In January 2005, a set of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), promulgated by the International Accounting Standards Board, came into force for listed companies in all member countries of the European Union and in many other countries around the world.

One of the most serious dangers in the whole process of moving companies to IFRS by the end of 2005 is that the market simply will not understand the information that it receives. As the main objective of the transition process is to create greater transparency and comparability of financial reporting for the markets, failure in the investor relations process would be immensely damaging.

There is, therefore, a pending and real obligation on all producers of financial research to ensure that their presentation of company accounting data, both historic and forecast, is clear, concise and conforms to IFRS.

How Blue Curve Addresses IFRS

Recognising the fact that analysts will have to adopt the new standards over a period of time, ‘transition management’ will be key to delivering a smooth conversion from the current standards to the new IFRS format.

Blue Curve has recently introduced important new functionality to make the transition to IFRS as painless as possible, whilst ensuring that the investment research process is not adversely affected and maintains compliance with regulations.

In addition, the Blue Curve User Group, a significant body of research producers, intends to publish a paper explaining the detail of IFRS migration for various sectors, with the aim of creating a standard that will be built into the Blue Curve software.

Blue Curve insight, our financial database product, provides a centralised data store for all company result and forecast data. To support IFRS, and any future changes to accounting standards, Blue Curve insight now supports the following scenarios:

• The storage of financial data in the current accounting standard and the maintenance of both results and forecast histories (current scenario);
• The ability to switch the accounting standard to IFRS, which has implications for the data items stored and calculations carried out in the database;
• The ability to support the storage of data sets in multiple accounting standards for a company and to allow the analyst to switch between them to support data cleansing, comparison and further analysis during the transition period.

In addition, all other Blue Curve modules also support multiple accounting standards to allow doucments, web pages and other display mechanisms to choose which accounting standard should be used. This makes Blue Curve the only solution on the market today that provides full support for multiple accounting standards and provides a painless transition to IFRS.