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Contact: Leah Szarek, Chief External Relations Officer
               202-838-1500
               lszarek@msrb.org

 

MSRB DEMYSTIFIES STRUCTURED DATA WITH NEWEST ADDITION TO EMMA LABS

Washington, DC – The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) today debuted its third entry on EMMA Labs – the MSRB’s free innovation sandbox for transparency enhancements to the municipal securities market – with a new lab aimed at demystifying structured data. The lab explains what structured data is, features case studies from municipal issuers who have prepared their financial statements in a machine-readable format and illustrates potential future capabilities of the Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA®) website.

“Our goal with this Lab is first and foremost education,” said Chief Product Officer Brian Anthony. “Issuers and other market participants need a common understanding of structured data as technology continues to evolve and new legislation is being implemented to require the greater use of structured data in regulatory filings with the MSRB.”

The Lab features case studies from two early adopters of structured data for financial management: the City of Flint and the College of DuPage. The Lab also illustrates how the EMMA website could be enhanced with dynamic comparison tools leveraging structured data.

“Since EMMA Labs launched in 2022, it has served as a place for market participants to collaborate on innovative prototypes and ideas that have the power to improve transparency in our market,” Anthony said.

EMMA Labs is free to use. The structured data lab is one of three “Active Labs” that serve as a proving ground for functional prototypes that could eventually be deployed on the EMMA website. The first Lab is a powerful search engine that the MSRB plans to bring to future-state EMMA to enable keyword searches across the hundreds of thousands of disclosure documents submitted to EMMA as unstructured PDFs. The second Lab is a dynamic dashboard for market data analysis that empowers users to discover and visualize market trends. An additional Idea Labs section provides a forum for users to submit and provide feedback on ideas for potential future Active Labs.

Visit EMMA Labs to learn more about structured data.
Learn more about EMMA Labs.
Questions about EMMA Labs? Contact EMMALabs@msrb.org.

The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) protects and strengthens the municipal bond market, enabling access to capital, economic growth, and societal progress in tens of thousands of communities across the country. The MSRB fulfills this mission by creating trust in our market through informed regulation of dealers and municipal advisors that protects investors, issuers and the public interest; building technology systems that power our market and provide transparency for issuers, institutions, and the investing public; and serving as the steward of market data that empowers better decisions and fuels innovation for the future. The MSRB is a self-regulatory organization governed by a board of directors that has a majority of public members, in addition to representatives of regulated entities. The MSRB is overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress.

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