Over 100 people from North America attended Bob’s talk on investor-focused reporting at the GRI summit held February 25th in Tempe, AZ. With Laura Nelson from the Antea Group and Sonal Dalal from SASB, the panel explained the growing demand for ESG information and the importance of integrated messaging. 

Bob described how Integrated Reporting is an adaptable reporting tool that aligns strategic thinking, planning, and reporting. Besides improving management decision making, it also gives investors information they need to understand in a holistic way how the companies they invest in create value. He explained IR’s guiding principles of strategic focus & future orientation, connectivity of information, stakeholder relationships, materiality, conciseness, and reliability and completeness among others. He noted that while policy momentum has been lacking in the United States, IR is becoming widely adopted in Japan and the United Kingdom due to government policy recommendations there. He closed by sharing exemplars of best practices in Integrated Reporting, specifically reviewing SAP’s 2017 report and encouraging audience members to check out Intel’s upcoming 2018 report which devotes a page to each type of capital in the IR framework.