According to the Association of Investment Professionals in Germany (DVFA), the planned European Single Access Point for capital market-relevant data of listed companies in the European Union still has a serious structural flaw.

„There is no uniform EU-wide quality assurance system to technically guarantee minimum standards for determining data from complex electronic reports, such as IFRS consolidated financial statements,“ says the DVFA. Without a quality assurance system, „the risk of producing junk data is very high“, warns Thorsten Müller, Chairman of the DVFA Executive Board and Managing Director of the consultancy GF Lighthouse Corporate Finance.

The planned single European access point is intended to provide financial data, ESG data and data based on the EU Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid) or the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR). They are to be published via a central database of the EU market supervisory authority ESMA. The European Single Access Point will gradually include more data. The starting signal will be given this year. Publication of the data should then begin in 2027. The project is scheduled for completion in 2030.

The reliability of data is essential for corporate analysis, one of the core disciplines of DVFA members. This holds especially true in times when data is processed and analysed using artificial intelligence. „This is precisely why,“ emphasizes Müller, „DVFA attaches so much importance to ensuring data quality from the outset in the concrete steps towards a uniform European access point for data on companies and their financial and sustainability indicators.“

Bodo Kesselmeyer, digitization expert in the DVFA Commission for Company Analysis and Managing Director of the consulting firm Anubo XBRL, illustrates the concerns: „If the single European access point is organized in such a way that it is possible to submit complex electronic reports incompletely filled out or to make obviously incorrect statements, then we have a big problem.“ That is because the analysis software, which retrieves this data from the European Single Access Point, cannot cope with information where, for example, the total assets do not correspond to the total liabilities. „To avoid misunderstandings: It's not about taking over the auditor's tasks,“ Kesselmeyer clarifies.

A central database such as the European Single Access Point can only bring benefits if a quality system ensures that minimum standards are adhered to when submitting data to the authorities. Kesselmeyer cautiously refers to the quality problems experienced by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) more than ten years ago. „We should by all means learn from the SEC's experience with inadequate data quality of machine-readable data.“