Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) has become the first Japanese bank to take delivery of an online XBRL-based foreign exchange trade system that the developers, NEC Corporation (NEC), say can digitalise all documents and business processes, including the issuing of letters of credit (L/C) and bills of lading.

XBRL (Extensible Business Reporting Language) claims to provide a common platform for the online publication, exchange, and analysis of complex financial information and improves the reliability and ease of communicating financial data among users internal and external to the reporting enterprise.

Electronic management

The Global e-Trade Service (GeTS) solution is aimed at global trading companies, international banks and shipping companies and is scheduled to start operation with SMBC from March 2003.

The system aims to provide SMBC the ability to provide online trading and financial services such as electronic management of export L/Cs, bills of exchange, and remittance information.

Compatibility

According to the developers the system can be easily integrated with other SMBC systems and those of its customers. It also allows direct connectivity with SWIFT secure messaging services and bolero.net, the secure electronic trading platform on which several trade finance products have been designed.

GeTS should also fit with other global standard messaging and settlement networks compatible with XBRL, which is an XML-based, royalty-free, and open standard being developed by a consortium of over 170 companies and agencies.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a standard way of encoding both text and data so that content can be processed with relatively little human intervention and exchanged across diverse hardware, operating systems, and applications.

XBRL benefits

Because the GeTS system is based totally on XBRL, "our customer's systems can use a globally standardised document format to do their trade-related activities much more easily, with more reliability and cost effectively," says Atsushi Suzuki, Head of Digital ID Planning Group Electronic Commerce Banking Department at SMBC.

The system accepts documents created by Microsoft Word or Excel and converts the information into XBRL automatically.

Nasdaq-quoted NEC is one of the world's larger providers of broadband and mobile Internet solutions with a staff of about 140,000 people worldwide and in the year to March 2002 it recorded net sales of approximately US$39 billion.

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