New hires signal EDGAR Online plans
Jinfo Blog

By Michelle Manafy

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Founded in 1995, EDGAR Online is best known for creating and distributing financial data and public filings for equities, mutual funds and other publicly traded assets. EDGAR powers tools such as MarketWatch, MSN Money, Yahoo! Finance and more. With yesterday's announcement of further expansion to its executive management team, the company is signalling plans to expand its target markets (and applications) as well.

Following upon its March appointment of new CEO, Robert J. Farrell, EDGAR Online has made several other key hires including Ed McDonnell to head Global Sales and Business Development, David Price as CFO, and yesterday's announcement of the addition of Jeanne Tshontikidis as VP of data operations and David Frankel as CMO.

While its XBRL technology has been used worldwide by organisations that want to add structure to unstructured financial information, the company found itself poised for a windfall when, in 2008, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandated that all publicly traded US companies and mutual funds convert to XBRL beginning in 2009 concluding in 2011. Given the timing – and the company's years of investment in developing technology and taxonomy around XBRL tagging – it is not a surprise that EDGAR Online is now aggressively positioning itself to leverage XBRL for a variety of offerings going forward.

There are opportunities in the market beyond simply complying with this requirement. As new CMO Frankel puts it, "there are many people in addition to the institutional investment community, like on the corporate side and in the enterprise, also retail investors and investment bankers, that want to take this finely tagged unstructured information and look at it in a structured way". EDGAR Online is gearing up to meet this demand. According to Frankel, "As we go into 2012, we expect to be releasing a number of datasets and analytics within our own online application that will make it easier for those across the markets I described to look at and analyse this information in a meaningful way".

"What I think is interesting, and many people wouldn't realise, is that we've developed this technology and expertise around XRBL and this taxonomy, but it can be applied in ways that people haven't really thought of before." He suggests that one way in which this data might be put to work is informing the sales pipeline by indentifying and delivering appropriate data culled from within financial statements and other filings, such as those about management changes. "With our technology," says Frankel, "we can provide data that could be plugged into a CRM or intranet portal to show things such as trends costs of goods sold" which could be used to help build the value proposition for a potential buyer. "We are going to be looking at ways to slice documents and financial data to apply it in many unexpected ways," says Frankel.

This granular tagging of financial documents provides a valuable degree of structure to this unstructured information. Now, as Frankel points out, the market wants to see what can be done with it to deliver more than compliance with SEC regulations; to deliver valuable information that delivers value to the bottom line. 

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