Absa’s 2022 report was chosen in the Top 10 Integrated Reports among the JSE Top 100 listed companies in the EY Excellence in Integrated Report Awards. Absa CFO Jason Quinn shares his insights on their success.
Report season is a difficult time for most companies, so it’s always nice to receive a little recognition for your hard work. The Absa Group Integrated Report 2022 placing in the Top 10 Integrated Reports among the JSE Top 100 listed companies in the EY Excellence in Integrated Report Awards is a testament to this hard work.
Jason Quinn CFO of Absa explains, “Our integrated report is our primary communication to investors and the market, and for us to achieve recognition for excellence in integrated reporting is a proud achievement. It is also a reflection on the level of integrated thinking embedded within the bank.”
What makes a great report?
Most reports can run to well over a hundred pages, so what makes a good report and what are the adjudicators looking for? For Jason the answer is simple:
“A successful integrated report should have a clear strategic, forward focus, emphasise value creation and reflect the interconnectedness between the various elements presented.”
He explains that, “What stood out for the adjudicators was our ability to profile value creation with the right balance of forward-looking information and performance disclosures. To assist investors in comprehensive investment analysis we focused on providing holistic, well-contextualised data including an unbiased view on how we compare against our peers in the markets in which we operate.”
While this is impressive, you need more if you want to be included in the top 10. Happy to share the team’s process Jason says, “Our strategy narrative was supported by scorecard metrics clearly outlining our financial medium-term ambitions. We made a point to profile how our most material issues are interconnected within the business. We closed off the performance feature with detailed disclosure on how future trends, risks and industry changes could impact the achievement of our strategic ambitions and provided a medium-term economic outlook on our five largest Absa operations to inform investor decisions and analysis.”
Point of pride
With any project there are always highs and lows. Asked what he was most proud of, Jason responds:
“Our materiality determination process description is lauded as best practice by both EY and the International Finance Corporation, which we are proud of, and the improvements made to our strategic overview and outlook chapters showcases our forward-looking strategic intent as an organisation.”
The final question when you have achieved a level of excellence is always, where do you go from here? Jason doesn’t hesitate: “We aim to expand the assurance scope over the integrated report to include limited assurance over the qualitative disclosure of content elements as described in the Integrated Reporting Framework.”
