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

Welcome to our Q3 2026 product update. Before we get started real here, just a few good things to know. This webinar is being recorded. We'll share it with you afterwards in an e-mail, but it will also be available in our help center. Please feel free to use our Q&A button if you have any questions as we go. We'll again collect them as we go and then we'll address them towards the end of the webinar. Yes. Today, it's going to be Kristian, Raquel and myself. And yes, Kristian, can you put a few words on who you are?

Thank you, Morten. Yes. My name is Kristian Jensen. I'm the Lead Product Manager here at Impero, and I have the pleasure of talking a little bit about recent highlights and some of the releases we've done, but also talking a little bit about what's to come. So I'm really excited to do that.

I'll just go ahead. Yes. So my name is Raquel. I'm Product Manager here at Impero as well. And today, I'll be doing a deep dive into our new Control Health feature.

Thank you both. And my name is Morten Christensen. I'm Customer Experience Director here at Impero. And today, my role is trying to moderate the things here. So hopefully, everything will go smooth. What you can expect from -- for today or for this webinar is a recap of our latest releases, highlights, recent product updates, et cetera. We're going to do a feature and focus on our newly released Control Health, and we'll again see a little bit on how that looks live and also a little bit on what our plans are for the future, both within Control Health, but also within other areas. And then as mentioned, we'll do a live Q&A towards the end. So again, should you have any questions, anything throughout the webinar, please address it in the Q&A picture. Final thing before we get started for real. Your feedback really matters to us. We are doing an NPS survey. We are doing that continuously within the platform, but we're also doing another round through our e-mail channel. You might have received it earlier like half a year ago. You could see how it looks here on the right side of the screen. It's a classic NPS survey that we're doing. It's really simple to do. You click on a number depending on how good you believe that we are as the official term is -- our term is, how likely it is that you'll recommend Impero to friend or colleague. It goes from 0 to 10. One thing to note is when you click the number in the link, it will actually be a pop-up window. We just have to confirm the answer and click submit in the end, and you'll be able to do that with a comment as well. And it's really important for us that we get as much feedback as possible, both the customer-facing team that I'm a part of, but also for our product team for Kristian and Raquel and the rest of the team over here, so we can be as good as we possibly can. With that out of the way, let's get started for real. I'll leave it to you, Kristian.

Thank you, Morten. Yes, I have the pleasure of spending a bit more time on highlighting some of the recent releases on the platform. So without further ado, let's dive straight into it. Entity Management allows you to run one set of controls across your whole organization, while each entity or department only sees and manages the data related to its own entity. Entity Management is something that we have now upgraded even further so that we have enabled local entity access to be able to work with the dashboard and the report module. This enables the local entity owner to pull reports, set up dashboards without needing to involve a global admin to every change request. We're, of course, very eager to hear your feedback on this, but we will continue to add more functionality to Entity Management and any feedback or potential improvements that you have, we're really happy to listen to them and see how we can help you get the most out of the platform. And if we move to the next slide. We also want to make it easier for you to complete and review controls. So instead of having inbox rules or similar that filters out not relevant e-mails, you are now able to be a bit more specific around which e-mails you want to receive from Impero. It's important to stress here that critical e-mails will still always be sent out. But beyond that, we want to make sure that you're only -- we are only sending you the e-mails that you deem relevant and that helps you basically complete your controls and so on. Next slide. If you're already using Impero Assist, you may already be familiar with this, but we have now added an AI summary to the residual risk within the risk module. So if you ran a mitigation plan on your top risk last quarter, how did that actually turn up? How does that change your risk picture? Impero Assist is now enabling you to get a quick summarized view on how that has been performed. And of course, it's important to stress here that this is only a summary and there may be errors and so on. So it's just a way to get you started with the work. And if we go to the next slide. We have upgraded our activities page, which is something that I believe most of you are using on the daily, but we have added some more functionality for all users, and we've also made it possible for entity users. So if you're using entity management, then the local entity admin or entity viewer and so on can now also work with the activities page and filter, of course, on entities and so on. It's now also possible to adjust the view to define where each column should be or which column should be visible. And hopefully, with this upgrade, you should also now experience a significantly faster reaction time from when you set a filter or start searching when using the activities. We've also added the ability for you to send personalized reminder to really get those controls over the finish lines and encourage performance and reviewers of completing a control. It is also possible to unarchive activities yourself instead of needing to reach out to support so that if you, let's say, accidentally archive a control activity that shouldn't be -- have been archived, now it's easy for you to undo that. And finally, from the screen shot here, you can also see the possibility to extend the due date, which is something that I'll return a little bit later to in this webinar. So that's just a little bit of a tease. And if we move to the next one, we have introduced a way for you to go beyond whether a control was completed in time or not by releasing our Control Health functionality. And of course, this is a natural segue into our Feature in focus with Raquel, who will be presenting our feature of Control Health and speaking a little bit more about some of the amazing things that we have planned for this area. But first, I believe that we have a little bit of a poll.

We do. And what we want to know here is a little bit on when one of your control activities is running behind. What's your first question? is that -- who is currently holding it up? Is it responsible? Is it review, is it little bit more what actually happened along the way? Is it something needs some rework? Is it going back and forth or she's just sitting with someone overdue? And is this a recurring pattern for this control? Or is it just something that you usually just kind of note and then move on? I'll just give one -- a few seconds here to vote on this, but it's something that's quite important for us also when we look at, okay, how should Control Health also look a bit in the future, then we are super interested in what's actually important for you guys. Just give it here for another 5 to 10 seconds, and we can see the result. Right. So yes, it was mainly the first option here. So who is actually currently holding it up? Is it responsible? Is it in review, but also a little bit on, okay, what actually happened along the way. So a little bit more in the detail on something needs some rework or something that's going back and forth. So that's super, super, super interesting and something I'm sure that Kristian can use going forward. And with that, I'll leave the seat to you, Raquel.

Yes. Thank you very much, Morten. Staying on the same topic as a poll as well. I'll share a bit more about Control Health, which we launched a few weeks ago, and I know that many of you have already been using intensively. So if we go to next slide, starting by the origin of it. The reality is that Control Health was not really invented by us. It was actually something that was invented by some of our customers. And through conversations with them, we kept seeing the same pattern that was that people were trying to understand what has happened with specific activities because the reality is that there was no easy way of seeing the full life cycle in the platform. So questions like as used that in the poll, who was the current bottleneck, if it was the responsible was taken a lot of time, maybe it was the first or second reviewer who was the one block in the way or whether the activity has been rejected or reopened. And what we realized was that this was usually a reactive approach, and this meaning that people were usually investigating an activity only once they already knew that there was a problem with this. And this was usually because it was already overdue or because it was flagged some way. A good example of that is what you can see on the screen. So here, we have 2 activities. Both of them share the same status, the completed status. And until now, at first glance, that was pretty much all you could see. But if you look at the health column, and this is the new column that we just implemented, the story is quite different. So the first activity seems that had no friction, but then the second activity was rejected and reopened along the way. And this doesn't really mean that one is necessarily better than the other, but at least it gives you more context on what happened before the activity was completed. So if we go to the next slide, what is exactly Control Health? Control Health basically tells you the story of activity. So first, as I just mentioned, status tells you where an activity is, but health tells you how it got there. So what happened along the way for the activity to get there. Control Health helps you as well to spot sign-offs early. So you can see issues building before an activity becomes overdue or closes, so you can act or fix it sooner. And then it helps as well understand performance across your portfolio. So you're able to identify patterns across programs, controls or entities or know where to focus. If we go to next slide. So exactly what is it that we consider a friction event? Based on conversations with many of you, we focus in 2 main dimensions. First of all, is completion cycle. So was activity completed in one go? Or was there any back and forth through rejections or reopens? And then the second dimension is punctuality that shows first on the screen. So was activity completed on time? And if it was not completed on time, who is the bottleneck or what was the bottleneck that was causing the overdue. So the combination of both dimensions showing up on an activity will show as high friction, just one dimension will show just as friction and no dimension will just show us clean. It's good to mention here as well that this is what we're showing today. But going forward, the goal is to understand whether there are other signals that would be useful to track and make Control Health even more insightful. On next slide, One important -- very important thing to keep in mind here is that Control Health tells you what happened, but it doesn't tell you whether this was good or bad. So basically, it helps to understand how an activity moved from X to Y and where friction happened along the way. But the interpretation of all these events should just be yours. And we had examples of customers having back and forth in an activity with the reviewer. And maybe this is something that might look like friction because it shows a friction. But then at the end of the day, the result was that this was actually good because it meant that the review was thorough and intense. So it improved the final result. So it's good to keep in mind that this gives you the tools to better understand what was going on with the activities, but the interpretation is just really something that you need to consider. Okay. So far, so good, hopefully, a lot of theory. I'm going to be showing a real example in the platform because I think that it will just help everybody understand the feature better. Okay. Perfect. Hopefully, you're seeing my screen now, right? Good. Okay. So I'm sitting right now on the activity page and just going back so everybody really knows where it is. We're going to the activity table, the activity page. And this is information that you until now were able to see. So for example, I see these 2 activities that are both completed after due date in terms of the status. The new health feature that we've developed is something that it should show by default on your activity table. But if it doesn't, we have, as Kristian mentioned before, this new adjust view functionality here that's actually off topic, but like something super cool that will allow you to like track and move columns around or deselect columns if you're not interested in seeing a specific column or just focus on something specific. But here, you should be able to see a column that says health. And as I said before, health basically tells you the friction or like the life cycle of that specific activity. So status is telling me that these 2 activities are both completed after due date, but then the health column is telling me that the second activity apart from being overdue, it has been rejected along the way as well. So this is the first thing that you will be seeing and that you can sort by the different activities to see exactly like which ones are -- have no friction, friction or high friction. But then if you click in this cell over here, here comes a bit of magic that basically is the full compilation of events of like what was going on with that activity from when it was created until the current status right now. So we have a summary box up here that basically tells you who is currently involved into performing this activity and then the due date that right now, I can see that, for example, this activity is overdue because it's showing red. So it's just easy to spot. And then we go to the activity time line. And as I said before, this is like the story book of activity. So you can see that the activity was created and it was assigned to me, something that will allow you to spot the bottlenecks. And I'm very happy that the poll turned out to be like that because this is -- the bottlenecks is something that you will be able to spot easier with Control Health. You see these weighting on boxes that basically tell you who was the bottleneck at that specific stage. So for example, the activity was created, and you can see that I was the bottleneck because I was irresponsible and my due date -- this was my personal due date. Then you can see that the activity was seen, I submitted activity for review and then the activity was weighting on Morten, who was the bottleneck with his individual due date. Then he saw the activity. And then this activity due date time line bar tells you that after he had seen the activity, then it got overdue. And again, this can be because maybe he didn't have enough time or maybe like he just took a lot of time in reviewing it before doing it. Then we can see that the activity was rejected back to responsible with the comment that it was left. And then the bottleneck boxes turn orange because the -- like me as a responsible, I'm doing my step after the due date. So you can easily spot what's after or like who was the bottleneck at the specific point in time and that with the next event. So it was in, then it was submitted for review. And then after that, you can see that it was finally completed and review. As I said before, this is something that you can sort. So for example, if you want to focus on the activities that are currently in progress right now, you can just like sort by the health column so they pop up before. So you can just take action before there's any -- before they become a real problem. I think that we can share the screen again the presentation.

We're back.

We're back.

Bit of luck.

Okay. Then in the next one. Okay. So, so far, we've looked at what's already been released. Now we're going to be shifting gears to what's coming next and continuing as well with Control Health. The first release as I just showed, gives you the most granular view. So basically, an activity table, you're able to see the overview per activity of like what's going on, friction events and so on. The next release will introduce a dashboard that gives you an overview of how friction is affecting your organization. So this means you're going to be able to see how activities are performing, like all your activities are performing over time. And you're going to be able to focus maybe on a specific entity or a specific program or a specific tech and with another widget as well, you will be able to spot patterns and current bottlenecks on specific programs and ongoing activities. So you know what you need to focus on first. If -- yes, just something that I want to mention here as well that it is fair to say that this feature is still evolving. And I think that we're really only scratching the surface of it. So it will become much richer as more of you use it, and we just share feedback and get more feedback from you. Okay. On the next slide, on future developments as well. For the next release, we've been working on a new public API endpoint that external systems basically to pull evidence files that this is the attachments and control activity directly from Impero as this is something that has been highly requested by some of you. And now over to you, Kristian, with more exciting features.

Thank you. Yes, I have the pleasure of talking a little bit more about some other things that are also coming soon. And I hinted that earlier, we're adding the functionality to enable organizations to decide whether they allow for postponing of due dates. This will enable you to either update a due date in the case of a reopen or in a situation where other factors cause the due date to be in the need of an update of some sort. In this way, an agreed delay becomes a locked attributed decision instead of a silent overdue of the record and maybe it's leading into some control friction as well. We do acknowledge, of course, that this is something that not all organizations want to have made possible. So the default will be that this functionality will be toggled off. But if this sounds like something that you're interested in, like you're more than welcome to reach out or if you have any questions or concerns to reach out, and we either will answer them. And if you just want this enabled as soon as possible, reach out, and we'll have it enabled as soon as this goes live. And you jump to the next slide. So -- we have the pleasure of hosting our networking event here in Copenhagen called Compliance. Curated. And at this point, I told the story about a change that we see in the market across many industries. In short, we shared that we're working on capabilities that will let people work with Impero in their favorite AI client and connect with Impero to workflows outside of Impero. And this slide shows how the change will be and how we see the changes is happening right now in the industry. So people and organizations are moving outside of the classic UI, and they're doing more and more work using either Claude or Copilot or similar. And next slide. So for this, this would mean that you would be able to go to Copilot or any other AI client and you would be able to ask it something. It could be something simple, like do you have any open controls or what do you need to review? Or it could be -- take the evidence from over here and add it to the specific control. This was just a short sneak peek, and we'll be -- we're going to follow up in the future and have more dedicated sessions specifically on this and share much more. But if this sounds interesting to you or if this is something that you have already been working a little bit with on your own side, then please reach out or if you have any questions or concerns. As always, please feel free to reach out to us, and we'll tackle that. But I think that's all from us for now on. I'll pass it back to Morten.

Thank you, both Kristian and Raquel for the update. As usual, a lot of things are happening and things are speeding up also for us. You can always keep exploring Impero, and we will have all the releases, updates, everything that we do are in our health center. It's at support@impero.com, as you can see on the screen here as well. In here, we also have some of our Control Health tutorials. So again, Raquel did an awesome job today showcasing how it works, but you can also see it slow pace, you can pause and play. So you can see follow a bit along, and it's both available in English and in Germany or in German. Keep following us on LinkedIn. There's a lot of fun stuff on what's going on behind the scenes, but also a way to get the news when something -- new features we're working on, et cetera, that will always be posted on LinkedIn as well. So follow us here as well. And then a few more practical things here. We are doing a product update webinar again towards the end of the year. It's going to be December 15. It's going to be so good. We're going to run the year off, hopefully, with a lot of exciting things. We've got a little bit of a sneak peek on it here today. So please sign up for our newsletter as well. You can scan the QR code here on the screen. There's both one for marketing and there's one for product left and right here. So you can also obviously subscribe to both of them. It's an easy way for us to communicate all the good things that are going on in our world towards you guys. And then before we go to the Q&A session, there's a second poll. And now we talk a little bit about entity management or you did today, Kristian, on how that actually works or how the improvements have actually went. It's probably a bit more accurate. It's something that has been enabled for a few of our clients already, and we see actually a lot of value here in data segregations, et cetera. So we are just really interested in learning where you stand on this and whether it's something you're interested in learning a bit more about in Impero. We have a few options here. You can obviously explore this a little bit on your own. Again, as mentioned, we have a lot of awesome resources in our health center. It's also something we can share a little bit more to your world. Then please select the customer success option here because then we can, in my teams reach out and we can schedule something where we can showcase what does that actually look like for you. If you're already using it, then you already know how it works. And it might be that the timing is not right now. But there's really a lot of good things that comes with Entity Management. You can assign more local ownership, a lot of clients where it's piling a little bit up on who is performing what is controlled very centrally but also when it comes to access rights to auditors, et cetera, then now we actually have a better way of actually assigning the access rights and granting a new access all the way down to a single entity. Really awesome feature. Please select the option here that makes the most sense for you. But obviously, we want to showcase it to as many of you as possible. Let's see how my sales pitch here went. And then we can see that a lot of you want to explore this on your own again, totally makes sense. There's a lot that's available on our website on this, and then we'll find the right timing for when we need to know more. If you're interested in having a chat with us, we'll obviously set that up, luckily a bunch of you are using it already. And then as always, there's a timing issue. And then we obviously also understand that. So we respect that. So hopefully, we can have a look at that later on either this year or at the beginning of next year.

And with that, we'll open the Q&A session. I will just find it so I have it on my screen as well. I see there's a bunch of questions available here already. I think this one goes to you, Raquel but if I make a swing and a miss that you can also pitch in here, Kristian. But in the health check, when an activity is listed as seen, will that be tracked for all the times that prepare a reviewer entered into or open the activity.