Impero A/S (IMPERO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to this Impero Q2 2026 Product Update Webinar. We're very, very happy to have you all joining us here today. Before we kick it off, I do want to just go through a couple of practical notes. And first of all, it is that this webinar is, of course, being recorded. We will also share it afterwards via e-mail with all of you, and we will also, of course, put it in the help center. So if it is something that you want to refer back to or share with your colleagues, it will be made available there. [Operator Instructions] A quick introduction here today. I'm Jasmine Hansen de Guzman. I am the Marketing Director here at Impero, and I'm simply going to be today's moderator. And the 2 stars of the show are from our product team, and I'm going to let them introduce themselves. So Kristian, would you like to go first?

Yes. Thank you, Jasmine. My name is Kristian Jensen. I'm the Head of Product here at Impero, and I'll be going through the road map and kind of what we've been up to last few months? And yes, you give me your own update on that? And over to you, Raquel.

Thank you, Kristian. It's wonderful to see everyone here. Raquel, product manager here at Impero. And today, I'll be covering a walk-through of the Impero [indiscernible]. So first set of AI features. And then a sneak peek into a new feature that is still in development.

Very exciting and really good to have both of you. And I know several customers do interface with you on a regular basis, but we do host these quarterly product update webinars to really provide a level set information for all of you on what is happening with Impero product, what's been released and what up. And that's exactly what we're going to be having a look at today. So as Kristian mentioned, he's going to take us through the road map. What's coming -- what's currently being prioritized and in progress, but also having a look at our release walk through and the highlights of some of the things that have been recently released, which is a big focus on entity management. Then we have future in focus, which is Impero [indiscernible], our collection of AI features, and then we'll also have something that as Raquel mentioned, is coming up next, which is the health score before we wrap it up with the Q&A. And if you join any of these webinars before, you know we love to kick it off with a little bit of interactive questions. And today, I actually have three for you in a row. So I'd -- let's see. I'm going to launch a poll in a second, and I would love to hear about how much time does Impero save in your risk and control processes per month? Is it less than 5 hours, 5 to 10 hours, 10 to 20, 20 to 40 hours or maybe even 40 plus. That would definitely be on the very high level of things. But I have that open for you right now. I'm going to leave it open for another 15 seconds or so, but really curious to hear because at least when I've talked with different users, super users, it can vary significantly. And of course, it depends on how many controls you have, how many control programs and as well as how many risks you have documented. Amazing. I'm just going to get a couple more answers. And just go with your initial gut feeling. You guys know your processes better than anyone else. So then you can kind of get an idea of how much time you're saving. Wonderful. I'm going to close that out. And the next one I have for you. I'm going to put that up on the screen already, so you can kind of have a quick microsecond ahead to think about it, and it should be launched on it. It is, is your audit process faster with Impero. And a lot of the different people that I speak with, they're actually giving their auditors access to Impero so that they can go in, find the information and the evidence and the documentation, find the controls themselves, which, at least from my understanding, have saved a lot of you time because then you don't need to sit with auditors and hands-on show them where everything is or find the documentation. They can just simply log into Impero and all of it is there. And great, I have -- we have some great answers there. I'm going to close that out. And then the very last one before we jump into all of the great content from Kristian and Raquel today, and I've thrown that up on the screen, and it should be launching now for all of you. And it is, have you improved your controlled completion on time rate since using Impero? Of course, it's if you're working manually with controls before, you have to send a lot of manual reminders to people. I do think the nice thing about Impero, at least and how we use it internally as you do get those automated reminders so that you don't need to spend time on it, which should also hopefully, in turn, make sure that the people who are completing the controls are doing it on time. I know we always internally as we'll have a look at our own on-time rate to make sure that we are living up to the highest standards. Wonderful. And I will close that out. And thank you all for sharing that input. We are very, very thankful. And with that, I am going to pass it over to you, Kristian, to talk a little bit about our road map.

All right. Thank you, Jasmine. Yes, I have the pleasure of showing our road map and giving you an overview of what we're working on right now, but also what's coming? And do you do the next slide? So here, we have a road map, and it's worth noting as always that the road map is a living document and is subject to change, but I'm basically going to try to guide you through everything that's going on this slide. And if I start with the things that I currently have been released. We have released the NTCscope data sheets, which is something that we'll cover in more detail later. We have also added additional functionality to the Impero Assist, which Raquel will have a little bit more of a deep dive on later as well. And then focusing on all the things that are in progress. We're currently working on the last phase of entity management. It's also something that I'll go into a lot more detail with in a little bit. And we are also working in the process of making it possible to postpone an activity and activities due date when needed. For example, when reopening activity, we're also going to add a little bit more functionality to the activities page overall, like making it possible to unarchive, archive activities and just a few like quality of life improvements that I know at least some of our customers are going to be very happy for. If we move to the performance and monitoring and data insights, Raquel will be talking about a sell feature, specifically aimed and giving you more insights into the bottlenecks and potential improvements within the platform. And in the AI section, she will also be covering the AI Assist, sorry, the Impero Assist as I mentioned. If I take it over to the UX and UI improvements, we are very soon making it possible for you to configure your own custom mail servers, so SMTP so that the Imperial as are being sent from your own domain rather than the Impero domain that's going to be coming out shortly. Lastly, for the things that are in progress, we are building an Impero Bocken for Claude and Copilot so that you'll soon be able to use your Impero data and ask questions about the Impero data [indiscernible] controls and programs and so on within your Copilot or Claude or similar. So I'm really excited about those things. And moving to the things that are currently in consideration. We have a lot of things. If I start on the left side over in the internal controls and risk management enhancements, we are currently looking at being able to do threshold [indiscernible] completion. This is all about letting a control activity, complete itself within -- when the submitted value sits inside an acceptable range that you have defined so that your team only spends time on looking at cases where there's actually a need for human being to look at it and it falls within your threshold. On entity-based control triggering, imagine you have controls that depend on each other within an entity. Here will be relevant to trigger the mix control based on completion rather than the normal calendar days and only trigger the corresponding activity or corresponding control within the same specific entity rather than the current implementation of our control triggering, which is that we have on the platform today. That way, one entity can run its chain of independent controls on its own without depending on the other entities within the control program. The last one in this area is about issue tracking remediation. And while we have some customers today that are managing this already the platform by using a control program, we want to make this feel a little bit more native when a control fails or an audit surface finding. So make it a lot easier, so you can log it, assign it, set a deadline and with a link back to the control of risks that really cost us instead of managing this in a separate control program or outside of Impero in a spreadsheet or similar? If I move on to the performance monitoring and data insights, dashboard health is something that Raquel also will be covering. So we'll talk more about that. But on the AI things, there are 2 things that we're considering. And the third thing is an AI-first review where an AI would basically compare one submission of control activity with the same control activity from the previous period and basically flag if there's anything meaningfully different from one month to another. This could, for example, be that a file is substantially smaller or that is missing some of the columns that it previously had or that what was submitted didn't really make sense. This is worth [indiscernible], of course, for the further view prior to them seeing this. And the second part is a bit of interesting because that's basically documented policy handling and benchmarking. So it really has 2 parts of this. The first part is being able to handle and version your documents directly on the platform and refer to them from within the control. So live up to this policy within the control. And the second part is more of a grander scope, where we basically would take an AI and apply across your controls and control programs to make sure that the control performance and the design of the controls of themselves would actually live up to the policy of frameworks that you're referring to. So that's super exciting and something that we're very much looking into. If I move on to the UX and UI improvements, we are looking at doing color and logo white living of e-mails, which kind of builds on top of the custom mail server I just mentioned before. So the e-mails from Impero not only -- are coming from your own domain, but also look and feel like e-mail stemming from your own environment with your own branding and so on and on the batch notifications. We have definitely received some feedback, particularly from reviewers that sometimes can be a little bit overloaded with e-mails when the first in each month or the last in each month comes as we're looking into how we best can address this and make it a little bit -- make your mailbox a little bit nicer. And lastly, within the integrations and connectivity, we are considering adding a new task type which we're calling ERP smart test type, which is a way for you to be able to configure and pulling data from an ERP system into the task itself so the control performer would review and approve the real number or the real file from the source, which in this case, would be an ERP system as opposed to copying and pasting by hand. And that leads me to the next slide where your input really shapes our thinking here. So the next poll that Jasmine is going to show helps us understand a little bit where your energy is and help us guide our decisions around where to prioritize. So for this, we're really interested in understanding like from these things I just mentioned, which of the things would make the biggest difference for you? And of course, there may be multiple things here. And again, if you have -- if this is just a long wish list and you would like all of these things tomorrow, then let us know, and let's see what we can really do in order to prioritize these things. I'm really excited to see where the energy is from you guys and where you would see the biggest difference in your day-to-day life.

And I will say I was sneaky and I wrote pick one, so it is a single choice because I'm sure there are some people who would love all of these, but to help you guys get input to prioritize the road map, it's pick one. And I can see about 1/3 of you who are on the call have answered so far. It is quite worthy. So I'm going to leave it up a couple more seconds. But Kristian, maybe you want to just quickly recap all of these different options that we have up here on the screen.

Yes, for sure. So we have the issue tracking remediation. So like handling, finding control gaps, finding control inefficiency from an audit finding, it could be from other processes. We have the threshold order completion so that could franchise will be used for balance sheet reconciliation of like don't bother looking at these specific controls because the sum is within some threshold that we have approved. There is the AI first review so that the AI would basically review and look at the performance from a specific control and have a first pass and making sure everything looks good, maybe finding some errors that you wouldn't expect or highlight the things that you are likely to find anyways. And then we have the document and policy handling, so handling that more gracefully on the platform. And then we have the smart task types, expanding the APIs to feed the directly into controls. And then we have another thing that I actually didn't touch upon, which is something that kind of stems a little bit or comes together with this whole control triggering -- entity-based control triggering [indiscernible] when you would be setting up your control triggers, if you're already using control triggering today, to have a little bit of better process mapping and visualization. It's like, okay, this process starts, then it continues over in this process?

Amazing. I see we've got lots of great answers. So I'm going to close out that pull and make sure to share those results with Kristian or Raquel. So thank you, everyone, for sharing your road map input as well. As Kristian said, it really does help us weigh all of the considerations in our prioritization and resources. And with that, Kristian, I think you want to walk into the release highlights a little bit. Of course, I will just preface. If you missed it, one of the big releases this past quarter was entity management. And Kristian, you're probably going to reference this quite a bit, but we do have a dedicated NTT management webinar. And if you miss that, we'll put that link to the recording in the follow-up e-mail as well? Because I know, Kristian, you're probably going to reference it several times.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Jasmine. Yes, as mentioned, over the last few months, we have definitely released other things, but most of the things have been related to entity management. So if you do the next slide. I thought it would be really helpful for everyone to see where are we right now? What is currently available today and what is coming in the very near future. And if this is the first time that you're hearing about entity management, then let me just add a few words to it. So like what is it? Entity management is intended to help organizations to operate a single framework across multiple entities without duplicated controls. It creates -- or it enables to create a clear accountability and granular access control and strong data separation between entities. It also allows for government model to scale as organizations expand across different departments or regions or subsidiaries. And yes, as Jasmine mentioned, we have covered this in detail in the entity management webinar, which I'm going to be sharing a link to on the next slide, and we're going to be sending you it in the e-mail as well. But basically, the things that are coming up in the next quarter here are things that are more focused on granularity, adding functionality for these entity users, so not the control program admins but for the entity users sitting out in the local entities and also some additional quality of life upgrades in terms of like making it a little bit easier and make it a little bit nicer to work with. Yes, if you do next slide. Here is the link to the entity management webinar. And in this webinar, we're also going into more detail around how to use entity scope data sheets, which is something that allows you to use the same control and the same data sheet across multiple entities while keeping the data contained to each entity. So maybe we can just leave up this slide for a few seconds, but I know that Jasmine will also share it. And if you are currently not using data sheets, and this is the first time you're hearing about it, I think now is a great time to do basically resurface the tutorial that William did on data sheets as a whole and data sheets as a way of handling large data tables, for an example, either automatic or manually pulled from ERP system. And yes, this is a great tutorial to really get started with them. And I think that was everything from my side. But of course, I'm very eager to hear any questions that you have to either the road map or to anything that I was speaking about today. But now over to Raquel that will be talking a little bit about the Impero Assist.

A lot of exciting things coming up in the pipeline. Thank you so much for sharing Kristian. Well, on my side, I'm very happy to officially introduce you to Impero Assist [indiscernible]. We've been talking about AI for a while now, and it is officially our first set of AI features. They've been live for a few weeks now, and many of you are already using the beta version and give it us feedback. But before I show you what we've built, I wanted to quickly highlight our approach with AI as we do believe that in DRC, AI should just assist but never replace human judgment. And that's basically the main principle behind Impero Assist, then everything that we'll built on top of it. Also, all features are up in. So nothing changes in your environment, unless you decide to turn them on. On the next slide, going into the first set of features. There are 2 areas we focused on so far. The first is the control setup. Setting up controls will take time and it's a very repetitive process, and this goes from writing a clear description or thinking through and creating the right tasks. So here, Impero Assist gives you a starting point to make it basically less time consuming and with a more consistent result. So the first feature is the description generator that helps you draft or improve the control description based on the context of the control and the control program title. And then we have the task suggestion that basically recommends you tasks that are based on the type of control that [indiscernible] that you're building. On the next slide, regarding the second area that we focus like for the first set of AI features is the data analysis or data understanding. So inside of the insight stuff that is something that which some of you saw in the last webinar, we've added an AI summary that basically helps you make sense of the comparison data between the 2 periods of the same risk map. And with that, I believe that's something we shall always stick better. So just quickly share my screen. So let me start in the control set up pitch. Let's say, for example, that I'm creating any control. So here, I've added the title, and it sits inside of this program, for example. So instead of me staring just at a black box. If I click on this little guy up here that suggests description, I can get a suggested description that is based on the control and the control program title. This description, this first suggestion I can take it as it is or ask Impero Assist to continue its rating on it. Then if we go to the task suggestor, basically is the same idea based on the title on the description, Impero Assist, i.e., this little guide that you see now up here suggests you some task templates that could be useful for the type of control that is detecting that you're building. So if we click here, we can see that we have 2 different blocks of suggestions that you can be using for this specific control. The point here isn't that this is doing all the work for you, but at least it's giving you a starting point so that it's easier to continue building on the rest of the tasks that you would be needing. And then the third feature, we have to go to the risk management model. And as I said before, within this new tab that is called the insights tab. Again, this compares to your risk landscape between 2 dates. And then the challenge here is like when you've got a lot of risk to be able to analyze and like to look through them all. So if you scroll down, you see here a new bit that is -- again, this part where it says Impero Assist. And basically here, Impero Assist fits the comparison and surfaces were changed. So basically, it's giving you an easier way of understanding the different changes between these 2 points in time. And then as I mentioned earlier, Impero Assist is in beta, which means we're still gathering feedback to improve all these features and also shape what comes next. And next week, we'll be shipping a first round of improvements, and this includes multilingual support for the tax generator and the AI summary and then also a deeper summary within the risk insights feature as well. Also, if you like to turn any of these features on, just reach out to your CS manager, and you'll also be able to find more information about them in the health center. Okay. Let me start with the screen.

Amazing. Thank you, Raquel. I will reshare the slides, but a really good point. You can also find a tutorial both in German and in English on Impero Assist features in the help center as well and in our YouTube channel. And with that, I'll let you, Raquel, jump from Impero Assist, which is super exciting. And I know I was at our German networking event a couple of weeks ago, and people were very excited about it, but let's move on to what's coming next. Now a little sneak preview.

Perfect. So yes, moving on now to a sneak pick up something that is very exciting that we're still building. This basically comes because in conversations with many of you, we kept hearing that completion rate wasn't enough. And this means that, for example, a control that was rejected twice and then finished 3 weeks late. Right now it's looking identical to one that runs smoothly, and this is because both of them are showing 100 complete. And when something does go wrong, there's no easy way right now to see where it went wrong or whose side the delay was on. So the goal here with control health is to be able to give you visibility into how efficiently your controls are running so you can then take action on that. And then on the next slide, the idea about this is very simple. And here, health is based on 2 things. that is weather activity run cleanly without rejections or reopens and whether it was on time, including or any delay happened. And together, these both metrics detail you not just if a control was completed, but how well it run or like how much friction it had. In the next slide, we are surfacing this control have at 2 different levels. At the activity level, you'll be able to see the health and friction of each activity, along with a full time line of what happened. And this means which one was every type of activity, who acted on it and then where time was lost. And then at the dashboard level, you'll be able to patterns across controls and programs and see where friction is happening and then be able to drill down to the specific activity to see what's causing it. We are currently working with the pilot group of very helpful users who are helping us shape it. But if this sounds useful to you, please feel free to reach out as we really appreciate your feedback to finish building it. And that's really it from the product side. Thank you so much for joining today. And please feel free to drop any questions that you have in the Q&A. It's well off to hear them and answer them.

Amazing. Thank you, Raquel for that sneak preview and to control health. I know that our own internal super users are going to be super excited about that as well. Before we jump into the Q&A, as usual, I just want to do a little highlight of some of our different resources. So if you're not signed up for our newsletters, I highly encourage you to do so. The only difference between the product and marketing on the product when you only get product-related information. Marketing, you also get our monthly newsletter with us of inspiration, other events and webinar invites like this one. But we also, of course, have the help center, and we really, really encourage you to make sure to check that out every single time we do new tutorials, we add those there as well. We've also been doing a series of online webinars called compliance curated online. We did a great session last week on why continuous controls of the new baseline can highly recommend that you check out the replay also available on our YouTube channel. And then, of course, follow us on LinkedIn for more information. Whenever we do our releases, we make sure that we're updating there as well as inside the tool, but also other things that are valuable for you to stay up-to-date on. And then last but not least, we have our annual flagship event, compliance curated here in Copenhagen on and 17th of September. And it's going to be a really good one. I'm very excited we have Tim Buckley from beyond the lines joining us, who's really an audit Bert. So he's going to come. We have Simona Bessa from NKT joining as well as [indiscernible]. So there's a lot of great presentations that are starting to shape up. And I know Kristian and Raquel will probably be there, too. So you'll get to meet them in person if you join and hear a little bit more.

But let's jump into the Q&A because I can see we're getting some really, really great questions. And the first one we have is for you, Kristian, will the ERP smart task type also be able to only trigger, example, a balance sheet reconciliation if balance is not 0.

Thank you. Thank you, Jasmine. Thank you for the question. So the very short answer is yes. However, I would also say that there are some building blocks that are needing to be in place before that can happen. But the intention with the ERP smart test type is, of course, that we pull in data, and then we can make things conditionally and so on. But we need to have that in place, and we also need to have the threshold completion in place before something like that would be possible. But that is very much the intention. And like within the whole notion of trying to reduce the amount of time being spent on reviewing things or performing things that doesn't really is the best where it's not the best use of time, we're really trying to reduce those kinds of things in Impero well so that your day-to-day and the amount of things you need to review is a lot smaller than smaller based on removing some of the friction or some of the noise that you do not necessarily need to review?

I mean, we also have a question about the plug-in for Claude, Copilot and if there will be an extra fee to use that. As with anything, we are currently reviewing that. And of course, there will be information provided on release. But as always, it always depends on your contract with us as well. But stay tuned for more information. And as we get closer to releasing it, we will make sure that, that is communicated. We also have a question around, do we offer any technical assistance and setting up API so that we can extract data from the Impero database. We do have quite a lot of documentation in the help center. I'm sure your customer success and/or implementation manager can help guide you on that. Of course, there's always a limit to how far we can go in supporting you, but reach out to them and they'll be able to better help guide you with regards to that assistance level. We also had a question and this one, Raquel, Kristian, one you might need to raise your hand. We mentioned being able to move columns around in the risk overview. When will that be released? I might have missed that one.

Yes, this is part of like the new functionalities for the tables that are coming up in the next release.

Amazing. And the next release will be coming up shortly, and there will be an in-tool banner when that is released as well as information on our LinkedIn page, so make sure to follow there because then you'll know when that is made available. And again, a little bit more of a general question. Raquel, Kristian, when will improve notification functionality be improved? I think that might be in reference, Kristian, to some of the -- what's it called, where you combine the notifications.

Yes. So the improved notification. So when we're talking about the batch e-mails and so on, what we're doing right now is we're trying to scope it and making sure that we understand the problem well enough that we are able to offer enough customizability for the user that is, in some cases, receiving a lot of e-mails. So I don't have a specific date for this, but I can tell you that this is something that we will probably be picking up next as one of the things that we will be working on. So this is definitely something that we intend on resolving in the near future, but I can't get any closer to release date on that. But I mean we will be sharing information both in our release notes and webinars and other news letter, I'm sure, Jasmine will be eager to send out that information as well once it's live.

Absolutely. And someone was also wondering when the next release is. We don't publish the exact release date, but we do keep you informed in the in-tool banners and also on LinkedIn. So there will always be information as soon as the things are made available. We also have a question, is there a feature upcoming where control activities can be assigned to other users within a specific period. This would be helpful during, example, summer holidays and save manual work, which I think is very relevant right now. I believe we're already able to do this. But...

I mean -- so today, what you were able to do is, of course, going through a reassigned flow and we do not -- like I know that we have the summer holidays here coming up very shortly, and you'll be very lovely with a smart way of handling that, but we do not have a way of automatic setting up these kind of vacation or people being away as of right now. But I mean, I would share that we are looking into giving you more visibility and it's not something that we shared today, but giving you more access when talking about like your -- both your business days, but also these kinds of like calendar settings around like vacation and so on. So I -- it's something that we at least have heard before. It's not the first time that I see it and it typically comes around here in summer months and Christmas months. So yes, but we don't have a smart way of handling that right now other than going in and saying, okay, I'm now filtering and these users, I know they are going to be vacation. Let me reassign these control activities from this. Otherwise, I would suggest using the group functionality where you have a default claimant for specific activity.

Amazing. And I think we have one last question, which is also just wondering about the control health if it will be for default. But we're -- again, we're -- it may depend on your contract. We will come back with more information as we get closer to the release. This was a very, very early sneak preview of the control health, and we want to be as transparent as possible with you on what is coming up. So that is also why Raquel has shared a sneak preview today. We'll do a final check to make sure we haven't missed any of the fantastic questions that all of you have. We actually had one question about how often we release. And I will say it is around every 7 to 8 weeks that we do have a release. So if you go back into the release notes, you can see that approximately every 7 to 8 weeks, we are continuously making updates to the Impero platform. Wonderful. With that said, I want to say a big thank you, everyone for joining, and thank you for listening in. And we will, of course, host the next product update in Q3, towards the end of Q3, and we'll do our best to send out to save the date as early as possible, but you could probably expect it will be around the last week of September. Wishing you all a wonderful day, and have a happy summer. Bye, and thank you Raquel and Kristian.

Thank you.

Bye bye. Thank you all.