IBM Data Governance Council Leads XBRL Initiative to Create New Reporting Standards for Risk Measurement

ARMONK, NY, Dec 15 (MARKET WIRE) --
In a move to provide businesses worldwide with consistent tools for
measuring aggregate risk in the financial world and provide a real-time
view of market exposure, the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Data Governance Council is
seeking input from banks and financial institutions, corporations,
vendors and regulators to create a standards-based approach to risk
reporting.

Today, organizations have inconsistent methods and vague language for
disclosing operational, market, and credit risk. These inconsistencies
make regulatory oversight both extremely difficult and complex. The first
step to enabling new transparency of risk and exposures in the financial
services industry is semantic clarity -- a precise method for consistently
describing and reporting risk across all organizations. Such transparency
could provide a new macro-economic tool and greater fiscal accountability
for regulators, investors and Central Banks worldwide, making it easier to
identify toxic assets on the books, mitigate fraud, help prevent wide
scale fiscal crisis and rebuild confidence in financial systems.

The IBM Data Governance Council is exploring the use of Extensible
Business Reporting Language (XBRL), a software language for describing
business terms in financial reports, to risk reporting. XBRL could be
used to provide a non-proprietary way of reporting risk that could
potentially be applied worldwide. It is already widely used for financial
reporting throughout Europe, Australia and Japan. The widespread use of
this standard ensures adequate skills and understanding among firms and
regulators.

"Creating a risk taxonomy using XBRL will provide a vocabulary and a
common language allowing everyone to understand what risk means, and
that's the first step in making it easier to calculate and report," said
Steve Adler, chairman of the IBM Data Governance Council. "When we have
semantic clarity around the way organizations describe risk, incidents,
events, losses, claims, exposures, forecasts and reserves, it gets easier
to aggregate loss information, analyze it with standard actuarial
methods, compare past exposures to present conditions and opportunities,
and forecast potential outcomes."

According to the Council, an XBRL Taxonomy of Risk could serve as a
fundamental building block to enable interoperability and standard
practices in measuring risk worldwide. Such standards could potentially
enable Central Banks to manage vast databases of loss history and trend
analyses that could better inform policymakers and member banks helping to
minimize risk and produce better returns.

"XBRL is gaining widespread adoption among global capital markets, banking
and securities regulators, and plays an important role in market reforms
by contributing to transparency and process enhancements," said Anthony T.
Fragnito, chief executive officer, XBRL International, Inc. "XBRL
International is pleased to be a part of this important initiative by the
IBM Data Governance Council."

The Council is immediately seeking proposals and discussion on this topic
to help drive a year-long effort to create a proposed specification for
XBRL for risk reporting. Initial discussions about this specification will
take place February 26-27, 2009 in New York City at a meeting to be
attended by the Enterprise Data Management Council, the Financial Services
Technology Consortium, XBRL International, XBRL.US, and U.S. Securities
and Exchange Commission staff.

"This is an opportunity for both improving the effectiveness of the risk
management function and the quality of reports," said Dan Schutzer,
executive director of Financial Services Technology Consortium. "XBRL for
risk reporting also holds the potential for cost-reduction through the
development of consistent, clear and comprehensive reporting standards."

The IBM Data Governance Council is a group of 50 global companies,
including Abbott Labs, American Express, Bank of America, Bank of
Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd, Bank of Montreal, Bell Canada, Citibank,
Deutsche Bank, Discover Financial, Kasikornbank, MasterCard, Nordea Bank,
Wachovia, and the World Bank, among others, that have pioneered best
practices around risk assessment and data governance to help the business
world take a more disciplined approach to how companies handle data.

Data governance helps organizations govern appropriate use of and access
to critical information such as customer information, financial details
and unstructured content, measuring and reporting information quality and
risk to enhance value and mitigate exposures. IBM's work in this area
supports and furthers the company's Information on Demand strategy, that
has delivered results through consistent earnings growth, hundreds of new
customer wins, strategic acquisitions and industry-first software
offerings.

For more information on the Data Governance Council, visit
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/governance/servicemanagement/data-governa
ce.html

For more information on IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/think

Contact:
Holli Haswell
hhaswell@us.ibm.com
512-590-8879

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