Ecquaria had the pleasure to host a group of delegates from Companies Commission of Malaysia (Suruhanjaya Syarikat Malaysia or SSM), a statutory body which regulates companies and businesses in Malaysia.

The delegates were in Singapore on a two-day study trip in December last year to learn from the  experience of its counterpart, the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore (ACRA) on XBRL adoption and its implementation in Singapore.

As ACRA’s technology partner for the BizFin^x or Business Financials in XBRL implementation, Ecquaria was honoured to share with the Malaysian team on the implementation strategies and milestones in the design and development of the free Web-based XBRL filing and reporting tool.  Launched in 2007, BizFin^x enables companies to prepare, manage and file their financial statements in XBRL, the new digital language of business, as well as in portable document format (PDF) without the need for them to incur additional software expense or for users to know how XBRL works.

Accessible from the ACRA website 24 x 7, BizFin^x provided an online guide for users as well as enabled them to print out hard copies of the financial statements for use at annual general meetings and to meet the reporting requirements of other regulators.

There was a lively exchange of questions at the sharing session with the delegates and ACRA representatives. The delegates commented it had been a fruitful meeting which had helped enhance their appreciation of the promise of XBRL and how its adoption could help SSM achieve greater transparency in corporate information and regulation in response to a dynamic business environment.