Case Study in Japan

Experiment of credit information supply-chain using XBRL and Web service (June 2002)

Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech), Toshiba Corporation, Tokyo Shoko Research Ltd (TSR) and Fujitsu developed a demonstration experiment system utilizing XML Web service and opened to the public on Website of TITech.
Credit information supply-chain system is a system to connect financial information related services such as ‘offering’, ‘processing’ and ‘evaluating’ by expert suppliers with the users’ credit management system by means of the internet. In the demonstration, financial data were written in XBRL, and each service was offered as XML Web service. Users can structure a high level credit management by connecting different systems of services anytime they want through a standard interface of information (XBRL) and a standard interface of communication (XML Web service).

In this demonstration, The the following three Web services were offered in XML:

1. （1）Supply of financial information in XBRL (TSR): XML Web service in which one can get financial information of companies written in XBRL.
2. （2）Data processing of financial information written in XBRL (Fujitsu): A service of producing various information utilizing XBRL taxonomy and instances. Specifically, they offered conversion service between different formats and also offered a simple management analysis service.
3. （3）Credit Risk Evaluation (Toshiba): A service of risk evaluation such as bankruptcy from financial information written on the database of TSR. It introduces a type of search engine called ‘CRAFT scoring method’.

In this demonstration experiment, each service was offered respectively by a single company, but in the future, more than two companies should offer services and should give users freedom of choice, that will lead to realization of ‘open type’ credit information supply chain. XBRL Japan is going to cooperate with member companies to keep working for more demonstration experiments.