Danubius International Conferences, 22nd EMAN Conference. Social Responsibility and Sustainability Accounting-Key Corporate Performance Drivers and Measures

Insights into the IR practices by European Union’s financial sector organizations

Adriana Tiron-Tudor, Diana Lavinia Martin, Gianluca Zanellato
Last modified: 2018-05-03

Abstract

Purpose of the Paper: The financial market’s proper functioning requires entities’ financial and nonfinancial information reporting and disclosure toward markets operators, regulators and supervisors. (Acharya & Richardson, 2009) that can be provided through the release of integrated reports. Financial sector organizations have been embracing the Integrated Reporting (IR) movement, since its very beginning, and in particular, after the release of the official International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRF) in 2013, there have been a constant presence in the official database of the International Integrated Reporting Council.

In this perspective, the present paper aims to analyze to what extent European Union’s ( EU) financial sector organization have been following the IIRF guidance from the release of the framework (2013) to the latest available IR, of 2017. We motivate the decision of limiting the present research to European Union’s financial sector organization, as the European Union is facing its first wave of regulation of non-financial information with the EU Directive 2014/95/EU coming into effect from 2018 onwards.

Design and Methodology: In order to achieve the objective of the present contribution the sample of organizations is gathered from the IIRC database under the section of examples, as in Sofian & Dumitru (2017). In addition to the organization resulting from the database, a manual research has been conducted with the extent to find further organization applying the IIRF. The manual research has been carried out through an in deep analysis of the integrated reporters declared under the section “IR reporters”, after the analysis of the IR reporters declared, further analysis have been conducted to establish the belonging sector of activity through the employment of Thomson Reuters EIKON database. Reports are further downloaded from the official sites of the organization for the available years. Contend analysis is used to identify the compliance evolution of financial sector organizations towards the IIRF, based on the framework proposed by Zhou et al. (2017) as it covers all the content foreseen by the IIRF.

Preliminary Findings and Outcome:  The present paper brings insight into the IR practices by European Union’s financial sector organizations. Similar studies have been carried out by Wild and Van Staden (2014). In particular, Sofian & Dumitru (2017) brought insights from the application of the IIRF on the European financial sector for the year 2015.

In this vein, the present study presents a first longitudinal analysis about the IIRF compliance on the European financial sector. Expected results shall demonstrate an increasing compliance toward IIRF from the population analyzed, as it has been in use for five years.

Research Limitation and Outlook: the present research has been conducted only on the European financial sector organizations, represents some major limitations as this research is focused to the financial sector and European region. Moreover, further research should presents evidences from all the IR reporters from Europe and insights from world wide financial sector.