We are going to talk about integrated reporting, and I’ll give you a brief outline of what it is, where it is used, how and why. Integrated reporting, IR, represents the latest international attempt to connect the firm’s financial and non-financial performance in one single document. An integrated report, IR, is intended to provide an organization value creation story and to stimulate businesses to use integrative thinking, to reflect upon how they generate value in the short, medium and long term horizons through a comprehensive range of financial, as well as human, intellectual, environmental, social and relational factors. The adoption of IR is expected to tackle a number of problems presented by conventional, standalone sustainability or CSR reports, such as the failure to account for all sources of value creation, the complex interconnections between sustainability and financial performance, and the communication of a company's business model. In this sense, IR is consistent with the developments in financial and other reporting, but also differs from other disclosures in a number of ways. In particular it has an emphasis on conciseness of communication that should be characterized by strategic focus, future orientation, and the special attention to the context in which an organization operates, as well as to the different needs of its stakeholders. But IR is different especially for the idea of connectivity of information, both financial and non-financial, quantitative and qualitative, and for the active consideration and measurement of the dynamics and interdependencies between the resources, called capitals, that an organization uses or affects in its value creation process. For the time being, IR represents a form of voluntary disclosure, with the exceptions of South Africa, where IR is mandatory on a report on explained basis for listed companies since March 2010. The International Integrated Reporting Council, the IIRC, aims to make IR the corporate reporting norm in the future. For the time being, more than 1500 global companies have adopted IR around the world. Regulators, stock exchanges, and policymakers are seeing IR as an opportunity for greater alignment with the evolution of disclosure regulations. For example, given the new EU directive enforced from January 2017 on the disclosure of wrong financial information, the EU has declared that it monitors with great interest the evolution of the integrated reporting concept. The IIRC, in absence of standards, introduced in 2013 the international framework. The framework has three core parts: fundamental concepts, that is, the foundations of an IR, guiding principles that inform the concept of an integrated report and how information is presented, and content elements, which are essentially categories of information that are to be included in an integrated report. One fundamental concept of the IR is the six capitals framework. At the core of the organization is its business model, which draws on various capitals as inputs and through its business activities converts them to outputs. All organizations depend on a whole range of capitals to create value, starting with the traditional ones, financial, that is to say, the pool of funds an organization has access to; Manufacture: it has plants, machinery and infrastructure used in the production of goods and services, but also other types of capitals are fundamental for sustainable value creation; Intellectual, that is to say, organizational, knowledge-based intangibles; Social and relationships, that is to say, relationships established within and between communities, different groups of stakeholders, and other networks; Human, that is to say, people’s competencies, capabilities and experience and their motivations to innovate; And natural, both renewable and non-renewable environmental resources. The guiding principles, such as connectivity of information, conciseness, reliability and completeness, consistency and comparability, are applied for the purpose of preparing and presenting an integrated report. As there are not standards, judgment is needed in applying them, particularly when there is an apparent tension between them. For example, between conciseness and completeness. Finally, the content elements are areas such as the external environment, governance, the business model, risks and opportunities, strategy outlook and, of course, performance, that should be described and reported in a way that best expresses the organization’s unique value creation story and makes the connections between the content elements apparent. They are not intended to appear in a set sequence, and they are not isolated, but fundamentally linked to each other. Recent papers show that the adherence to the the framework in terms of both contents and style of the disclosure, determines the quality of an IR, and in turn, the benefits deriving from its adoption. In fact, IR quality brings several benefits to companies in terms of both improved dialogue with the capital markets and better internal decisions leveraging on new non-financial information and KPIs to assess performance and to motivate executives and boards. Recent research has highlighted some value enhancing beneficial effects associated with IR regarding both market effects measured in terms of firm value, stock liquidity, cost of capital and future cash flows, and real effects in terms of better investment decisions and higher operating cash flows.
