Automating ESEF/XBRL Data Collection for Paderborn University
The Challenge Researchers at Paderborn University were conducting a quantitative study on the adoption and quality of the European Single Electronic Format (ESEF). To do this, they needed to programmatically access thousands of XBRL packages—complex ZIP archives containing structured financial tags—across the entire European market. Constructing valid download paths for these files was proving difficult due to inconsistent naming conventions on company websites, and retaining the official ESMA-compliant filenames (LEI + Fiscal Date) was critical for their data matching.
The Solution FinancialReports provided a robust API solution tailored for structured data retrieval.
- Direct ESEF Endpoint: We gave the research team access to a dedicated
10-K-ESEFAPI endpoint, allowing them to filter specifically for machine-readable XBRL filings rather than standard PDFs. - Original Metadata Preservation: While our system uses UUIDs for secure storage, we ensured that the internal structure of every delivered ZIP file retained the original, regulation-compliant filenames (e.g.,
LEI-2024-12-31-en.zip). This allowed the researchers to cross-reference files against official registries effortlessly. - Developer Enablement: Our engineering team provided custom Python scripts and rapid technical support to resolve URL construction issues, ensuring their scraper ran without interruption.
The Result The university successfully automated the retrieval of the entire universe of available ESEF filings. By solving the technical challenges of file retrieval and naming persistence, FinancialReports enabled the researchers to focus on analyzing the XBRL tags themselves, rather than building infrastructure to fetch them.
"Accessing raw XBRL data at scale is usually a headache. FinancialReports provided a stable API that just worked. Their support team helped us navigate the complexity of ESEF file structures, allowing us to build our dataset in days."
