL) in order to make the system interactive in a way which EDGAR is not.
“EDGAR dates back to the era of mainframe computing. It is being strained and it is time to move forward,” Mr. Cox said during a webcast.
He went on to demonstrate how laborious and largely manual a process it can be for a typical investor to search for and compare mutual fund data using the current EDGAR system.
IDEA, Mr. Cox said, would be much more interactive and allow for far greater flexibility in both searching for and manipulating data online as well as in exporting into spreadsheets.
Development of the new system is already under way and the first pieces of it will be available on the SEC’s website later this year, he said.
A fully operational system will be online within three years, Mr. Cox added.
For further information see the SEC’s press release.
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