It’s been two years since the regulations around corporate reporting changed to promote a shift toward the strategic report and 10 years since the start of How Does it Stack Up? (HDISU), Radley Yeldar’s annual evaluation and discussion of annual reporting in the FTSE 100. One of the key questions at this year’s event, taking place on 9 July at 30 Euston Square, is ‘Has regulatory change made a difference?’

“We really want to look at the last 10 years because we want to celebrate those that have been doing great work in the environment of so much change,” Radley Yeldar’s investment engagement director Brett Simnett says. “But we also want to start looking at the 10 years ahead.”

Speakers at the event will include the FRC, IIRC, ICSA and in-house client teams from AstraZeneca, Berendsen and Vodafone, who have achieved reporting success over the past decade and again this year. They will discuss their routes to achieving best practice as well as the ways in which the reporting landscape has changed in recent years. A panel of analysts will provide the counter-point by addressing the things they look for in annual reports.

The discussion will be complemented by the annual presentation of the top-10 narrative reports and top-10 online reports from among the FTSE 100. Narrative reports are evaluated based on a 15 point criteria including KPIs, materiality, governance and risk. They also must meet criteria around the style, form and function of the report itself as a means of providing a logical and coherent read.

The online report is judged by its interactivity, user experience and messaging, among other criteria, while taking note of the context of the business and its overall use of digital communications, in order to establish best practice.

This year, HDISU does not examine integrated reporting as a separate category, as it has in the past, but uses its main criteria to identify the journey towards an integrated approach across the sample.

The research has seen fundamental improvements in many reports across the FTSE100, but has highlighted that much work is still to be done by reporters to provide clear, coherent and material narratives that truly reflect their business' invest case.