XBRL-based projects for financial and prudential reporting – an empirical analysis in European banking system

Our paper approaches the extensible economic reporting language for collecting information on business processes, namely XBRL by analyzing its implementation in the European banking environment, closely related to the adoption of International Accounting Standards and Financial Reporting (IAS/IFRS). Our research problem mainly came from the accounting development issue, which is an evolutionary process dependent upon several factors. On the other hand, improving banking supervision on information reporting is a problem that needed special attention in order to increase its efficiency and effectiveness, especially in the latest period sprinkled with various banking failures. The results of the performed analysis using various statistical tools (descriptive statistic and correlation tests) reveal that the implementation of both XBRL-based projects (FINREP and COREP) is independent of a fully or partially adoption of IAS/IFRS, while the financial and prudential reporting frameworks are mainly inter-related. Thus, our paper came to point out XBRL’s major role in facilitating information communication in a homogeneous way that will allow the interchange of data between software applications, as well as the automatic analysis of financial information in a particular business field, the banking one