Technology conference: “This is the information I want from you”

The Boar: With a degree in Computer Science, how did you find yourself working in the financial field? Was it was to transition and to adapt?

David North: Well, it’s an interesting one. Because of the size of the company, we’re fairly flexible about which directions people want to specialise in. You don’t have to know a lot about the finance. As it happens, I am one of the treasurers of my church, in my spare time, so I happen to have the knowledge of what it’s like to run the money for an organisation with maybe six figures of turnover. But there are plenty of people in the office that only focus on the programming and try to be the best at that without having to understand too much of the financial aspect. We also have accountants whose jobs it is to explain to us the financial side of it.

The Boar: Talk to us about your job at Core-Filing. What do you do on a daily basis?

DN: I guess my job is fairly similar to that of a senior computer programmer elsewhere in the IT industry. I lead a team of two other programmers so I still get to be hands-on myself, which perhaps you wouldn’t be able to do if you had a team of 10. But it’s also my job to have the ultimate responsibility for the technical side of what we do. Someone else in the company gives me requirements and it’s up to me how we use technology to deliver those. I have to lead the team to get those done.

The Boar: You say that we have to put technology to use to avoid another crisis similar to the 2008 one. Do you have any ideas on how to spread this technology to the public and make it more accessible?

DN: We’ve got a couple of ideas. One of the ways of demonstrating to the public the benefits of using technology in the financial area are projects such as our company’s open data idea: You can go on corefiling.com, search through and look at information about all the companies in the UK who submitted data to that. This way, you can get an idea of what state they’re in if you were thinking of investing in those companies or dealing with them. That’s a benefit to anyone.

The Boar: So do governments implement the regulations you come up with and do they require companies to come to you and use your software in order to give more information about their state to the public?

DN: When it comes to pushing the benefits to governments, I think we’re lucky in that we passed that point. The American government was the first to be persuaded that there was a value to be had here. Our own has been too. So we now see an increasing use of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language). It’s also being extensively used in Australia, in the Netherlands, in France, etc. I think we have probably crossed the boundary to the point where, especially after 2008, governments understood that there had to be some better way of working with all of this information and so far, we’re it. So we’re starting to see more and more request for our services.

The Boar: You say in your presentation that you were part of teams that came up with regulations that are currently implemented. Can you give us an example?

DN: We’ve been involved in the technical standards behind all of this. We’ve been part of the bodies that have been working on that going back 10 years ago. I was personally involved in a number of these groups over the years. Most recently, I’ve been working on the standard for what we call the Table Linkbase, which is the way of defining 2D tables of information. It is used so that you can give a blank table to someone and say: “this is the information I want from you” and so that you can take the electronic information from them and display it in those 2D grids and allow it to be arranged by different dimensions. So when it comes to coming up with the actual regulations, the EU or the government of the country involved generally gets accountants to do that but we come in and advice them on what’s technically feasible.