CWA 16745:2014

Improving transparency in financial and business reporting - Metadata container CWA 16745:2014

Scope

The purpose of this CWA is to propose a standard for submitting data instances to financial regulators in accordance with the chapter describing this CWA in the business plan [26]:
""Metadata container" to wrap a submitted XBRL instance document and compliance test. Provide a standard Metadata Container to enable XBRL sourcing, with in addition necessary compliance tools to enable all stakeholders to test and ensure full adherence to the technical standards.
Metadata such as sender of the document, contact details, date and time of submission, version, digital signature, etc.. are not included in the taxonomies, because they really don't belong to the data model. On the other hand, and often for legal reasons, these data are required by national regulators. As a consequence, a variety of national protocols has been engineered, which complicates the life of cross-border institutions, but also prohibit the possibility to create a harmonized European collection system. Metadata are needed as well for financial reporting as for company legal and economical data. For the digital signature, existing solutions from the Business Registers, who have a deep expertise of the topic, may be generalized. In order to ensure compliance with the protocol, this project will deliver online tools for all stakeholders to use and to test compliance with the complete set (metadata container and XBRL instance document.
This CWA will provide standard protocols and mechanisms for digital signature, administrative data such as identification of submitter, feedback parameters, versioning of subsequent submissions and encryption, as well as online collaborative tools to ensure compliance."
This document specifies:
 a submission container structure to enable financial institutions to submit their regulatory reporting to the respective regulators in a standardised way;
 a metadata information structure (called « Header ») that is part of the submission container structure;
 an adequate negative (or positive) acknowledgement to be returned by the regulator to indicate if the submission container was well received by the regulator (or not);
 a response container structure to allow the regulator to return content-related error messages for the data instances in case errors occurred during any validation phase.
The main targeted authorities are the EBA (European Banking Authority) and EIOPA (European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority) as well as their related national supervision agencies, but the standard may also be used by other regulators. All container structures defined allow the packaging and securisation of data in a uniform way, which should lead to a greater transparency and interoperability between the declaring entities and the national and the European supervisory authorities.
In the course of the specification process, supplementary requirements were added by stakeholders or authorities concerned, among which:
- The scope of the data instances to be supported has been extended from pure XBRL instances to any type of structured data instances, including XML, CSV, etc.;
- The possibility of a 2-layer (or even multi-layer) submission process: some data instances are to be processed by the receiving authority itself (e.g. a national authority), others may be forwarded to a subsequent authority (e.g. a European one);
- The possibility of using the structures of the present CWA in a secure environment i.e. an environment that has its own signature and/or encryption facilities;