It Will Soon Be Easier for Investors to Access Company Filings on Their Mobile Devices

The Securities and Exchange Commission plans to modernize its website to ease public access to company filings via mobile devices under a contract awarded to Accenture Federal Services, the company announced on Thursday.

Under the $17.9 million contract spread over five years, SEC.gov will “soon be easier to navigate, giving citizens, financial professionals and other stakeholders more streamlined, timely access to the agency’s more than 21 million disclosure documents,” Accenture said. The planned mobile framework is designed to integrate social media while enhancing Web content, consolidating information management systems and providing user-analytics capabilities. 

Arlington, Va.-based Accenture will also provide the SEC with content management user training and round-the-clock maintenance for a site that already attracts more than 562 million page views monthly. Investors regularly consult the agency’s Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval (EDGAR) system to search more than 21 million disclosure documents.

Accenture will also deliver “visual style updates and other improvements to help make the agency’s websites more flexible, informative, easier to navigate and secure – not only improving the customer experience for investors, public companies and citizens, but also allowing the SEC to consistently and reliably deliver timely and accurate information to its users,” the contractor said in a statement.

“The SEC is at the forefront of digital strategies and modernization and, with enhanced Web content and document management capabilities, the agency will continue to demonstrate its commitment to delivering a high-quality user experience,” said Elaine Beeman, head of Accenture’s federal civilian agency projects.

The award drew praise from the industry-based nonprofit Data Transparency Coalition, which has been pressing the SEC to restructure and standardize its documents and data to make them more open and searchable for the public.

"The SEC's information on public companies, markets and financial products includes the most commercially valuable data sets in the whole federal government,” coalition Executive Director Hudson Hollister said in an email to Government Executive. The agency’s “full transformation hasn't happened yet, but we've been excited to see several incremental rule proposals over the last year to replace PDF documents with XBRL data within select SEC reports. Accenture Federal's website support project will be able to draw on readily accessible open data sets in formats like XBRL to power new visualizations and help the site better serve investors."

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