CODEx Project: Discovery Phase insight
The FRC supported by Companies House, FCA, The Charity Commission, HMRC and others launched the Company & Organisational Data Explorer (CODEx) Project in September 2023 with the aim of accelerating the use of structured financial data. The project is funded by DSIT as part of the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund.
Enhancing the data ecosystem
The UK has a focus on economic growth, support for longer-term investment and a drive to maintain and enhance the UK’s capital markets. A key enabler for all these goals is a financial data ecosystem that provides useful insights to the widest audience, at the lowest cost. To achieve this, it is critical to enable access to the data and the tools to analyse it.
The UK is a world leader in collecting company and organisational data in structured digital form in iXBRL (Inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language) format. Of the 3.1 million accounts published annually on the Companies House register, around 88% are already available in iXBRL format. In addition, more than 500 issuers on regulated markets file their annual reports in iXBRL format with the FCA.
However, access and usability of the XBRL data is challenging. Data is often not in a form that is easy to view and analyse, and there are limited tools to support users. This reduces the public and regulatory value of the collected data and adds potential complexity and cost when the public, investors, regulators, and government bodies are consuming such data.
In November 2022, BEIS awarded the FRC a grant of £796,000 via the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund to deliver CODEx. The RPF is a grant-based fund to enable UK regulators and local authorities to help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages business innovation and investment. The current £12m round is being delivered by the DSIT.
The CODEx project is investigating ways to make the XBRL data more usable, with an aim to build simple tools that allow access directly to the data, including:
- a public element being an iXBRL viewer (the Viewer) – a tool to display individual or a small number of iXBRL files, showing the tags in the context of the human-readable report; and
- a private element being a regulatory and agency toolkit (the Toolkit) – a series of data capability sessions to develop skills, blueprints, and tools for bulk data analysis.
The first phase of the project has been focused on Discovery, aiming to learn what current challenges users face when using the XBRL data.
Taking a view on a Viewer
A critical part of understanding potential users’ needs is to conduct user research. It is important that we design a product that works equally well for both internal and external audiences, which is why we wanted to connect broadly with the communities that might use the Viewer. We therefore collaborated with our partner, Public Group International, to interview 27 users representing seven core user groups:
- Supervision staff within regulators and agencies
- Policy staff within regulators and agencies
- Retail and Professional Investors
- Preparers of company reports and design agencies
- FinTech companies
- Academics and students and
- Other members of the General Public
Needs not wants
Based on the interviews four distinct high-level user needs became clear:
- Finding information efficiently: Users spend an unacceptable amount of time and effort accessing relevant XBRL data from company reports and need a tool that optimises this.
- Understanding iXBRL tags and navigating confidently: The level of familiarity with iXBRL viewers across research participants is typically low, emphasising the need for concise, accessible, and consistent explanations and user guide elements to maximise usability and navigability.
- Accessing company reports easily and quickly: Across user groups, users expressed a common, overarching need for tools that connect to the free, centralised, and searchable repository of company reports in iXBRL format so that they can easily find specific reports.
- Exporting data for offline analysis: When needing to conduct more complex data analysis, users struggle to extract specific information from company reports into human-readable format for offline use.
We learned a lot from the user research, and it validated our hypothesis that there are barriers to the use of existing data and tools. We are taking these lessons through to the next phase of the project where we plan to build a viewer to meet these needs.
Building capacity and capability
In parallel to the work on the public viewer we have also been exploring a blueprint for regulators and agencies that supports the consumption and use of the XBRL data to support policy work. This blueprint has focused on the process, tools, skills and infrastructure we need to bring data into the heart of decision making.
Working on the high-level blueprint has been valuable but now we want to put the blueprint into action. Therefore, the next stage of this work will be to create a sandbox, which allows us and our partners to experiment with the data during design sprints in the summer.
Find out more about CODEx or get in contact with the CODEx team.