CODEx project makes structured financial data more accessible for investors, businesses and regulators
News types: Publications
Published: 30 May 2025
The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has today published its final report on the Company and Organisational Data Explorer (CODEx) project, marking the successful completion of this innovative initiative.
The 18-month project, led by the FRC and in collaboration with Companies House, the Financial Conduct Authority, The Charity Commission, and HMRC, has successfully delivered on its aim to find innovative and cost-effective ways of accessing and using structured accounting and reporting data in the UK.
As part of the project, the FRC launched its Digital Reporting Viewer tool in March, unlocking vast repositories of digital data, enabling investors, businesses, and the public to easily access and analyse company information and in turn support UK economic growth.
Mark Babington, Executive Director of Regulatory Standards at the FRC, said:
"With the completion of the CODEx project, we have achieved our objective. Our public XBRL viewer has made structured reporting data more accessible and more transparent, and our regulatory toolkit provides us with the tools we need to give better regulatory and policy insight.
"These innovative outcomes would not have been possible without the funding provided by the Regulators' Pioneer Fund. I want to thank the team at DSIT for the opportunities the funding brought, and the support given throughout the project. By regulators working together, we have built an important component that underpins a digital future for UK company reporting, supports growth and demonstrates innovation in practice."
In November 2022, the UK Government awarded the Financial Reporting Council a grant of £796,000 via the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund to deliver the Company and Organisational Data Explorer (CODEx) project, which started in September 2023. The RPF is a grant-based fund to enable UK regulators and local authorities to help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages business innovation and investment.
The most recent £12m round was delivered by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and concluded on 31st of March 2025.
Science Minister, Lord Vallance, said:
“Fresh thinking and new regulatory approaches will give confidence to investors, researchers, and consumers alike. We want to encourage businesses to choose the UK as the best destination to develop their new ideas and bring great technologies to market.
“From using financial data to deliver better services to AI in healthcare, the funding will give UK regulators and local authorities the support they need to accelerate innovation and turn it into success in every corner of the country. With our help, innovators working on these projects can experiment with technologies that will transform vital public services, fuelling our Plan for Change.”
The UK is a global leader in collecting structured company data, with 88% of the 3.1 million accounts published annually on the Companies House register available in iXBRL format. However, until now, access and usability of this data has been challenging, with information often contained in regulatory silos and not in a form easy to view and analyse.
The CODEx project addressed these challenges by delivering:
- A public iXBRL viewer that displays tagged data within the context of human-readable reports
- A regulatory and agency toolkit with blueprints and tools for bulk data analysis
- Skills development sessions to build capability across regulatory bodies
The final report details the project's discovery, alpha and beta phases, and highlights how the delivered tools are already enhancing transparency and empowering data-driven decision-making across the public and regulatory landscape.