Cross-border IORP growth slowing

In its third Report on Market Developments, CEIOPS provides an update of recent developments in cross-border pension funds. Net growth has dwindled to a mere 9% in the reporting period. Notably, there were 4 discontinuations of cross-border activities of IORPs. The report includes little conclusive evidence of the reasons for the slow growth. In particular, the discontinuations were not attributed to the regulatory framework, but anecdotally to reasons specific to the institution in question. Nevertheless, our assumption would be that the uncertainty surrounding the pending revisions of the pensions directive are certainly not encouraging strong growth at this juncture.

XBRL covers 60% of global market cap

Doing some research in preparation for a draft answer to CESR's Call for Evidence on standard reporting formats, I was curious to find out how much of the world's capitalisation is already covered by an XBRL mandate. I've thrown together a list of jurisdictions provided by Mike Willis that either already have a mandatory scheme of XBRL disclosure for issuers in operation or decided about its introduction. Using country weights of the MSCI World Index for developed countries (i.e. without China or India and others, both of which have or will soon have a scheme in place), this adds up to slightly above 60% of the "developed" world's equity capitalisation that is already covered by a mandatory XBRL disclosure scheme today.

While this is an encouragingly large share, it is still some ways away from the 90+% that I reckon to be necessary to encourage global investors to migrate the information infrastructure of their analytical processes to XBRL. Bringing the EU's market cap on board would bring us substantially closer to that important threshold.

XBRL for Dummies

Next week, XBRL for Dummies, the long expected reference manual for XBRL by the standard's inventor Charles Hoffman and Liv Watson, its most fervent proponent, will hit the market. We are keen to delve into it!

XBRL for Swiss Treasurers

My presentation fest continued this morning with my first Webex enabled online seminar about XBRL to the Association of Corporate Treasurers in Switzerland. Please find below the slides used during the presentation.

UNCTAD on fair value

I've had the honour of addressing the Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting, twenty-sixth session in Geneva yesterday. The subject matter was implementation issues of fair value accounting in an IFRS context. To my great surprise, there was hardly any criticism expressed of the approach, neither from the panel nor from the floor.