The German association of Investment Professionals (DVFA) commented on the EU Commission’s consultation in January 2021 on the establishment of a “European single access point (ESAP) for financial and non-financial information publicly disclosed by companies”. The Corporate Analysis Commission, of which I am also a member, has commented on this in detail. The statements of the various stakeholders are available on the EU Commission website.

Excerpt from our statement:

“Actually, it is relatively inefficient to use regulators` portals to gather information. Therefore financial analyzer are avoiding using such portals. In order to radically increase the transparency of capital market information, automation is one key – among others. This means that ESAP should provide appropriate interfaces to access ESAP by computer programs and to download the information automatically.
In addition, we recommend the EU commission to carefully investigate actual ESEF-obstacles. For example, “valid ESEF data” is another key to increase capital market transparency in the EU. However today ESEF data usably are not NOT VALIDATED at the OEMs. Although this is technically possible. validation (for example XBRL-validation) is mandatory for filing XBRL reports at the US SEC, since it`s beginning . At this point, one key obstacle is that the ESEF mandate does NOT include a mandate for the OEM to validate ESEF data. In addition, the technical implementation could be simplified by setting up a “open source ESEF validation engine”, which OEM have to integrate in to their national platforms. This would guarantee valid data, using the same validation rules EU-wide. In addition, this would be cost efficient for OEMs.“