Workiva Inc. (WK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to the opening session of Amplify GO, Modernizing Data and Reporting to Thrive in the New Normal. Before we get started, I'll briefly cover off a few housekeeping items. If you have a moment, please do respond to the survey questions in the top left corner of your screen. At the bottom of your screen, you'll see a few engagement tools, and these are all movable and resizable, so feel free to play around with the space however you like. You can expand or maximize your slide area using the buttons in the top right corner. If you have any questions as we go through the presentation, you can submit these through the Q&A engagement tool. However, as we only have 30 minutes until you go off into your breakout sessions, we may not have time to address these during the webinar. So if that's the case, we'll follow up with all of these on e-mail. And please note that we do capture all questions that are submitted. Our presenters today are Dermot Murray of Workiva and Simon Atherton of Deloitte. I'll now hand you over to Dermot to kick off today's presentation.

Thanks, [ Sean, ] and good afternoon, everybody. And, Simon, thanks for joining today. It's going to be a very exciting presentation from Simon as well with over 15 years in the business and Director of Finance and Transformation from Deloitte and a great partner. So looking forward to hearing what Simon has to say today. A very warm welcome to everyone joining this event. I know the weather is phenomenal outside. So you have a choice between going outside and listening to this, and I hope it will be of a great benefit as we move through the session today. Jumping right into it. Okay. Here we go. Jumping right into it. There are really 3 key takeaways we want to talk about today. This concept of transforming sustainability, how we'll see the long-term, controlled approach to technology and how we build a resilient business. And you'll hear Simon and myself talk a little bit about that, what does that mean from a digitization perspective, how does the digital ecosystem need to evolve, what have we learned potentially from the current crisis that we've been managing through and how do you maintain and keep the momentum on that, what bits have been missing. And so we'll drill into that. There's a number of sessions today, too, that you'll see that drill into that. And again, it's not necessarily just about the technology. It's also about the governance, the oversight, the culture and how the organization needs to adapt for that. And again, you'll get some great insights from Simon on this as we move through the presentation this morning. I think building trust is also really important. And that also comes on a number of different levels, whether it's at a very high level, culturally letting your employees work from home and trusting that they're going to do that, or whether it's building trust in the information that you're working on. And again, in an office environment where everyone is collaborating very closely, that level of trust is not as tested as it is when you move into a remote environment. And so this ability to have the right platform, the right digital ecosystem, the right access to the data, becomes a very important piece of being able to work in a remote environment. And even if we get back into the offices at some point, and I hope we all will, we still have to understand the lessons that we've learned from what we've just come through. And this will be an important way of understanding how we connect to the back-end systems where we had problems, et cetera. And then, finally, capturing the momentum for best practices. Certainly for me, running the Workiva business here in Europe, there have been a number of best practices we found that we've been driven to, that we're going to continue as we move back into our office environment. And so, again, this has allowed us to expand our thinking around how business gets done, how we collaborate with our customers, how we collaborate with our partners, how we collaborate with our employees, how we collaborate with our auditors. So the whole concept of the business ecosystem or system of work, as I like to call it, is really beginning to evolve and evolve very quickly based on some of the events that have happened recently. So with that, we can see that many organizations, not just us, are thinking about how to accelerate this and really begin to move a lot faster into this new normal, new environment where there are many advantages and then some challenges that we need to face. And, Simon, maybe I'll let you introduce yourself and begin to talk a little bit about how Deloitte is viewing this, what you're seeing in the market. Again, huge experience, over 15 years, and I'm sure it's been an interesting couple of months for you as well.

Yes. Thanks very much for that, Dermot. Yes, as a brief intro, I'm a director of Deloitte, part of the controllership practice. I'm also the EMEA lead for our alliance with Workiva. And you're right, it has been an interesting 2 or 3 months. It's not -- I'm used to being out on the road quite a bit, and being stuck in 1 room in the house has been interesting, I suppose. And engaging with clients online, it was difficult to start with, but I think we're all kind of getting used to that now. So I wanted to start off thinking about where we were at the beginning of the year, where -- what finance looked like at the beginning of the year. So perhaps some of you on the call were thinking about an ERP project this year. Perhaps you were thinking about how you might have an RPA pilot or you were thinking about what digital technology you might be trialing. Maybe there was an M&A transaction on the horizon. You were thinking about the finance here was going to spend a lot of time integrating that new team into your existing team. Then, obviously, COVID arrived in March. And actually, for a lot of people we've spoken to, it's been fairly seamless. You may have gone through -- the full 3 months ends by now. And that's been okay. It's almost as if you haven't been out of the office. When we worked, we put out a piece around virtual close. And a lot of the feedback was, actually, things have been okay. For others that we spoke to, they've had to shut down parts of their finance team because the challenges that working remotely brought. But, actually, some in retail, the feedback was, well, we're not doing month end because there's nothing to report. The economic downturn has impacted what there is for finance to do. If I think back about 12 months ago, the slide that I've put up on the screen there, we set out -- Deloitte set out some predictions around where we thought finance might be in 2025. That focused on a lot of things that you would expect, standardization of data, automation of processes and this idea of a finance factory. It talked about what our workforce wanted from the work now and how that might change the workplace and, obviously, how that then impacts upon the role of finance, how do we move to a place where we're adding even more value to the organization, which ultimately has been a theme of the discussions I've had throughout my career with CFOs. And I've presented this slide a number of times over the last 12 months, and often, at least 1 person will ask me then, they'd go, do you really believe that's what finance is going to look like in 2025? And perhaps it was a bit of a provocation in us presenting that, because most organizations would look at it and go, well, the challenges that we have to overcome, we'll be lucky if we managed even half of what's on that slide. I guess what we couldn't have foreseen is where we are now. And I guess what -- a question to start with is, do all these predictions hold true? And I think they do. I think, actually, what you might want to think about is whether the horizons are closer as a consequence of what we've been through over the last 2 or 3 months. The circumstances that we're in perhaps provide the burning platform that maybe some of us didn't have before when we struggled to discuss digital technologies and digital enablement within our finance departments. So as I said, I think COVID has fundamentally disrupted the work of the finance function. And the question is, is whether that's temporary or permanent, whether when this is all over, we'll all return to our offices. From the stats there, I think there's some quite stark stats there, really. I mean, 80% of the workforce around the world has been impacted by COVID. There were 44 million daily users on Teams during March, and I suspect that's increased through April and May. And Zoom as well, as well as the sort of portals we're on now. We just couldn't have imagined that before. Of the CFOs we regularly survey and speak to, 74% of them are looking at it and saying they will permanently move some positions remote. And that makes things quite significantly different. Doesn't it? You only think about the people you could recruit now. I was speaking to a group financial controller of a large retailer last week, and he's based on the wrong side of the Pennines for the retailer he works with. And he's saying, well, actually, now given where we are, it may well be that this job is now a lot more viable for me because I can work at home half the time. So it will be interesting to see where that goes. I think the key shift for organizations and the bottom half of that slide in terms of stats around how productive people are -- and, Dermot, you spoke about that at the beginning, is those who have been more productive are those that were digitally enabled in the first place. They're getting much more -- much better utilization, much more productivity out of their staff where they have cloud tools that automate and enable great collaboration already. So certainly, the research shows that CFOs are keen to use the current situation as a catalyst. And I guess we've got this kind of sliding scale in terms of scenarios where we think this is how people will go back. So right at the top scenario A, we've got to have that idea of a rapid return to pre-COVID BAU. So that view that probably plenty of people in the audience are thinking, when can I get back into the office? I just want to get back to normal. It's not working for me. And they'll go back to the office, and I suspect, months down the line, they'll almost have forgotten about how it was to work at home. Whereas you've got on the other -- and perhaps, by the way, that's a missed opportunity for those people who do go with scenario A. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got scenario C, those who -- those CFOs who are thinking about how they accelerate to the new normal, how they move their business landscape into a place that's characterized by digital adoptions. And clearly, the key for those organizations is how digitally enabled they are, how they leverage their technology, because that's going to make it best work. So as CFOs grapple with the options to thrive in the new normal, there's a number of uncertainties that they need to start thinking about. So we start off on the left-hand side there. Clearly, customer expectations, customer behaviors have changed over the last 2 or 3 months, and understanding how your customers interact with you is critical. How you penetrate the market, that's how your business is successful. Clearly, what we've seen is a swing to digital-first sales. I sit in a window at home looking out and the number of delivery trucks that are up here and down here every day delivering Amazon parcels. I'm sure you're seeing the same thing. Things are fulfilled, people are interacting a lot more digitally. The question is, is how much of that sticks once we can go back to the shops, which we are, in part, able to do now. But what does that mean for us as finance leaders? I think that for us, that means we need to be a bit more agile. We need to think about how we're responsive to that. How do we plan for that? Has it changed how our organization operates? What we've been used to, has that changed? Will we see differences in our weekly, monthly, annual cycles of business? And with all of this, I think some of the questions you might want to think about is more digital interaction means more data. What do we do with that? Analytics is going to be key here. Equally, working capital. So if you're interacting more with digitally, do your working capital policy stand up for that? Are the buying patterns changing? Do you need to think about working capital in a different way? If we move on to our employees, because it's not just customers, clearly, our employees, that's critical. The last 3 months has been the biggest virtual working home experiment ever. We've all had the odd Friday where we've worked from home or some of us may even have 2 days a week where we generally work from home, but this has been a fundamental shift. And I'm sure some of you today are listening from the kitchen or they're listening from hastily created offices in spare bedrooms. The question is -- I'm sorry. For many, though, 2 months ago or 3 months ago, the prospect of that was impossible -- the idea that we'd all be able to sit at home and still work productively. But, actually, the technology that has been around for a number of years for us to do that, so collaboration tools, like we're using today, tools like Workiva and a number of the other automation tools on the market, which enable workflow and now enable collaboration, enable you to engage using mobile devices, have existed. But we haven't had that burning platform to do it, and now we have. The question really is for each of you is, is how much more technology do we need to invest in? How much -- where else do you need to look that will -- to improve the collaboration technologies that you use? The RPA pilots, the solutions you were thinking about at the beginning of the year, how do you accelerate those? How do you speed those up to enable some of this to stick? And I think, Dermot, you mentioned this right at the beginning. And it isn't just all about technology, although that's going to be a large part of it. But all of this changes the risks and controls that you face as finance leaders, how is your risk and control framework looking now as people are operating from home? And how do you need to respond to that? In terms of an operating model, I mean, prior to COVID, we were embarking -- lots of organization were already embarking on change to enhance their operating models. They were -- we probably have had this sort of conversation over the last 5, 10 years on how the finance function moves from a transactional place to a more transformative place. So we've had those sorts of conversations. Digital has always been considered an enabler of that. How do we enable that operating model utilizing digital? Now the thing is where we see that shifting is now that digital is the strategy rather than an enabler of the strategy. And that's a difficult mind shift. But it will be important to think about how you utilize digital to improve your competitive position. For finance, this is going to mean a significant upheaval. Skill sets, tooling, we think, are going to accelerate. And the ability to be agile to that is going to be really critical. CFOs are going to need to think about how they evolve their operating model -- shared service centers. How do they develop with more virtual work? And do they still make sense? How do we maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of them? And how do we really radically simplify our end-to-end processes that really enable us to automate? A priority for CFOs in normal times is to ensure cash and liquidity and finance and arrangements are optimized for operational effectiveness and growth ambitions. But with this COVID situation, there are new sets of uncertainties that have emerged across customer supplier and financing landscapes. The CFOs, you're really going to need to think about how you have a ruthless focus on the cash position, optimizing costs across the organization, engaging your finance sources to proactively understand debt arrangements and prepare for the implications that may present themselves. So thinking about how you optimize cost to reinvest in some of this technology, but equally, M&A opportunities may well present themselves for some organizations and how do you prepare your finance function for bringing in and integrating a new set of finance staff in a virtual environment. I'll pick up digital first. I've spoken a lot about digital as we've gone through. But, clearly, all of those things that you were thinking about, you need to think about how you accelerate those plans, shrink the time lines, take full advantage of where we are today. Decisiveness and certainty of outcomes is going to be really key for you to gain some advantage in this. The fact is, having said that, it's all really easy to say, invest, invest, invest. Think about what financial technology is going to help you. But, clearly, I spoke right at the beginning about economic uncertainty. There's going to be a restriction, and we see this in the work that we do. We -- through March and April, we saw projects paused. We saw projects canceled as organizations begin to think about where they prioritize investments, where they prioritize against in-flight initiatives and how they start thinking about what their new priorities are, given where we are today. And finance has got an even greater challenge because it ultimately is thinking about what is important for the whole business versus what's really important for finance to do for their organization. So I encourage you all to think about where to be clear on the digital accelerators, which are going to truly make a difference for your organization. And those ones are the ones that are going to have a really compelling case. And in a difficult environment we are, it's going to need a compelling case. It's going to need a compelling return on investment. And I'll just bring it back to also, what are the new risks in bringing in some of that technology. Don't forget about the risks. They are changing. It is not as simple as where we were before. I'm going to hand back to Dermot now to speak about how Workiva can help solve some of the challenges I've discussed today.

Thanks, Simon. So look, Simon brought up -- there's a lot going on. I think there's a debate, and we're going to see it as business leaders around what does digital dexterity mean, the desire, the ability to transform your systems of work really to drive new business outcomes, and how can we take what we've seen over the past couple of months and begin to use it to transform our business, and where do we see we've had some gaps. And again, as Simon said, we've had some amazing technologies that have allowed us to continue to operate, which just would not have been possible 5 years ago. And so we've come a long way, but we've also seen some gaps. And of course, any good crisis allows us to begin this debate about what must our platform include, what is missing in our business environment that allows us to do that. And we certainly believe that this concept of disconnected data and processes in the area where we're working, mainly in spreadsheets and documents today, creates a real problem for all the investments we've made and our ability to operate in a remote environment. So let's just drill in a little bit on that, right? So if you look at sort of the different silos of technology platforms that have been developed over the last 20 years, a lot has gone back into the systems of record or ERP or CRM or HR systems, initially on-premise, and then it's the cloud. Again, anyone on a S/4HANA transformation thing will see, that has been continuously evolving from an IT perspective, and a huge investment from the industry in that. We've seen also recently examining data and looking at data from reconciliation, the BI, intelligence perspective, planning, et cetera, a lot of tools coming available on the market integrated into the back-end. And then, of course, we start working on the documents. And of course, this is an area where I think we've been really lacking a platform that allows us to begin to look at some of the challenges that we really need to solve in this particular space in order to continue to leverage what we've had in the background. And by that, I mean, is like do we have multiple versions of truth in where we're working? Do we have the information at our fingertips once we begin to send it around in spreadsheets? Do we trust the information that we have? Do we have enough control and governance if we have to go back 18 months later and begin to reassemble the decision-making process around a particular decision, what the auditors said, what we decided to do internally -- do we have that level of control over a system of work? And I think one of the things that has started to happen, and a simple example is one of our customers were talking about having just to go back into the office to actually print something out so they would have documented versions of what they were doing, that is sort of an area where you begin to see the stress and the challenges around how we're working with our documents in our office environments remotely. And while this is digitized, I'm not sure the dexterity or the trust or integrity that we really need in that platform has really evolved. Like we're still using spreadsheets, documents, presentations the way we were using them almost 20 years ago. Some stuff has shifted to the cloud. But we know this is an inefficient process because we're creating version 10, version 11, version 12, version 22, et cetera. So we have some real challenges in this space. And again, this chart here just shows all the changes. You get a lot of people redlining -- people -- some people are still redlining on paper. And it's hard to track the changes. It's hard to be sure that if you did have a change, was that tracked? And the integrity is slipping out of this system. And I think this is certainly one of the stresses in the environment that we've seen where we need to look at the transformation piece. And so this system of work really does require us, given the investments we've made in the back-end system, for us to have a platform. And I always like to, what I call my 5 Is for the platform, like, do you have interoperability in this space? Can you connect to your auditor? Can you connect to the different departments? Can people operate on a single document? And if the way you're doing that is by passing hundreds of versions of documents around, you've got a problem. Do we have interdependence? Can we track that? In other words, can we see the risk? Simon talked about one of the things this environment has done today is showed us that risk and how we view risk and how we look at the risk as it relates to the continuous nature of how the business is changing so quickly. Do we have interdependence in the data at work to allow us to look at the risk and the pressures on that risk? Are we including everyone in the platform? So not just the case of, are we connected to the back-end systems and do we have access to the data, but we really have -- have we created an ecosystem of inclusion that brings all our partners, all the supply chain people, et cetera, onto this work environment so we have a real good view, not only of what we're working on, but where we are in that work environment. And then, finally, insight. If you've got multiple versions of the truth and it takes you a long time to develop them and you've got somebody who's like 1 week away from getting the data, is that really the insight that you really need to be able to manage your business today? And so those are the 5 Is: interoperability, interdependence, inclusion, integrity and insight, that I would ask you to think as business leaders, is that happening in your system of work? You may have it, and IT may tell you, you have it in the system of record. But if you're dumping it out into an uncontrolled environment where you don't have a platform that provides that type of level, then you've got a challenge as it relates to how you're actually managing the work and that is a risk built into your system. Access gap, I talked about again. Do people really have access to what they need? Information, I would say, yes. Work environment, I think, is difficult. Control gap, I think, again, we see 72% of the problem is compounded. When we get to working on documents, we now have a problem from a control perspective, and I talked a little bit about the efficiency piece as well here. And of course, Workiva, we are continuing to develop big investments to build this system of work. The platform where you will have that integrity, that trust, interoperability, the inclusion of multiple vendors from outside, your partners, your auditors, et cetera, onto the platform. The inclusion and, of course, the integrity to know that, that data, whether it's narrative or whether it's a number, is linked all the way back to the integrity and investment you made in building your systems of record. And that becomes a really key piece, I think, to closing this picture to ensure that we have a platform that is digitized, a platform that provides the value that we really need and that our employees are really efficiently working on the information, not working on the process. And busy slide here, you'll have it available to you. But as you look at your business, you have to ask yourself, do you have all of these items covered from a maturity perspective of where your business is going? And again, Simon and I spend a lot of time talking about this as it relates to the transformation fleet. Never let a good crisis go to waste. I think it was Churchill who said it. I think a few other people maybe said it over time. I will say it again. This is an opportunity for us to accelerate the transformation of the work environment in the area of finance, and it is a good time to begin to have this conversation, not about fixing a small problem, but how to fix the broader problem and get there over a period of time. And so again, take a look at this slide at your own time. If you've got questions, ask us. But it is important to look at the maturity level of where your technology is for your work environment. Are you getting the data? Can you trust it? Is the content correct? Does it allow you to have the right processes for managing the environment where you can have control and reduce the risk? And are your teams involved? And on some of the operational levels, we're pretty good. On the work environment, we have some real challenges that we need to solve. How does it get going? Obviously, start small with any platform approach, and then build a plan, but make sure the plan looks at the complete maturity model that you want to move forward towards, and then begin to act with a sense of urgency. Because whether it's this crisis or the next crisis or the next event, events are happening faster, we need to be able to react to them. And some of them will be business events, some of them will be economic events, some of them will be social events. These things, we need to be able to act faster on the business, and finance plays a really key role to being able to provide, I think that Simon described as the agility to allow businesses to move at a faster pace. And I think one of the good things that will come out of this is that we have managed to find a way to do that and act at a faster pace. Again, look at the platform, listen to the 5 Is, and we will stop there. And, [ Sean, ] I think we're right on time. So we probably don't have time for any questions, but I will let you close out the session. I want to thank everyone for listening. Thank you, Simon, a great partner. And we look forward to working with all of you in the future about digitizing your platform of work.

Welcome to Amplify GO from Workiva. We are so excited to be with you today. But, first, the usual housekeeping. On your screen, there should be a Q&A box. Please feel free to ask any questions. At the end of this webinar, we will answer as many as we can. Any that we don't answer, we will get back to you via e-mail. We do capture all questions that are submitted. If you have a moment, please do respond to the survey questions at the top left corner of your screen. At the bottom of your screen, you'll see a few engagement tools, which you can move or resize. You can also expand your slide area using the buttons on the top right corner. A very warm welcome to you all and for this session called the end-to-end process of your ESEF annual report. As you know, Workiva is a huge multifunctional platform and too much to show you in 30 minutes or so. So for this session, we're going to use ESEF as an example of a Wdesk case study. ESEF is a hot topic at the moment, and it's a good one as it shows the power of consolidation at a stressful time from year-end to filing, but also the beauty of XBRL at your fingertip along with full design integration. There will be a much longer demonstration available shortly, which you're all invited to. So let me introduce your presenters today. I have with me, Katherine Reynolds, a solutions consultant at Workiva. Katherine works with multinational companies located in the U.S. and here in EMEA on reengineering their reporting documents and processes. Introducing myself. I am Jacqueline Whitworth. I work in marketing. I have a special interest in design reporting and the final product that the investor actually receives. So Workiva is focused on delivering 1 central cloud platform, all of the business, regulatory and internal reporting needs. We pride ourselves on not only supporting individual teams such as finance, but connecting people and data across multiple business teams, both internal and external. This solution wheel is just a visual example of how many different processes Workiva can support, but is certainly not limited to these areas. Wdesk has over 350 use cases, all of which are customer-led. Today, we are highlighting the context of a centralized and connected process, which encompasses people and data from multiple teams over the businesses. We would like to take you on a Wdesk journey together with the new electronic annual report being the end product. Our checkpoints will be data aggregation and assembly, then onto how designers interact with Wdesk, both export and import, together with audit and XBRL on route, concluding with the actual final report, which you need to file next year. So thanks for your time today, and over to Katherine.

Thanks, Jackie. What we've understood so far. So working across many of our different companies, we found a very common theme of working through the ESEF annual report process. Some of the key challenge are the manual, inefficient and costly reporting process; disconnected data across reports, resulting in a high error risk; disconnected teams. There's no version control, no oversight, duplicative efforts; the lengthy manual review and audit processes, which are very cumbersome for roll forwards; and the lack of security, scalability or flexibility in current reporting structures. All of this has been done because of the tools that our customers are using. So what would they like to see out of this? What are the positive business outcomes? They would like to have a sustainable, efficient and reliable reporting process; easy to use, flexible and scalable; increased data integrity, assurance and confidence, really reducing that risk of error; centralizing the reporting to have a connected teams and data all in 1 place; increasing that visibility and auditability; reduce the manual non-value add work and spend more time on value-add analysis. Now how do they get there? And that's the required capabilities. So from the current tools to that positive business outcomes, we can get there by having a secure and reliable solution; ability to automate the updating and recurring data throughout reports; controlled collaboration, which allows us to have quickly and easily produce comparison reports for review; integrate that XBRL capabilities; efficiently roll forward all of the documentation; and the ability to scale as your needs expand. So we see this across our customers starting with very manual processes around a Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Many different teams working on all of those documents, which were going to many different versions, to get us to that final end state, to that final beautiful annual report that then gets published. Now what does that actually look like? If we look at the current state, are your systems of record through these systems of work and the reporting process? Not many teams will have this entire oversight of what the whole process looks like itself. So you'll see little bits and pieces of this. If you're the finance team, the treasury team, HR providing information, the audit team, reviewers, the design agency, XBRL, Investor Relations, et cetera. So if we start on the left-hand side for our systems of record, our companies, we find, will spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on systems of record, only to pull that data into an Excel file that loses all the integrity of the data. So coming from the Oracle to get your general ledger information, Workday for that nonfinancial information, BlackLine or Anaplan to do those consolidations and aggregation, as well as e-mail sending across those Excel files or just one-off pieces of information. All of that has to get aggregated into 1 core master spreadsheet. So again, coming from that source system into that Excel file, and then where does that data go? But before you can get there, your teams are going to have multiple versions of that aggregation as numbers are updated across the general ledger. Nonfinancial information gets updated. The core team is constantly going back to that true source of information to make all of those updates. Those updates then, we can see, go into additional Excel files, additional documents and PowerPoint presentation to get to our review stage, which could be the Board committee, the upper management, preparing for audit pieces of information. And again, every single time a change has been made, the teams are going to have to go all the way back to that first aggregation level, push it out to every one of those documents, every one of those Excel files for every one of those different reviewers many different times. So you're working with many different versions of the document. You don't have the consistency or the control over that data. You don't have the collaboration because everyone is working on 1 static document at a time. Most of the time, those files are being saved on a SharePoint or a shared drive, being labeled as version 1, version 2, final, final final. So by the time it hits that review stage as that final review, you've gone through many iterations of your documentation. And you can't quite find necessarily the entire data lineage of that story. So when organizations are not investing in their reporting processes, it leaves the businesses exposed to a high risk of manual error, which is a necessity for all this human intervention that is currently happening and ultimately producing a costly process with increased time to report. From that reporting then, we also have to then get to the audit trail. Because your other teams don't have that interaction and collaboration, it makes the auditor's job a lot tougher to follow that data back. There's a lot of back and forth e-mails that tend to happen or a lot of phone calls to, again, go all the way back to that aggregation stage at the very beginning point from that systems of record. So all of that back and forth is taking place across the many documents, the many Excel files by the time it hits the audit desk. Not to mention, we haven't really touched on the design element or the XBRL tagging that also has to take place at the end of the process. And should you make any updates in the current flow of how our customers before Wdesk are coming in, there's many iterations, pencils down moments, just adding to the end cycle process before we can finally hit that report stage, where we've got our final PDF version sending out to the shareholders or going out onto our web page. So it seems like a lot, and it is. And again, if you don't have that insight of being at the core team, you don't typically see all the every single day-to-day pieces that come together. But this does add up to be quite a complex process. With Workiva, we can help simplify this process out. So if we start at our systems of record, we know those aren't going to change. You've already put in the investment for each of those. The Oracles, the Workdays, Anaplan and BlackLines, those are going to stay, and that's perfectly fine. Once we then connect directly to Wdesk, we can automate this process. We can use different API connections to pull the data automatically. We can set up scheduled trigger events so we know when that data is getting pulled and then where that data is going. We're going to show you later on through the linking capability of Wdesk how we can collaborate, and it's providing that consistent and continuous monitoring of the data, updating the narrative pieces of information all with -- [ inside ] of 1 platform, connected again back to that true source system. So anytime an update is currently being done, it will push directly into all of those documentations, all those presentations at the exact same time. And on top of that, and this is a big key, you can see the design and tagging is happening at the same time as the assembly, the review and the audit. You're no longer working with a pencils down moment. Everything is fully live. It's fully collaborative. And you can have that consistent, continuous reporting process to get us to our final reporting stage of going out to the Board management, auditors, regulators, shareholders, et cetera. Now turning it back to you, Jackie.

Thank you. So let's look at a real use case for Wdesk. ESEF is a new electronic file format that affects reports starting 2020. All these teams will need to connect together to create this report all within the same 4-month filing window. You can see how Workiva system allows for complete teamwork with the added bonus of no version issues -- a nightmare in annual reporting. With the correct financials, wherever they appear in the report, this is still an issue when the front-end and the back-end sit in different systems or formats. And our integrated system allows for edit and changes right up to final review. The Chairman's photo, the front cover, all the usual stress points can be changed right up to the finish line. For the graphics here, the XBRL representative could be from the finance team or the corporate reporting team or even the company secretary. So the red icon is the one responsible for the XBRL tagging. So look out for our tagging section later. The IDML section will probably matter to the corporate reporting team who's responsible for the entire report and the final XHTML. Board committees can easily add their reports, and audit can be given access as and when necessary. Wdesk is secure and flexible, a must in annual reporting. So that's [indiscernible] overview. So let's get going over to Katherine.

Thanks, Jackie. All right. Step 1. So we need our corporate reporting team and our finance team to use those systems of record and aggregate that data. Within Wdesk, we can automate this data aggregation to reduce the risk in manual efforts. As we previously saw in the current state of affairs, that's a very manual process, right? So we're going from each of our connected. Our source systems, using that Excel file to copy, paste that data out. And inside of Wdesk, we can eliminate that. And what that looks like. Once we have everything set up and built out for you, you can see on the right-hand side here, I have these Wdata connection. Each one of these connections could be connected directly through an API system, again, to your general ledger. You can also input a CSV file. That connection is going to be set up to automatically pull in the data whenever you have that predetermined trigger setup. So to pull in the data as often as you need it to, it will then push into a spreadsheet view, which will then push into the documents, again, whenever you have predetermined each of those trigger steps to happen. So I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 different source systems on the right-hand side feeding into -- you can see my consolidated group income statement on the left-hand side. So I've reduced all manual effort. This is completely automated to update again at a frequency we determine as a company to then directly flow into my spreadsheet information for me. Once I've got my data inside of Wdesk and I brought it down into my spreadsheet, then what? It has to go somewhere. So the next phase then is to start assembling this information. So we're still working with our core reporting team and the finance team, as we can see with our [ icons ] on the bottom side, and still introducing the level of Workiva, which we can see with that green bar is still going across this entire process. So by introducing our linking functionality, we've got that collaboration to increase the audibility and the uniformity across the reports where we can ensure the oversight with permissions. So every document, spreadsheet and presentation inside of Wdesk is 1 live file at all times. Again, you're no longer working with multiple versions of the document. It's always live. And every single person on your team is working in that same live file at the exact same time, depending on the permissions that they have been provided. This allows the core team to be at the very beginning of that process. So we are taking that aggregated data. We're pushing it into the document. Now we can invite our teams in to start writing the narrative pieces of information. And then eventually, when we're ready, because of that permission and all of the full audit trail, we can eventually let in upper management and audit, and we will get towards that at the end. But touching again on the linking capabilities. We just saw how we can use Wdata to bring in all of your data from your true source system. And now we are looking at the linking. On the left-hand side here of that same income statement we just saw, my revenue value has a green -- sorry, a blue triangle in the top left-hand corner, letting me know it is a source value. The source is feeding. As we can see on the right-hand side, there's 3 different destinations, as shown by the green triangle in the top left-hand corner. So anytime that value in D7 in my master spreadsheet gets updated, every 1 of those 3 different destinations will get updated. And we can see it's going into 2 different locations within the same document as well as feeding my investor relations deck. So again, we are reducing the manual efforts of updating all this information for every single 1 of our reports around the annual report process to automatically flow-through from our source systems of information. So now we've got that consistency of the linking. And with linking, I like to say you're right or wrong, but you're consistent. So again, each of those 3 locations will automatically update for you based on the permissions that you have. You can make the changes around the narrative pieces of information that will then follow in the rest of the report and still maintaining the data structure and the lineage and that full audit trail capabilities.

So for design reporting for ESEF, you collate your entire annual report in Wdesk, everything, not just the financial section, all the content from at a glance to notes and glossary. And you need to do this because it's the end product, and the end product is the XHTML file. For professional design, you need to send this content from Wdesk to your design app. We would like to introduce you to our new ICML exporter. It's very slick. The benefits are there is no disconnection between editing in Wdesk and the designers designing in InDesign. Our purpose in our minds is complete data assurance wherever that data is, and we can do this as the content is locked to Wdesk, while still allowing designers to do their job and create professional reports ready for this new format. So this is how we interact between Wdesk and your designer working an InDesign. Here is the content of an annual report in the Workiva platform on your left. This is where your team works together to collate your report. You can see I typed loads of 0s. When you're ready to send this to your agency, you export this document as an ICML file by simply clicking on export ICML. You can do this as many times as you wish, right up to sign-off. Now pretend I am the designer here on the right. The ICML file is received by the designer where she overwrites the previous ICML files from Workiva to update the new content for the 0s. And she goes to the Links panel, and she can see the alert, the yellow triangle. She then updates all the links and all the updates made in the Workiva platform carried through into InDesign without disturbing the design. So tagging. The XBRL is a layer that sits above your document. Once you associate a tag with a number, if the number is linked, this tag will repeat throughout your document. You have the added security that if you try to tag a different number with the same tag, it will give you the warning of a duplicate fact, giving you the indication that you need to explore other options or seek out the right team of experts. Once XBRL has been applied, you can still change the figures as the XBRL overlay stays in place. You can be confident that the numbers remain as intended as we have full version control that the tagging is complete and error-free due to our easy review tools, and that the file is fully validated using our validation tool. And all this is available to you at any time of day, wherever you are. XBRL mistakes can easily be spotted, like here on the right. You have total control and a maximum time line with full data assurance.

Now for the final review team. So now we're adding in the finance team, upper management, Board committees and anyone else who would be reviewing your annual report. We want to create a robust but speedy reconciliation and sign-off process. But once again, because we have 1 set of documents, 1 set of the data sources, we've linked all of that information together -- your upper management and Board have 1 location to go see all of that information. They can leave comments directly inside the document. So you're no longer sending e-mails back and forth. Why was this number updated? I'm not sure. Let me go check it out. And back and forth and back and forth until we get to that final -- the final end stage, and everybody agrees as to what the values or the narrative should be itself. We can also review the information by creating blacklines. We've mentioned many times that everything inside of Wdesk is fully auditable. We have a history panel that will track every change that has ever been made through the entire concept of the reporting process itself. And you can easily mark the milestones between those different revisions for our first review, second review, third review and so on. And then by running a blackline between those, you can easily see the different changes from that first review to the second review. So now we can speed up that review process because we're not sending the entire document every single time for a review. We can simply send off the sections of information that have been updated for that final sign-off piece itself. This final process can also happen inside of Wdesk. So we have certifications where each of the team members can attest so that they have updated their information. It's been completed and is ready for final approval and sign-off. Each of the certifications can be linked directly to the documents so the users can see exactly what they're signing off on and get all the information into that 1 place for the [ support ] team to manage. If there's ever a chance that someone would say, no, my information is not up to date yet, they would be forced to leave a commentary box to fill it out. So you can see why they are not signing off onto their final attestations rather than, again, having an e-mail back and forth of is your information correct? No, it's not. Why is it not correct? And so on and so forth. We're just streamlining this process that's all done at 1 step at a time and not multiple steps in there. So we've sped up the review process and, again, keeping everybody inside of that 1 location. With all of this, the audit team is very happy. We have quite a few customers bring in their external auditors because, again, it speeds up the process. So in a typical standpoint, the audit team, is getting all the documents at the very end of the process. If they have any questions, it's a lot of back and forth [ that goes through. ] Without linking, without the full data lineage, it takes the reporting team time to go back. And where did this number come from? Can I prove where this number came from? Where does it feed to? Did I catch every location that number is being reported? Again, inside of Wdesk, because of the connection to the true source system as well as linking and hitting every single time that number has been referenced, audit can easily follow the link properties. They can also easily see all the comments that you and your own team have had before audit comes in to be able to see, again, why the changes have been made. And again, it keeps them in that 1 central location. So it speeds up the audit time as well. And we've had several customers report back that they've had a good deal of savings from the audit team because we've saved them time and effort with that clear audit trail for the governance and the traceability of the entire end-to-end process.

Thank you. So in Wdesk, the typing has taken place and the content is finished. You now need that wonderful glossy report you want and your investors are used to. Do not panic. Your ESEF will look exactly like the PDF you are used to, but with the amazing functionality ESEF can bring. You do not need 2 documents, one boring one for the ESEF mandate and one lovely one for stakeholders. No, you can have it all in 1 document. So we now need to reach out to your designer and ask them to send us their design. So let's see how we bring the design content back into Workiva. So here imagine again I am the designer on the left. From InDesign, I export to the IDML format. This file now gets sent to Workiva. Now imagine I am the client in the Workiva platform on the right. We import the IDML file into Wdesk and upload it to the system and convert it to XHTML. This process is seamless, so long as you follow Workiva's design guidelines. Now the XBRL layer containing the tags is incorporated into the designed file. For data assurance, remember that the platform will know if any content is different from the content in Wdesk. Additional content like captions, for example, is fine. Also remember that the designer would have to unlink the ICML files to change content, which the platform will be aware of. The XHTML will be part of your file system and can be viewed by clicking on it and opening it up in your browser. Wdesk is great for designers because they have maximum design time, and their design flows into XHTML. So the first ESEF report that you've filed and placed on your website is the one where there is trust in the data, and Workiva is a champion of this cause. But we also believe that functionality, navigation, brand values, design and collaboration work hand-in-hand. Again, you don't need 2 reports. The best data assurance is when every output comes from one data source. This is the Workiva way. You can output to all formats, giving full design reporting with data you can rely on. And here they are, totally confident that they're all the same inside and out. But why is this important? Because XBRL will leave a footprint, downloaded and shared in seconds. We don't exactly know how investors will take XBRL. It might take a few years for regressional analytics to show its power. A 3-year-old mistake will be embarrassing at best, while quite possibly damaging to reputation and brand. Workiva is a fully integrated system and one where XBRL can be generated at any time, perfect for audit. Both parties will be confident that the numbers remain as intended. Designers can be reassured that they have the correct version and that their design will pass through to the web and print simultaneously. Our review tools are available wherever you are. You have total control and maximum time line with full data assurance. This is perfect for ESEF and perfect for the footprint. So in summary of everything we've shown today, with having one platform that is quite different than anything our customers have seen before moving into Wdesk -- so data consistency, efficient collaboration and process control, the 3 key points to get to those positive business outcomes that we saw earlier. So I hope you've seen how we've walked through of having that data and narrative updated automatically from that single source of truth, increase the data integrity by using Wdata connecting through your APIs and linking all of that information out. You also have that full audit trail of information through the history panel, through the commentary and every data lineage from there that has been updated. This reduces the review period -- again, because everything is done inside of one platform, one document, one spreadsheet. You're not going to multiple Share Points, shared Drives, through different source files. It's all in one place, adding in that collaboration where every team is working inside of that one live document at the exact same time based on the permissions that they have been given. We see many [indiscernible] as well, again, those external auditors coming in for that increased collaboration. There's no more pencils down around the audit process, same for the iXBRL tagging processing and design. It's all happening at the exact same time that the documents are being updated, the data is being updated, and the reviews and audit at the same moment, to give us that final process control of having a flexible and scalable platform. As we mentioned before, we've got over 300 different use cases inside of Wdesk that companies have expanded into. The user-friendly interface, everything should look pretty familiar to each of you listening today, and that was done intentionally to help our teams get up and running very quickly inside of Wdesk by having, again, that one central reporting repository and being an industry-leading support.

All right. Do we have any questions? Jackie, I think this first one is for you. The first question here is how does Workiva think about its relationship with design agencies?

Okay. That's a great question. We're working hard to build on our relationships with design agencies. We totally understand the hard work and the dedication they give to clients. What we want to do is make their life easier by giving them the best ICML exporter. We want to totally reassure our designer friends that they will be absolutely working with the correct version. And also, designers will be reassured that their report will be known for the right reasons, their great design and content, not the wrong reasons like a restatement or late filing. And we're aiming to be the best citizen of professional publishing with tight code suitable for swift download. And we're putting together loads of new content welcoming design agencies, so please look out for that soon.

Okay. Thanks, Jackie. Let's see if any more come in. Looks like everybody likes design questions. Here's another one for you. Are you saying I can put my full complete report in Wdesk from a content point of view? And -- sorry, I misread that. Are you saying I can put my full complete report in Wdesk from a content point of view for it to be a fully designed report?

Yes. This is because the final output has to be in XHTML with the XBRL tags in place. So all the content needs to be in Wdesk, and we bring the design back in via IDML. So this is a big change because historically, usually, only the financials are in Wdesk. Another great thing is that you don't need an amend system. Wdesk will make sure that you're working on the right version. We have blacklining not only of content but of tags. It's really sophisticated. So the design values get added to the content in Wdesk to create your ESEF reports. And the code will be well formatted. And every output will look the same, no glossy PDFs and a compliant filing. Everyone will look the same, and we're really proud of that. And we hope companies, designers and investors will be, too. Hope that answers the question.

So let's see if any more, anything not design? It's important. I'm definitely impressed. Here's one. I'll take this last one here. What does the implementation process look like to bring in the annual report? This is a great question, and I get this one every single meeting I'm in. So if you recall from that very beginning of the current state of process where there's a lot of things going on, that's exactly what we're tackling inside of that implementation. So there are 4 key phases during the implementation process of an annual report. We have the document setup, linking, XBRL and data mapping itself. So that first phase of your document setup, we're going to take your existing Word documents, PowerPoint, Excel files, anything around the annual report that you would like to bring in, so the true annual report, the data supporting it and then if there's also an investor relations deck you'd like to bring in or any other kind of management PowerPoint. We'll bring those in and import those into the Wdesk version of each of those documents. We'll then make sure they're formatted exactly as they looked like before. So you still get that nice, clean look that you guys are used to working inside of your Word documentation and then helping with the design element as well. Once all of the documents have been set up, they're beautiful. The -- your team has confirmed that they look exactly as they should. We then move to linking up the data. So by using your existing information, so right now, we would use your 2019 annual report to link out that data. And this allows us to confirm that every link has correctly updated the information to where it should flow. So taking that Excel file, it's now brought into Wdesk spreadsheet. We're going to link all of that information to the financial statements. You can also have the individual notes linked out, whatever has been worked out for your implementation process, and create those links there. Once the links have been done, we can then move on to XBRL. As Jackie mentioned earlier, XBRL is live, and it lives on top of the documentation. So we do have teams inside Workiva that can do the tagging for you. We also have some customers who decide to do a third-party outsourcing. But if it's inside of Wdesk, we will take that on for you and get all of the tags applied and, again, turn this over to your team for the review process of that information. And then the last step of these 4 is the data mapping. Where does this data actually come from? So we took that original Excel file. We've inputted that in. We've linked it to the document. Now we want to see how far back into the true source system we actually can go. And so some of our customers will take the information. And we make sure that we allow for the manual input inside of that spreadsheet because we know there will always be adjustments or rounding that need to happen. So maybe that data mapping requires adding in an adjustment field within there. We can also look at using an Excel sync. If we can't quite connect to your true source system via an API, we do have a plug-in to an Excel that will allow you to simply push that data from the Excel file into Wdesk. So in that instance, it can look closer to a [ raw trial balance, ] which then using formulas, we can feed into the final output table such as the income statement. Or the highest level that we mentioned before of getting that API connections through Wdata itself and what does that look like. So working with your IT team, that's really the only IT element that we need in the entire implementation process. It's just confirming that API connection, making sure we have it set up again to have those predetermined automation run that will trigger at the following events. So how often do we want the data to update? And then where does it go? Is it going to that one master spreadsheet before we break out to those other additional use cases of information? And how often do we want those updates to happen? That will then trickle down to the spreadsheet. And again, using the formulas, we'll update the end tables themselves and then flow out to the documents, any investor relations decks that you want. And then you're pretty much set up and good to go. There is that then final, final review process to make sure the data has flowed everywhere it should from that true top source, through the spreadsheet and documentation of the build. And then we teach you how to do that roll-forward process, which is very simple and very easy for you to do. You have your training. I guess that's step #5, that's the most important out of those key phases that I mentioned. You will be trained by your customer success managers on how to use Wdesk. We don't just leave you out on your own. You'll be fully live and ready to run at the end of the process with all of your questions answered, and then that maintained support going forward so that way, you're ready to go with your annual report when that time comes.

That was a brilliant answer.

Thanks, Jackie. All right. I think that's about all the time that we have today. Any questions that weren't answered, we will definitely reach back and follow up with you to get -- make sure everything was answered. And thank you all for joining today.

Thank you so much.

Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to this webinar on ESG sustainability and nonfinancial reporting. Before we get started, I'll briefly cover off a few housekeeping items. So if you have a moment, please do respond to the survey questions in the top left corner of your screen. At the bottom of your screen, you'll see a few engagement tools, and these are movable and resizable. So feel free to play around with the space however you like. You can also expand or maximize your slide area using the buttons in the top right corner. If you have any questions as we go through this session, you can submit these through the Q&A engagement tool, and we'll do our best to answer them during the webinar. But for anything requiring a more detailed response or if we run out of time, we'll follow up with you via e-mail. Please note, we do capture all questions that are submitted. Our presenters today are Sakis Kotsantonis and Natalia Kaleta, and they'll be covering off the trends and challenges in -- of ESG reporting, a demo of the Workiva solution for ESG reporting and answering your questions. I'll now hand you over to them to introduce themselves and kick off the presentation.

Thank you very much, [ Sean ], and welcome, everybody. My name is Natalia Kaleta-Schraa, and I am a Global Solution Architect leading Workiva's efforts in developing ESG reporting solution. And today, I will have a pleasure of walking you through the demonstration of how our tool can help you streamline your entire ESG management and reporting process. Before I do that, though, I would like to invite our very special guest, Sakis Kotsantonis, who is a managing partner in KKS Advisors. And I would like to take this opportunity today to also announce that Workiva and KKS are now an official partnership, with which we are elevating our services offering that includes also extremely high-level subject matter expertise in the field of ESG reporting. So Sakis, over to you. Please tell us a little bit of KKS Advisory and then walk us through your presentation.

Thank you, Natalia, and thank you for the valiant attempt at my surname. I know it's not easy. So hello, everybody. My name is Sakis Kotsantonis, and I'm the managing partner for KKS Advisors. KKS is a strategy consulting firm helping clients find innovative solutions that enable the creation of more sustainable business models and communities. We try to work with clients that have impact across the investment value chain, from companies to investors to nonprofit organizations. And with today's presentation, I want to share some of the latest trends on ESG and nonfinancial reporting. As Natalia mentioned, we're very excited to partner up with Workiva and bring subject matter expertise in the sustainability space, combining it with Workiva's unparalleled technology capabilities, and help solve some of the ESG reporting challenges that you will probably hear me talking about during my presentation. So during this presentation, I will be using the words sustainability, CSR, ESG pretty much interchangeably. And one might argue that these are not exactly the same thing. But I think there is enough complexity in the ESG space, so let's make our lives a little bit easier. And I want to start on why are we even talking about corporate social responsibility or ESG, which stands for environmental, social and governance issues? On this slide, you see one of the latest risk landscape reports from the World Economic Forum. If we took exactly the same graph that has been produced every year pretty much, 10 years ago, the total global risks in terms of impacts would include only 1 ESG issue. At that time, we're talking about asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy and chronic diseases as the major risks. But today, ESG risks account for 4 out of the top 5 risks in terms of impact. And these are risks like extreme weather events, failure of climate change adaptation and mitigation and biodiversity loss. And if you think these are just risks that might never materialize, actually, this year, we had a record-breaking $302 billion in damage from extreme weather events in the U.S. alone, that's in 2019. We also witnessed the first so-called climate change bankruptcy. That was of the Pacific Gas and Electric, which is California's -- or actually was California's largest utility, overwhelmed by rapid climatic changes with a prolonged drought and decimating pretty much most of the forest in the state and dramatically increasing the risk of fire. What happened is PG&E filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and it was estimated that they had $30 billion in liabilities and about 750 lawsuits from wildfires. Keep in mind that PG&E was once an S&P 500 company that moved from a $25 billion valuation in October 2018 to below $4 billion at some point, with its shares basically falling to their lowest level since 1972. So these issues are real. And they're prompting multiple stakeholders to ask companies to report on what they're doing in terms of ESG initiatives, activities, intentions, outcomes and so on. And the public has formed social expectations that are guiding this corporate sector-increased involvement in contributing to social and environmental solutions. So what we believe we're witnessing is actually a transition. The same way that we moved from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and then to a service economy, we're now moving to an impact economy. We're trying to better understand, what is the impact of the company's operations on the environment? What is the impact of the company's operations on employees and local communities? And if you take this from an investor perspective, in the field of impact investment growing, we are trying to understand how can my money be aligned with my values and principles. But what we also know is that transformational change is hard. And what I have on the screen is a typical S-curve of an adoption of any specific practice in technology, from early adoption to a flattening of the curve. And what you see is that when an innovation is introduced in the market, let's say, in this sense, this whole concept of an impact economy, it takes a number of years to diffuse and penetrate. You might actually need to reset the curve at times. So firms that make this transition realize that this is not easy, so for example, if you want to move from a company that doesn't have enough diversity in the workforce to a 50% diverse in the workforce or if you want to move from coal to renewables. And there are 3 main reasons why companies have difficulties. One is cognitive barriers. So companies don't believe this is happening. They don't accept that this change is happening. We've seen that a lot of times in the marketplace, and then companies lose competitive advantage or, at times, basically become bankrupt. Number 2 is that new practices might have lower margins. So it's costly to introduce a lot of sustainability initiatives. You might not see what the benefit is in terms of your business model and so on. And number 3, you can see it's happening, but you don't have the organizational capabilities to get it done. For example, you are an automobile manufacturer, but you don't have electrical engineers, you don't have software engineers to move you from a combustion engine production line to an electric car production line. Same problem you can see in pharma, where a lot of companies make money volume-based rather than value-based and so on. So many organizations fail to make that transition, but that doesn't mean that this is not happening. And actually, the data shows that this transition is happening. So over the last few years, we have seen a tremendous progress in increasing availability and quality of ESG data. On the left-hand side, I have a graph that shows how reporting practices of large corporations have changed. So while there were fewer than 20 companies producing reports with ESG information in the early 1990s, there has been an exponential almost increase to over 9,000 companies in 2018. On the graph on the left, the light blue line refers to a worldwide sample of about 4,900 companies. And what you see on the graph is 100 companies by revenue in each of the 49 countries researched in the study. And the dark blue line refers to the world's 250 largest companies by revenue based on Fortune 500. And this is important because what we know is that whatever large companies are doing, in terms of reporting practices and corporate behavior, can predict the trend that we subsequently adopted more widely. So you tend to see that these companies become leaders. And on the right-hand side, we have a graph that shows the investor perspective. For the ones not familiar with the space, the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment, or UN PRI, is an international network of investors working together to put their 6 principles of responsible investing into practice. And their goal is to understand the implications of ESG and sustainability for investors and support their signatories to incorporate these ESG issues into their investment decision-making and their ownership practices. And similarly to what you see on the left-hand side on the corporate side, on the investor side, we have seen an impressive growth in terms of the number and the size of signatories that now represent over $80 trillion of assets under management. So the next time you probably come across in the news a letter from the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, you can assume that a lot of pressure and influence has been put from organizations like PRI for Larry Fink to write this letter. Similar trends can be also seen in, for example, the growth of green bonds, which is a way for issuers to raise money specifically for environmentally friendly projects such as renewable energy or clean transport. And their issuance has reached over, I think, $200 billion in 2019. And the investor interest in ESG data has been growing at a very fast pace. The number of customers using Bloomberg ESG data has more than tripled in the past 7 years, similar trend across most of the ESG data providers. Market spend in ESG content and ESG indices is also increasing at a fast pace, and there are other several capital market players that play a very important role in the move towards better ESG reporting. An example I want to give is the Sustainable Stock Exchanges initiative, which was created to facilitate this dialogue among stock exchanges, investors, regulators and publicly listed companies and, in doing so, to increase corporate transparency. And keep in mind that stock exchanges are in a very unique position to help improve ESG data availability and quality by including listing requirements related to ESG reporting, providing appropriate guidance, appropriate training and so on. I believe now we have more than 15 stock exchanges that produce ESG reporting guidance for listed companies, and about more than 20 that have committed to produce guidance in the future. So from the investor perspective, what is driving demand from this ESG information? A recent survey showed that a proven link between ESG issues and financial performance is probably the most likely factor to cause investors begin considering ESG issues in their investment analysis. And I think this has significant implications for companies because it gives a clear indication on the type of information requested by investors. And I will come on at a later slide about differences between different sustainability reports and so on. But one thing to keep in mind is that if you are thinking about an investor audience as a key stakeholder for you, investors don't just want to see a list of community givebacks in a very nicely -- glossy report, especially if that has nothing to do with your company's business model. And having worked with most ESG data providers as well as a lot of investors, I can tell you that this information will pretty much not be captured at all. What they want to see is how some of these ESG issues are related with financial performance and what that means for your bottom line: Revenues, costs, new products and services, competitive advantage, et cetera. Now from a regulatory perspective, there has been also a lot of developments. What we have seen is that there has been developments that aim to improve transparency and availability of ESG information. One example that I have on the screen, in 2019, the European Parliament adopted an EU directive, and that was on disclosure of nonfinancial and diverse information by large companies and groups. These companies have to publish a report on policies they implement in relation to social responsibility, respect for human rights, anti-corruption, diversity on company boards. And this report could be either part of their sustainability report or an additional report that goes hand in hand with their financial filings. These EU rules apply to large, publicly listed companies with more than 500 employees, and I think it covers approximately 6,000 large companies across the European Union. In June 2019, the European Commission also published guidelines on reporting climate-related information, which in practice consists of a new supplement to the guidelines that I just mentioned that got published in 2014. And what's important is that this supplement integrates TCFD recommendations. And as much as I hate acronyms, there's quite a few in the ESG space. TCFD stands for the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. And whoever is not familiar with this initiative, it's an initiative that develops voluntary, consistent climate-related financial risk disclosures for use by companies. They -- TCFD published their final recommendations on these disclosures in 2017, the second half of 2017, and have actually currently attracted interest by over 1,000 global organizations that declare support for the task force. And together with private sector, the supporters have a market capitalization of nearly $12 trillion. And the supporters of TCFD, they're headquartered in over 50 countries. And they span public and private sectors, like companies, national governments, central banks, regulators, stock exchanges, et cetera. But the key take here is that better disclosure of this climate-related information can have really direct benefits. I have listed some on the slide: Increased awareness and understanding of these risks and opportunities, better risk management, better strategic planning, lower cost of capital and more diverse investor base, a better constructive dialogue with investors and stakeholders and, of course, better corporate reputation. Now I know I focused a lot on the European Union. And one question could be, how about the United States? What's the progress there? What we have seen is that the SEC is moving, although slower than the developments that are happening in the European Union, toward including ESG disclosures in public company filings. And although very recently, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a bill that was trying to actually align ESG reporting standards closer to the ones that are found in the EU, this is an issue that is likely to gain in prominence in the near future. Actually, very, very recently, a couple of months ago, the SEC's Investor Advisory Committee urged the organization to take the global lead in mandating these disclosures. In one of the statements, they said that if the SEC does not take the lead, it is highly likely that our other jurisdictions will impose standards in the next few years that U.S. issuers will be bound to follow either directly or indirectly. And that's because of the global nature of the flow of investment into the U.S. markets. So in a way, we see a slower adoption, but that doesn't mean that it's -- that they're not on top of this and you won't see this becoming a much more prominent issue in the future. Now all this is great so far in terms of progress, right? But not everything is perfect. And this progress has come with some difficulties and challenges. The rise in the demand for ESG data has given an equal rise to organizations that are active in the space, and these span from NGOs that develop reporting frameworks and principles to ESG data providers and ESG rating agencies. And as much as these organizations have the best intention to help with creating this infrastructure for better ESG information and for ESG data to be readily available, they have unintentionally, I would say, created an element of complexity. And again, apologies for the many acronyms and many organizations that maybe you're not aware of. But for example, when we look at reporting frameworks, a company will naturally ask, "Which reporting framework should I follow?" GRI, for example, the Global Reporting Initiative, is an independent standards organization. They have developed a framework for companies to produce -- to help them produce sustainability reports. But then a company might say, "How is this different from SASB?" The Sustainability Accounting Standard Board has created its own framework to identify material ESG issues across industries. And then how about the Carbon Disclosure Project, where they aim to improve environmental reporting? And does that go hand in hand with TCFD? And I'm just looking at the left-hand side of this slide because then on the right-hand side, what you see is you have multiple ESG data providers that I -- what they're doing is they're collecting all of this information that's publicly available. And then they score company's performance and provide that scoring to interested parties, primarily investors. And that comes with its own complexity that many of these rating agencies and ESG data providers issue questionnaires to companies that have to respond with a fear that if you don't respond, then you're probably going to be penalized in the scoring nondisclosure equaling a worse score. And it's interesting because I have had conversations with companies that have over 20 full-time people or more just responding to surveys and questionnaires. And what they say is that there's so much complexity in bringing together the data every single time that there's a different information request. And as you can imagine, this is a highly inefficient process and definitely something that needs to be improved going forward. And we will be discussing soon, and Natalia will touch upon, how technology solutions can solve this problem where you have multiple information requests that need to originate from pretty much the same data sources. So companies are left with the responsibility to satisfy the information needs for all of the stakeholders, and they have a number of ways to do so. This could be through a sustainability report, which is a stand-alone document, or some companies actually integrate some of that content on their website. It could take the form of a nonfinancial report, which is a smaller usually add-on document to the financial report. And that's pretty much what's regulated by the EU directive that we discussed in previous slides. And these reports present only basic information about these issues. Or an integrated report, which is considered right now the best-in-class or the best practice, where ESG information is connected to the business model, the strategy of the firm and gets closer to the heart on, number one, what investors want from ESG reporting. But more importantly, how companies can get a benefit by doing all the hard work of collecting the data, setting an ESG strategy and basically how -- if they can use ESG as a competitive advantage. So here's a few things that I want you to keep as a conclusion from this presentation. There is tremendous progress on ESG data availability, and this is set to not only increase but improve in terms of quality over time. But what we do have is we do have different reporting frameworks. So there is not just one framework to follow. It's not as clear-cut as that. We also have different reporting metrics to describe the same issues. And that creates a lot of complexity, especially if you have to decide which metrics and how you can actually satisfy information needs from different stakeholders. We have multiple data providers within companies. But also, we have multiple data providers and data requests, requesting information from companies. And again, the problem with all this is that a lot of the times, you see misinterpretation of this public available data and companies complaining about the ESG scores they're receiving from rating agencies not representing their performance. You have miscalculation of qualitative data because sometimes, if the information is not presented in a certain way, this is not translated into, again, a score that represents exactly the performance of a company. And a lot of the times, there is not an effective way to have a good audit trail of the data, again, because some of these requests could be ad hoc. You could have too many people working on satisfying all these different stakeholders. And unless this is becoming very systematic within the firm, it can be very difficult to trail how data flows. I have this little screenshot on the right-hand side. We wrote a paper with a colleague of mine called The Four Things No One Will Tell You About ESG Data. It was published in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. And it discusses some of the major challenges that we have seen with ESG data and why some companies see major differences in the ESG scores they receive from the major ESG data providers. So for whoever is interested, it's a practitioner's [ read -- it's not ] an academic paper, so feel free to have a look. And so with that, I'm going to pass it on to Natalia, and she can talk a little bit more on how can we address some of these major challenges through technology.

Thank you, Sakis, for this very insightful and interesting presentation. And what I would like to do now, I would actually like to take you through a quick demonstration of how Wdesk for ESG can help you streamline your entire ESG process, both on reporting but also on the framework management side. So we'll talk a little bit about the centralization of the entire documentation. We'll touch on the collaborative document creation, added benefits of data connectivity in the tool; data collection and aggregation, which is also a huge challenge; and also, last but not least, dynamic framework management. Hopefully, those points will help you answer the question on how some of the challenges mentioned by Sakis can be addressed through our technology. So let's jump in. What we have in front of ourselves right now is the home page of Wdesk, where you can see I have certain folder structure containing my different types of ESG reports, submissions and questionnaires that I need to fill out and I need to manage. You can see that I can quickly jump through a specific documentation. All of that is readily available in one centralized platform, whether it's my CDP information request or whether it's my Dow Jones questionnaire or whether it's some other reporting frameworks such as GRI or SASB or TCFD or any other that could live in this one particular place and, therefore, be readily available to anybody in a team that needs to work on that. For the purpose of today, I've already opened an ESG portion of an annual report that I'd like to walk you through. And I'd like to call out a couple of quick things before we move to the next topic. So this is a single active document. As some of you know, Wdesk offers a solution in which we no longer need to create our documentation in Word and then save it with specific terminology. Neither do we have to follow this linear process where one part of the work has to be completed before we can move to next step. We introduced a single asset document, introduced -- invite all of the contributors to work in it in the same time. And therefore, we eliminate a lot of those challenges. You could see here on the bottom on the page, if I scroll here right now, there is just me in this document. However, if I have my colleagues work on different sections or different portions of that document, they could work with me in the same time. Now the way I can still manage it, though, is very controlled, and it's managed through our concept of permissions. I'm not going to go into the detail of that right now. But just so you know, even though you are introducing everybody to the same document, you can still give them different access levels. So then you can directly advise people and directly assign people to work on specific chapters on the report. Another very important bet that is a huge challenge that Sakis already mentioned is the lack of audit trail of certain ESG-related documentation. Now everything that happens in Wdesk is always tracked, and it's recorded from the moment you log in to the moment you log out. Everything will be hosted here under the history panel that you can see has all the different revisions of my document. I can go back and I can see who made what changes in any given point in time. You could see that there was both my colleagues still making certain changes earlier today. You can see what happened in early in June and May and so forth. You can always open a previous revision. You can filter through revisions to find either only important ones or revisions created through certain -- by certain individuals. You can finally create blacklines to see what changes have been introduced. That full audit trail extremely helps both during your production process of the report or reports, but also enables auditors to have very easy and quick access to the information that they are auditing. And therefore, the external assurance is covered by our tool completely. In fact, a lot of our customers just gives access to external auditors directly to the documentation and, with that, saves a lot of time on audit and, therefore, costs on audit fees. Another thing I wanted to touch on at this point is data connectivity. So what you see here is that the -- my total carbon emission number, either in the text over here or in the chart or in the table, this one number, all of those, they have either a green underline or the green little triangle here on the left-hand side. That indicates that this number is linked from a different source. What it means is that I won't be able to edit it from here, and the system will actually force me to edit it in that source if I want to do that. It -- what it means is that this number is given off of somewhere else, but then it can be linked out to multiple destinations. And look at that. If I open my link properties on the right-hand side, you'll see that, that particular number is sourced from the nonfinancial reporting master spreadsheet, but it's linked out to 14 different destinations. And so it shows in my annual report, those places we look at right now, also in my annual report in French and in German, but it also is linked to -- directly to the CDP template and to my Dow Jones Sustainability Index questionnaire. After following this link, the system will pull the correct document. It will take me directly to the cell where this information is also inputted. So what you can understand through that is that we can link out our information that is required by multiple frameworks, and it asks for multiple submissions, and we can just link it to multiple destinations from one place. And then whenever we have a change, we just change it once, and we update it everywhere. Let me show you quickly how it works because that is actually a pretty simple process as well that saves a lot of time. So if I go to the source of this information, I'm just going to follow the link, and it will open a spreadsheet. Functionality in Wdesk that is very similar, it's -- you can think about it as an equivalent of our Excel, but it's also a collaborative tool that enables multiple people working together and so forth. It will take us directly to a section and to the cell that is the source of that information. So now, should that change, should my total GHG emission change, let's just say that we're going to add the employee commuting number, there you go, and of course, through formulas, this number will now increase. As soon as we publish this link, what you'll notice, if I now switch back to our report, is that everything will change. I don't know if you noticed that, but now this number automatically changed to 398,000. This bar is now bigger. The information over here has changed. And every single other destination, whether it's my Dow Jones Sustainability Index or any other questionnaire or template, is also updated. That very much helps with the challenge of overlapping requirements that sometimes need to be framed differently or worded differently but essentially call for the same disclosure of the same data to be published to different audiences. Another topic I want to quickly discuss is the multiple data sources that need to be collected in order to ensure the proper data set for any ESG reporting. Unlike the financial reporting, we are dealing here with a magnitude of data sources. We need to collect the environmental, the social data. We need to have important information on KPIs included. We have to have information on our governance. All of that comes from both structured and unstructured data sources. I often hear that customers have challenges around collecting the correct data and also collecting the right quality data, also because they're global companies and they deal with issues such as different languages, different measurement units, different metrics. All of that prevents them from collecting standardized information and, as such, presenting the correct information in their reports. This is -- this can be seen very easily as soon as you go to any GRI checklist. A lot of companies will lack some of the disclosures on, just not to look too far, scope 2 or 3 emissions because collecting the information for those is extremely difficult. Wdesk in -- through their spreadsheets, offers 3 different ways of collecting the data and bringing data into this centralized platform. First, I want to call out the fact that our spreadsheet here follows the structure of GHG protocol. So should you start collecting and working on data in Wdesk, those templates and the look and feel of the templates for at least the GHG part or the environmental part would already be available to you in the GHG protocol-compliant format. Now in terms of collecting the data, I quickly want to call out 3 ways of doing it. So if you have -- if you think about some portion of the data that do not come from a structured source and they require a small portion of data being contributed directly by your colleagues maybe in -- from some other parts of the world, you can quickly create those data collection templates and simply give them access to only those templates. As you can see, in here, I actually highlighted in blue certain cells that I want to be edited by my contributors. All the rest is actually locked from editing. So in other words, we can enforce specific data and also standard of this data that will be contributed and populated by different data providers. Should those -- should that data then be converted to a certain unit or certain metric, calculated -- maybe multiplied to a certain metric, we can quickly build that into that -- the data collection template. So then it rolls up to the purchased gases total, and it calculates the subtotal. And then that subtotal actually goes, let's say, to your summary. And at the end of the day, it's part of your total GHG emissions. That is one simple way of collecting your data. I also know that there's a lot of data that already lives in different Excels on your desktops, and it comes to you in the form of e-mails and so forth. So for those that already have their Excel sources, you can utilize Wdesk Sync add-on in Excel to push the data in. This example, I just have the business travel source here. It just hosts very easy and very simple source data that is actually automatically pushed through Excel. Every time there is a refresh in Excel, you just follow a couple of easy steps in Excel to push the data automatically into the spreadsheet. And then off of that, you can run whatever calculations or aggregations you need to get you to your final numbers. Now last but not least, I want to quickly call out the fact that Wdesk can automatically connect with your source systems. So if you're using systems of record to capture your raw data for either environment or human capital information or maybe both, you can also connect them directly to Wdesk. I have this example over here. So you can see that I have my electricity data, and I have my human capital data connected. It can be seen through this little cube over here that indicates that my data is connected from somewhere else. So what you can see is that I can refresh that source file through my data connection panel on the right-hand side here. So if we had any change to the source system, I could just hit this refresh button, and that would instantly give me all the changes into this file. We can quickly test this. I'm just going to remove a portion of the data here -- or actually, let's just remove this entire column. So what we can do, we can zero this out. And you'll see that through doing this, I will update certain portion of tables in my spreadsheet that are driven off of the source information. So you can see that, for instance, my average length of service here is all zeroed, zeroed out right now because it all comes from Workday spreadsheet, right, which I just deleted data from. So now if we go back to the source file, and when we hit the refresh button, what's going to happen is that Wdesk will connect to the source system of Workday and will pull the most up-to-date version of this report. And then as soon as that's complete, there you go, my data on the average years of service appeared here. And as such, we also updated my human capital information in the tables, there we go, now we have that column populated. And as such, through links, that information can also be automatically updated in my sustainability report and in all of my different questionnaires and templates where I want to present this information. I hope that those 3 ways illustrate how you can quickly collect different types of both structured and nonstructured data and how you can, therefore, streamline your calculation and aggregation in order to produce high-quality disclosures for your different stakeholders. The last bit but definitely not least I want to call out right now is how do we manage all of this in compliance to frameworks that all of -- we leverage for our ESG reporting. I will show that on an example of GRI. So at the bottom here, I created a little table that talks about my energy consumptions and outside of the organization. And you can quickly spot that both this cell and that cell are linked through summary. You can see that there is this little green triangle over here. Now what that gives me, it gives me the information that comes from somewhere else. Now let's trace that to its source. You can see that actually, this GRI disclosures is not linked from any spreadsheets or a document, but it's actually linked from a disclosure itself. Let me open it real quick. And you'll see that every GRI disclosure in our tool is built in a form of this little form that has certain material information to each GRI disclosure. So it's going to have an ID. It's going to have a description, reporting requirements, as laid out by the standard, the indication of which disclosure chapter and series it belongs to. And then it will also have a couple of fields that will be specific for your organization. So it will talk about who is the owner of this disclosure, what kind of disclosure it is, if it's material to us, is it subject to external assurance? And if so, what's the conclusion, what is the standard -- sorry, what is the status of this particular disclosure? That way, you can give your contributors certain tasks. You can assign them to specific disclosures, and they can complete the work and also inform you about that. Now then being a manager of the ESG process, you can leverage the functionality of our reports and dashboards to see where you are with your process. When I open the disclosure matrix, you'll see that I'll have the full raw data set with all of my GRI disclosures. That maybe does not look very pretty, but that hosts all the information that will always be dynamically updated as soon as somebody adds information to it. But more importantly, it also allows you to create the views. So I can create a view that will -- has the column structure of my GRI checklist. I can just create a view that will allow me to see disclosure lists, so I can quickly go through all the disclosures that I have built in and I'm using for my ESG process. I can create different -- the views that will tell me which of my disclosures are or are not subject to external audit. And I can quickly see, okay, let's check which one of those, okay. And there we go, we got a list of those that have been externally assured. Now last but not least, you can also leverage the dashboards to see where you are with your status of production of those GRI checklist. When I open this dashboard here real quick, you'll see my breakdown of disclosures that we are reporting on in my organization, and you will see where we are with those. So you'll see which of them are not started, in progress, in review or complete. And let's just imagine that as a manager of the process, I want to be on -- ahead of the curve. I want to be done with my work quickly, and I don't like the fact that I have this one not started disclosure. So I can quickly drill down through it, and the data view panel on the right-hand side will show me what is the disclosure that is not started. Who is an owner of it? Actually, I already see it here just by hovering over it. And I can essentially just trigger a workflow process by simply going through my -- to my home screen and created the task. And I can quickly create a task and I can assign it to a specific user. And I can say, please finish your work on the GRI 302. As soon as I create this task, I can add a due date, description and I can assign it to a person. Those people will receive both a task notification here in Wdesk, but they will also receive an e-mail notification that there is some outstanding work that I'm expecting them to finish. Now when they do that, they can go, they can do their work. They can prepare their tables and whatnot, check the data, and they can just flip through the status and say okay, Natalia, now it's in review. As soon as they do that, what you'll see on my dashboard is that my dashboard jumps in real time. Every piece of information that is updated in Wdesk will be automatically reflected on those dashboards. With that, you achieve a truly dynamic way of managing your frameworks and, therefore, streamlining your process, ensuring both consistency of the data that you produce and prepare and collect but also compliance with the framework on every stage of your ESG reporting process. This is everything I wanted to show you today. I hope that this gives you a good overview of how our technology can help you dynamically manage frameworks and produce your ESG reports. Thank you very much. And [ Sean ], over to you.

Thanks, Natalia, and thanks, Sakis. I'm just conscious that we are close to our allotted time. So in terms of questions, we are going to have to follow up with those. I saw a number of the ones coming in. So we can follow up with those after the webinar, for Sakis or Natalia. And of course, for anything else that you've got, you can reach out to [email protected], and we can get those answered for you as well. So with that, we'll conclude today's webinar. Thank you very much to our presenters, and a big thank you for everyone who attended. We hope to see you again soon.

Hello, everyone. On behalf of the whole Workiva team, thank you for attending today's virtual event. Risk, Audit and Internal Controls: Executing Risk and Control Frameworks at the Time of COVID-19. We have over more than 200 participants throughout the whole EMEA region, which shows the relevancy of this topic. I'm Diederik Wirtz, Sales Director of Integrated Risk Services at Workiva. I will be the host of this virtual event. Before we begin, we want to cover a few housekeeping items. At the bottom of your screen are multiple application engagement tools you can use. All the engagement tools are resizable and movable, so feel free to move them around and get most out of your desktop space. You can expand your slide area or maximize it to full screen by clicking on the arrows in the top right corner. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can submit them through the Q&A engagement tools. We will try to answer these during the webcast, but if a fuller answer is needed, or we run out of time, it will be answered later via e-mail. Please note we do capture all questions. Our presenters today are Rosemary Amato from the Institute of Management Accountants; Bryan Moiles, Vice President Controllership of NXP Semiconductors; and Jeroen Bolt, Senior Manager, Risk Consulting at KPMG. Okay. Let's start the workshop. Rosemary, as an opening question for you, as a long-lived member of the IMA, CMA and a former IMA (sic) [ ISACA ] Global Board Member, you have been involved in many forums where enterprise risk management has been discussed. Can you share some perspectives on ERM with our listeners today?

I'm always ready to share my views on ERM, Diederik, it is one of my favorite subjects. To all our viewers today, welcome into my home. As this is a special webcast due to the COVID-19 situation, all of us are presenting today from our homes, and we appreciate all of you taking time to be with us. The slides will be shared with everyone, so I won't introduce myself in detail, except to say I recently ended my role in the Chief Data Management Office of ING Bank where I led data management -- demand management for 14 months. And at the same time, I was very happy to serve on the IMA's Nominating Committee this year. We were able to achieve something special this year, having 54% of the incoming Board comprised of women, which matches our membership. So let's move to another topic, a special topic for today and the reason why we are here: getting back to fundamentals with risk management. Current events show that professional risk management is a must for every company, no matter what your size. And the financial departments in the companies must contribute to the effort and, possibly, drive the effort. As we all recognize, finance is front and center during a time of crisis. I read a recent McKinsey COVID-19 newsletter, and it said, "Senior executives have to be ready to access both new and newly critical data to make unprecedented decisions in the short term and inform adjustments to their business strategies and operational plans in the medium and long term. Finance departments should be best equipped to understand what data needs to be gathered and that they have a role to play in providing insights during this time." Some mission-critical responsibilities described in the McKinsey report include enabling rapid reporting, mitigating new data-related risks and helping the organization shift to a predominantly digital operating model. And these probably sound familiar to you as you're probably in the middle of one or more of these activities right now. Now is also the time to build resiliency for the future crises. And that's why I'm saying that we should not let go of fundamentals as they are always fundamental. You need good ERM planning. A recent article in the German Edition of Corporate Finance by Bernardin Generalao, a director responsible for regional partner relations at the IMA in Central Europe, discusses how fully implemented functional ERM system must include the risk of a pandemic. He describes the characteristics of ERM, that being a logically structured system, where you execute a systematic risk assessment including various scenarios. And remember scenarios, I'll come back to that shortly. As we are now experiencing with COVID-19, this includes not only economic crisis, raw material shortages or bank crashes but also pandemics. If we had a poll right now, I wonder how many of our listeners had pandemics in their ERM plan as a scenario. Remembering that fundamentals are fundamental, a company must be able to assess precisely which faults are particularly susceptible to their own business model and where the specific weak points lie in every scenario no matter how low the probability of occurrence. Let's look at an enterprise risk maturity model that Bernardin provided in his article. Many maturity models exist. I had the privilege of being part of the IMA team that provided input into the COSO framework when it was revised in 2013. In 2017, COSO developed an ERM framework and those materials are also an excellent place to start if you are looking at your ERM plans at this time. Also in October 2018, COSO published ERM, applying ERM to environmental, social and governance-related risks. Remember that financial experts in the company should use their qualifications for risk management as well. It is the experts in the finance department who can best assess an ERM system once it has been implemented. Another way to look at ERM is as part of the 3 lines of defense model. Risk management is part of the second line of defense. But I've seen many times where ERM is often overlooked as companies tend to focus on financial controls, compliance and security before addressing risk management. And remember, risk management is unique to your company. Yes, you can leverage your other ERM examples, but remember to make it yours. My last slide is from a recent Deloitte webcast. And for transparency's sake, I did spend 21 years at Deloitte in Atlanta, The Netherlands and Malta. This slide describes activities that should be in your ERM plan, if they are not there already. Remember that finance plays a big role in understanding dependencies and impacts. Remember the fundamentals, you must align data with compliance activities and really understand what is in your ERM plan. At this point, I would like to leave you with a short story. February 26, 1993 was the day a terrorist attack occurred at the World Trade Center in New York, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower. Many years later, I met a CISO who worked for a company that was housed on one of those high floors. This is his story. When he became the CISO, which occurred after the bombing, he evaluated the ERM plan that he inherited and made several changes. One of the physical security measures he implemented was making sure employees knew how to leave the building. That meant having a drill several times a year, where all employees would walk down more than 50 flights of stairs. I had to walk down 10 once in my office in London and that was an experience. He got so much grief from the senior leaders who wanted this to stop, but he persisted and continued the drills. When 9/11 happened, everyone in his company safely made it out of the building as they had walked those stairs many times. He was finally vindicated with one of the elements of his ERM plan. But when he tells the story himself, he always mentions that it was an awful situation that a tragedy had to occur before anyone understood the importance of ERM planning. He stuck to his fundamentals. A good ERM system will have many scenarios where risks will be categorized as low. But a low-risk does not mean you don't plan for it. We have all recognized that we are in a time of crisis now. ERM plans are being executed. But as McKinsey says, you should also take the time now to build resiliency for future crises. You could invest in additional capabilities that will allow your organization to create more flexibility and timeliness in data aggregation and reporting. One example would be to proactively conduct drills to simulate a scenario and produce and discuss ad hoc reports. By strengthening this muscle, organizations can be much better prepared for any subsequent outbreaks or other crises, which now may appear likely throughout the coming decades. Diederik, I think it might be time to hear from Jeroen to share more information with our viewers. Thank you, everyone.

Okay. Well, thank you, Rosemary. Well, welcome to every one of you for attending also this webinar. I would first like to introduce myself, who am I? My name is Jeroen Bolt. I'm working at KPMG Advisory in The Netherlands for more than 10 years, where I'm leading the team responsible for Internal Control and Risk Management Services. I'm also now the proud father of a 16-week old daughter, with whom I can spend quite some time now at home, so COVID also has some advantages for me as well. But at the same time, today, I would like to discuss with you some of the challenges that we have due to COVID-19. And we face now different ways of working, new ways of communication with each other. And also I hear from a lot of my clients that they have difficulties now executing all their controls in a timely and adequate manner, as some of the reasons may be that processes may have changed or system access may have changed. And as a result, there are more segregation of duties issues. So as a matter of fact also within the organization, some of the employees, they may feel that -- they may feel uncertain about their future or -- can anyone still hear me? Or -- because I see some items in the chat or I think it's still on there. So others may feel network issues or have -- they may be assigned to other task and, therefore, have other priorities. So this all impacts, I think, the risk profile of your organization and as a way, we need to work with that. So therefore, at KPMG, we truly believe that we've got to watch our soft controls more closely than ever. And as a matter of fact, the soft controls are actually the culture and behavior of our employees within the organization. Also, I think that GRC technology can support some of this soft control element. The soft control model was actually built and designed by KPMG here in The Netherlands, and I think it's widely used across the world. Now I'll discuss each of the different elements of the soft control model and also elaborate on how GRC technology can support at the end of my presentation. So the first, soft control element is around clarity. So in organizations, we now see that employees may have reported ill or maybe assigned to other tasks or priorities, and some of the control execution may be delegated to other employees. But do these employees really feel what is expected from them and do they really know which reports to use or which steps to take? So clarity is really an important soft control for control execution. The second part element of the soft control model is around role modeling. So senior management has a lot on their mind at the moment, so they have to deal with this crisis, so they may give less priority to executing controls. But senior management also has to lead by example. So whenever they are not doing that, that may impact also the behavior of the employees below them and not executing their controls in a timely manner. The third element is around commitment. So we are all working from home now and we may teach some of our children their school work or some of our family or closer -- or friends, they may be facing health issues and, therefore, we may not be able to be as committed to our work or see the emerging risks ahead of us. So commitment is really key at this point in time. The fourth element is around achievability. So everyone is working from home, but do they still have access to the right data and information to execute controls? And here also, GRC technology can help supporting employees doing their job. They should have sufficient time and feel that they are able to complete their work. The fifth element is around transparency. It needs to be visible that employees need to feel that whatever they're doing and the work that they're doing, the controls that they execute or the extra step that it takes to mitigate emerging risks -- that it is visible to others, to their managers to see what they're doing. So especially in this time, if this is not visible, then we should really pay attention to this element. The sixth element is discussability. So working from home, new ways of communication, new ways of working, emerging risks, challenges in control execution, employees need to feel that they should be -- that they're able to discuss issues that they may have in control execution or new risks that pop up on the horizon. So we need to ensure that they have the right platform for that. Call someone to account. So when working from home, we don't see each other anymore. We do not have, yes, the opportunity to go to someone's desk and ask them how they are doing or ask them, "Hey, where did it go wrong this time, and what did you do?" So also here, call someone account -- to account is a very important element that we should take care of. And the last element is around enforcement. Employees need to feel that they are rewarded for the things that they're doing good and the risks that they are mitigating -- the actual effect of [ their take. ] But they also need to feel that there are consequences when things are not going well. So when they do not actually take controls in a timely manner or an adequate manner or do not mitigate the risks that are arising in front of us. So all these elements play a very important part in remaining in control. But how can GRC technology support here? I think for 4 of these soft control elements, GRC technology like a Workiva tool is -- can be of great importance. So especially about clarity, whenever we delegate controls to other employees, we need to provide them with instructions, provide them with the right level of information. So GRC technology in this way can really support you. Also for role modeling, senior management, it needs to be visible that they are really executing their controls. And in GRC tool, this is really something that can -- that's shown and other employees can see that as well. So -- and they know that also senior management thinks that control execution, mitigating risks is something that needs to be done in a timely way. It also helps in achievability. So providing, via workload, the right instructions for control execution, provide access to the right level of information, indicate in a timely manner when someone needs to start or when someone needs to finish their controls, assign new risks and controls to them, that gives them a comfortable feeling that they're able to do their job. And I think the most important one is around transparency. So this -- using GRC technology makes it really visible where we stand in terms of progress of control execution. It can be monitored in a timely way. So it's really visible that -- what employees are doing. And they will feel that, it really helps strengthening some of these soft control elements, which are so important in order to remain in control as an organization. Also, the other soft controls are, of course, great importance, but therefore, we really need to find other ways of communicating it in the future via periodic status update meetings, giving someone a call, meetings via webinars, et cetera. So to summarize in a few key takeaways. So control execution in COVID-19 is not simply business as usual, so the processes may have changed, employees may not feel as comfortable as they were, so we really have got to be aware of that. And we really think that soft controls are now, in this time, more important than ever. And we're -- actually we have the opportunity to leverage on GRC technology to support these soft control elements, and this really strengthens your risk and control framework. So this is what I wanted to tell you. Well, I hope you like it. And if there are any questions, please feel free to reach out. So I think it's now time to go over to Bryan, who will tell us a little bit more about NXP and how they're used.

Thank you, Jeroen. A reminder to all the listeners, if you have questions, please use the Q&A section in the platform so we can get the questions answered by the end of the session. So it's now time to go over Bryan Moiles with us of NXP Semiconductors. Over to you, Bryan.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. If I could just get a thumbs up from the other presenters, you can hear me okay? I was having some tech -- okay, good. I just want to make sure. So everybody, welcome to my attic, which is now a converted office. So here we go, this is the way we work now. Just by way of introduction, you could see on the slide here and [indiscernible] he'll be obligating us all -- go over everything. I spent quite a bit of time in my life in public accounting at Deloitte. I was there for 12 years in total between Boston and Silicon Valley. And then at one point, I was recruited to move over here to The Netherlands. As a side story, after shortly moving over, I was kind of questioning myself with the weather, with a beautiful California weather to come here, but we've had great weather here in the Netherlands for the past months, so it hasn't been that bad. One of the interesting things about the time that I spent in Silicon Valley was I had an opportunity when I left Deloitte to go work for a company called Altera, a semiconductor company. And there we were introduced to WebFilings, which is now Workiva. So at that point in time, WebFilings was a start-up and we were getting calls from the sales team every week about this great new product, and it's really focused more on the external services that all of us were going to need to address at that point in time. So we brought them in and we developed quite a nice relationship with them. And in fact, the relationship that I developed with the team there carried forward with me when I moved to the Netherlands. And when I came over here, I [ sought ] right away to bring them in-house. So a great company, I find them really awesome to work with, and they listen to all our feedback. So it's something that has come with me over here to the Netherlands. So we're in the middle of our -- towards the near end of our close process here for Q1 at NXP. So I hope to give you a little bit about what I thought going into the close and then what I experienced during the close and coming out of here, some of the lessons learned. So hopefully, it's similar to what you have experienced or things that you can use for your next quarter. It's certainly very similar to what Jeroen was talking about. There's a lot of things that we experienced as we went about dealing with COVID-19 and how we're addressing the close at this point in time. So just a little bit about NXP. We're a semiconductor company. Most of you will know us for our exposure in the automotive market. Just about every car that's made these days, there's at least 1 NXP chip in it. We also are involved quite a bit in security, so microchips that are in passports, bank cards, cellphones, all that kind of stuff. We started working with Workiva here in early 2019. The -- we were bringing in a new way of working. A couple of years ago, we did an acquisition of a semiconductor company, Freescale, in the U.S. And with that, we acquired a much more global presence. So we have about 14,000 employees. And what's interesting about us is that we have a Center of Excellence in China, as part of my SOX team in Malaysia. We have our headquarters here in Eindhoven, and then we have another headquarters basically in Austin, Texas. So globally, we need to be able to coordinate. And obviously, with that kind of setup, I wanted to utilize a 24-hour clock as much as possible to make our filings more efficient. So we get things out of the way earlier and get people focused on other projects rather than just the compliance stuff that we do around the quarterly close. So with that, we're introducing a new way of working. And like I said before, with my experience with Workiva, I said this is the tool that will help us get there. We were looking at 2 things, the SEC filings and the SOX compliance aspect. Shortly after we made a decision to adopt the tool, we had another change in NXP, where we became a domestic filer. So prior to that, we were a foreign private issuer, which meant we filed 6-Ks on a quarterly basis and our 20-Fs on an annual basis. We didn't have to deal with proxies and Form 3s and Form 4s. But with the change to domestic filer, there was the additional filings that we would need to do. So with this tool, we're able to start doing our Form 3 and Form 4 filings, we will eventually do a proxy in the tool. We are doing an IFRS sort of financial statements in the Netherlands as well. So the idea was to really create this connected reporting environment. Where we didn't have pieces all over the world, I don't have to worry about Word documents being sent back and forth or embedded Excel spreadsheets not working. I wanted 1 source of truth, where I brought data in that fed into these other reports, and I want to be able to expedite the time line on all these filings that we had to do. So far to date, we've had quite a bit of success with that. Then COVID-19 came in. So the timing for us was really around -- we were just completing the 2019 audit. Our team and the COE was just coming back -- or supposed to be coming back from the Chinese New Year. At that point in time, we started to do our annual planning process. So from that perspective, it was somewhat timely. But right away, we were mandated with the fact that the show must go on. We were not going to take advantage of any delays in timing for filings. We wanted to keep the same cadence. We thought that because of the way were structured, we were used to working somewhat mobilely, at least in various locations, so we could quickly adjust to that. But from there, I started to worry about what could go wrong. Many of you probably use that terminology in audits and when you're designing your control structures. So for a period of time, we went through and developed basically a risk list of the things that we thought could potentially go wrong. The list was bigger -- the big -- at the onset of this, I'll say. It eventually dwindled down as we get into the actual workflow because we're pretty comfortable with working mobilely with everybody. The other thing I wanted to do was make sure that we engaged all stakeholders. So clearly, we had more than just your normal Controllership team and FP&A team. Investor Relations had a heavy involvement, right, as far as disclosure, what we're going to say. Clearly, there's an aspect of guidance that is more of an art than a science this time, I would say, right? None of us really know what's going to happen. Senior management is always engaged, but was more engaged. And we want to make sure that we were messaging things appropriately to the Audit Committee and the Board of Directors and, ultimately, to our shareholders. And so we were thinking through all those different stakeholders and what was going to be important to them as we went through this. Clearly, our end goal was to ensure that we had safety for our employees. Everybody is working from home. We'll work from home for a while longer. We did want to maintain a normal cadence, which I would say is relatively aggressive. We continue to get better with that. And then we want to provide a seamless transition to a new way of working. And from that perspective, it was really more of a reliance on technology. We obviously utilized technology, but it was how could we take this tool, Workiva and other things like Microsoft Teams and get the most out of it and make sure that our people were really connected? So as we went through our risk assessment, I have a snap from a PwC white paper actually that put together [Audio Gap] We went through really well. So as we looked at the overall process, and as I mentioned, we were doing our annual planning anyway, so kind of aligned with what we were doing, we went through a risk assessment and prioritized controls. We looked at where gaps may be, so identify key risks. We assessed the key control framework that we had, and we wanted to make sure that there wasn't something that should be added. We re-prioritized where we needed to. We looked at access controls, of course. IT was a big component of this for us. And then, where needed, we updated any key controls. And I will say, fortunately, for us, the updates were minimal at the end of the day. So here I'm calling the smart navigation. We kind of laid out this map. For me, the big focus was on those what could go wrong, so identifying the gaps and what mitigating controls that we need to be -- what we need to have in place. I'm happy to say that we didn't identify too many mitigating -- too many gaps at all from an overall design structure. The gaps for me were more the fact that there was going to be bigger stresses on our mitigating controls, right, with people not centrally located, not having those water cooler conversations, maybe having a cup of coffee or sitting in a meeting room together. It was what was not going to come up in the not-normal flow of conversation. And for me, the mitigating controls are going to be important, where you have your analytics, your more detailed reviews, in-depth reviews where people are asking questions; what was the framework of their mindset as they went in to do their review; what expectations have they set; and how are they going to go about this review process without having somebody right there available to them. Also, I would say we were adjusting to people's different work schedules. Clearly, a lot of our people work at home with young kids, so not everybody is doing a 9 to 5, right? Work hours have shifted, so it was how are we going to be able to communicate effectively, make sure nothing slipped through and be able to maintain that process that we wanted to maintain? With that, we look -- took a look at our documentation standards. That's something that we always do anyways. The beautiful thing of the SOX tool for Workiva is the ability to upload and communicate via messaging to reference other people so that there's communication and people don't miss something that should be sent to them. So that's something that we really reemphasized with our teams. We have a monthly closing call. We wanted to make sure that anything that they thought of, that they looked at, that they were uploading that as part of the control documentation, so that as it worked its way through the review chain, other individuals have an aspect to take a look at that. We challenged manual versus automated controls, again, something that we continually do anyways. Clearly, the risk was around the manual controls. There were things such as cutoff that we had some concerns around. It ended up working out. But with our team in China being out sooner rather than later in the process, right, the -- there's still a lot of things that are received in the paper mail there, right, a lot of invoices. So we just made sure that everybody was aware of that. And as I went through and did their reviews, they were certainly challenging, okay, what am I used to seeing in here? Is there something that should have been caught in an accrual for an example, that maybe didn't actually make its way through because of the paper aspect of it? There were some immaterial things that popped up on us at the end of the day, but nothing material. Our people had thought ahead. They really worked out a process to formalize a way to go back and check what they've done in prior quarters to align. Analytics were a key thing for us, right. So that all worked out pretty well at the end of the day. Other things that we were worried about were the displacement of the team. That wasn't such a big deal other than the shift of the timing maybe. Communication, we encouraged everybody to overcommunicate, utilizing the Wdesk tools that allows us to do it seamlessly within that tool, and everybody gets to see it. And actually, we saw, specifically, in the external reporting tool where there were comments where maybe somebody had overlooked it, but somebody else got it and you could kind of ping somebody through that tool directly and get them to go look at that. So a great way to catch and help other people to deal with, what I would call the biggest thing I worry about was, mental fatigue. We all have a lot on our plates right now. We're all learning to work differently. There's other things outside of work, of course, that we should all be focused on. We have family, friends that we want to make sure stay healthy. And then for those families with young kids at home, clearly, their days are much longer. There's a lot that they have to handle. So I was worried just by the fact that as you get into the process, people get tired, things get pushed through the process, that maybe there will be oversights. So again, going back to those mitigating controls, we just made sure that we had more sets of eyes than normal on some of those things where we really challenged the reviewers to make sure that the reviews were done appropriately and worked its way up the line. Cybersecurity concerns became a big deal. I'm sure many of you heard about some of the tools that are out there that we use for video conferencing that had challenges. Obviously, we had concerns now. When we adopted the tool, our IT team did a very extensive background check from an IT perspective to make sure that all our financials -- to make sure it was going to be safe. Clearly that -- the Workiva platform passed that test with flying colors, and that's why we're utilizing it. So that made things a little bit easier for us to not have to worry about this. Our people who were working from home, we knew they were on their home networks, but they were accessing both the SOX module and the external reporting model that we use in the cloud that was very secure from our point of mind. So that brought a lot of sense of calm overall from that perspective with financial information going everywhere. We encourage people to use things in the tool as opposed to going via e-mail, again, because of those security concerns. And so far, so good with that. Then the potential lack of internal IT bandwidth was another thing that we highlighted. Clearly that as we move everybody to home, there were going to be all kinds of requests on the IT team. There were concerns with people having to access our systems via a VPN. We do know that as they try to get into SAP, for example, that wasn't consistently working for them. But with the Workiva tools out in the cloud, we have less of a concern here. There, we didn't have to worry bothering our IT team at all. And actually, the Workiva team provided great support here, we didn't have 1 issue at all. But now we still have to get through filing, so if I didn't jinx myself, that does occur next week. But so far, so good, we seem to be [ on there. ] Talking a little bit now about what we ended up experiencing at the end of the day. So as I mentioned before, we found that our process really didn't change at all. And I think we actually got a little bit faster. People really saw what was kind of the fat in the process that we had. We became a little leaner. We looked at areas where we could be quicker. So the focus on efficiency became a big deal. As people were working at home, maybe they were less distracted being in the office. Or maybe it was just a new way of thinking in a new environment, but that really works well for us. I love the consistency that we had with the tool. There was never any concerns about access. For our 10-Q that we will file next week -- this past week, we had a what we call a roundtable. So as we send the document out for review, we use that tool for the review aspect of it, people put their comments in the tool. We respond to those comments. We went into the actual roundtable and we just used the Workiva tool, and we used Microsoft Teams to broadcast it there. So it's all in one place, and everybody is familiar with the layout, and that really worked well for us. No downtime with having that tool in the cloud. We rely quite a bit on our customer success manager at Workiva. I think that, that individual is probably one of the most important people at Workiva. We go to that individual a lot. And they are great with their responses. We never have to wait or it's a minimal wait. And certainly, if a question comes up, they answer it right away or get us to the right person to answer that question. From a SOX compliance perspective, I was focused on the flexibility and the connected workflow. The fact that our SOX tools have that workflow within it, so as we have a monitor -- somebody monitors the control, they complete the control execution and then it goes to the next person for the actual review. That reviewer is notified instantaneously. The tool sends out reminders, so we didn't have to worry about chasing people down in the office, right? They were at home. So this way, it was more automated from that perspective. The other great aspect of the SOX compliance tool is the mobility. We use the tool for quarterly questionnaire. And I think this is the first time that quite a few of the people who do that quarterly certification did it on either a mobile phone app -- their mobile phone or they did it on an iPad or some other tablet device. So they love the aspect that they could just -- they receive the link on their e-mail. They click on that link, it went right to the portal, completed the certification, boom, done. So they love that fact that they could -- not have to get in front of their laptop or desktop while they're at home already looking at it for 10, 12 hours a day, whatever it may be. It's just another way of going about it. The other beauty within that SOX tool is that we are able to make changes within the control structure as well. So we did some rationalization. And 1 big step we took this year as well is that we have our prepared by-client list for our external auditors as they do their review. We're able to link that list right into the control instances that we have, so we didn't have people uploading things in 2 or 3 places, we just pointed directly to there. We hopefully we'll have an API in the near future that we'll pull and put it into the actual PBC list itself. So there's not even an extra step needed there. But it was really the flexibility, which is the key for us to having success around maintaining the time line that we want to maintain with everybody everywhere. The SEC filings. Now this is an area where I love this one source of truth concept. So those of you that utilize the tool know that there is basically an Excel-like tab -- an Excel-like document where all the financial information is brought in. And that links into the other documents if that's done correctly. Knowing that I only need to check that if the change is made and it's linked directly into our system, it's automatically updated, I know that I'm always looking at the latest and greatest version. A big win for us was the collaboration and communication aspect of the tool. People were apprehensive at one point in using the review aspect of the Workiva tool. Sorry, still I call WebFilings, way back to my old days. But what we did see was a marked increase in people leaving comments to each other using the @ symbol to identify either a person or a group of individuals, getting review comments out then filtering those review comments back and seeing the responses and then closing them and being done. We felt that it was a more interactive process. So actually, as we went into that roundtable meeting, there were very few things that we needed to discuss. It was kind of done before we went in. And to be honest, our document has really been set since last week. We are good to go. We're waiting on the auditors at this point in time to finish their process. So we're in good shape overall. We feel like everybody's on board. They've caught up with -- they've caught up to where we are. They know when updates are pushed out, right? So overall, the communication has been relatively seamless from that perspective. And that's where this new normal aspect comes in here, right? I do think that we learned a lot on how we work with each other within these tools. And the adaptability that we have with the tools, the ability to change on the fly, to add, takeaway, we know if we needed to add a whole set of controls, we could have done that without much of a challenge at all. But I will say maybe because of our structure being globally spread out, we were set to go. So there were only minor refinements and really just emphasizing that review process was thorough and that people had a chance to provide us -- provide feedback as we went through the process were the kind of the key things for us. So just a couple of key takeaways. So one thing I was greatly impressed with was how resilient our people were, right? So we went into the quarterly close process. And so guess what, you have to work from home. So that was a big shift right there. And that's a mind shift for everyone. Then right away, they addressed it, they got on board. They had their setups at home. We started the process and things just rolled. Change is not always bad, if you look at it from that perspective. As I said here, it would have been nice to have a little bit of a heads up, some more planning, that didn't happen, but we adjusted. Flexibility was key. Flexibility on the tooling was huge for us. The fact that it was cloud-based, people could access it from anywhere. It just worked perfectly for us. And to that, I would say the smart tools allow for a smart workplace. We look to expand the tooling more. We use it right now, as I mentioned, for SOX and for the external reporting aspect. With the SOX, we do the quarterly certification, but we are looking to embed our accounting policy manual within that SOX tool. We are looking at the ERM module because we can see how that would link really well into the risk that we evaluate as part of our 10-K process, in our overall SOX process. So we're looking forward to the linkage there, and then also working with the presentation aspect of how we could link financial information into some of those normal quarterly presentations that we do, whether it be the investor presentation or some of the quarterly analysis that are done by the teams and then presented to me. So we really look forward to pushing the connected aspect of the Workiva tools, and it's a great partnership with them. They've actually just asked me to be part of their customer development board. So I look forward to joining the company there and helping them out a little bit more with my thoughts, and I look forward to the future. So I wish you all great luck with your close and your filings. And certainly, as we've mentioned, if there's questions, feel free to ask and certainly feel free to reach out to me independently as well, as you go down your quarterly close processing question. So at this point, I'll hand back to Diederik and go from there.

Thank you, Bryan and Jeroen and Rosemary, for sharing your thoughts and your great presentations. There are a few questions that came in. The first one is for you, Bryan. Did COVID-19 change your risk management practice? And if it did, how or what can we learn from this? It would also be for Jeroen to answer, but whoever thinks who can answer it is best.

It didn't essentially changed our risk management practice. So this is something that we've been working on developing more and more, becoming more of an integrated part of our overall SOX and compliance process. There were certainly risks. The COVID-19 was a specific risk that we addressed. And from that, it fell into other risks that we had already identified, to be honest. So things around inventory excess and obsolescence, costing, absorbed and unabsorbed costs, the potential impairment of assets, right, those are normal risks that we were looking at on a quarterly basis anyway. So it was really just taking that overall pandemic risk that we encountered and then kind of identifying the other things that we already had in place. So it became more interactive, certainly. It certainly pushed up our enterprise risk work that we were doing. But I wouldn't say it led to a very significant change overall. Jeroen, if you have anything to...

No, but I think I see in a couple of my clients that the risk managers get more into the light than ever before. Everyone is -- want them to look at the changes in processes and how COVID-19 impacts their organization. So there's a lot of demand from the organization on the risk managers at the moment.

Okay. Rosemary, do you think that any company, it's another question, included scenarios for pandemics in their ERM planning?

I would sure hope so. And if I was the ERM responsible person at any company and didn't, I think I would be looking for a job right now. But I did a little quick research on this the last couple of days. And it's interesting to see the variety -- how companies addressed pandemic. If you go back to 2008, a global transportation company had put in their reports that they didn't consider pandemic a black swan anymore. And they thoroughly expected it to happen. And they had it in their plan. In the COSO 2018 ERM report, they also mentioned that pandemics were reported as 1 of the top 5 risks to be addressed in a plan. But what I thought was really interesting is I found the ERM plan for a Canadian health company, Alberta Health. They wrote it in May 2014, and it describes everything that you need to do if a pandemic hits. So a lot of people were prepared, but my guess is a lot also were not.

Thanks for answering. A question came in, either for Bryan or Jeroen. The question is I'm working with the business to make them aware of key controls, key internal controls, which may be at risk of not being performed in these times, so during COVID-19. Are your clients adopting a similar approach? Or any insights on how to prevent this will be appreciated. So how are we dealing, how are you dealing with the likelihood that current key controls are not being executed due to COVID-19?

Yes. Bryan, you can start, if you want.

Yes, sure. So kind of as I mentioned before, one of the things we did focus on were our key controls. A, where they the right controls; and B, how are we going to ensure that those are done, right? Those are the things that kind of hold up the house of cards. So we, as part of our closing meetings, made sure that we address those risks and that people were set up to ensure things are going to be done and to identify if there are going to be challenges in completing any of those key controls, right? So with anything else, if there's planning in place, generally, you can adapt and address it. And again, the backstop was our mitigating controls, right? Did the mitigating controls ensure that the key controls operated effectively? So it was communication, it was sometimes reeducating. It was increasing that documentation standard. And I can't think of an instance when we ran into a challenge, but we were prepared to switch out people who completed certain key controls if we needed to. We have a rotation process in place for people in different jobs. So we thought that if we needed to, we could make a shift or somebody from another level can step in and take over. So we had backup planning. Fortunately, we did not need to execute on that, but that's kind of the approach that we had as we went into it.

Jeroen?

It's also -- actually, this morning I also had a call with one of our clients who was facing, I think, the same kind of challenges. And they were also thinking how can we increase monitoring of all the key controls because it needs to be very clear to everyone that right now performing these key controls is more crucial than ever and that people need to feel that they're being monitored and being watched. So like I also gave in my presentation, transparency is really a key item that people really feel that whatever they're doing is just being monitored.

Okay. Maybe one thing that I didn't highlight too much when I spoke about it because maybe I take it for granted, but the SOX -- actually all the tools, I believe, in the Workiva platform, but the SOX module, there is a dashboard where we can monitor the control activities, right? So with that, I have my SOX memos, send out reminders. It's generally weekly, a little bit more frequent as we get towards the end here of the status. But real quickly, I can go in and see what's done, what's not done, what's in progress. If somebody has left a comment that maybe needs to be addressed and that's the same thing with the certification tool as well. There are -- the dashboards that are adaptable in the tool as well, so you can make them the way you want them to be, do provide a lot of insight as to managing the process overall. For us, again, being globally spread, right, I have controls done in China, in Texas and Malaysia, in various other parts of the world, Europe, of course, many countries. We have a big facility in Nijmegen, headquarters here in Eindhoven. Tax team split between 2 continents, right? For me to be able to see that on 1 screen and be able to picture it and then communicate it to those who need to know where we're at is a big deal for me. It makes my life a lot easier, so that's kind of how we manage the overall process.

And Bryan, elaborating further on your answer, it sounds like NXP is really at the forefront of using technology. How long did it take the implementation of the platform throughout [ before broad based use? ].

Yes. So actually I get this question quite a bit because many people envision that there is... [Technical Difficulty]

We lost his sound.

It was maybe 2 weeks to get it up and running, right? And that was with external tagging as well. Then the SOX module was a little bit longer, I think it took 6 weeks in total. But I will say that Workiva spent a lot of time with us in thinking through our control structure and how we wanted to build the tool as well, right? So again, this is a tool that is extremely adaptable with a lot of the -- a lot of what they've seen with the implementations they've done, right? We wanted to get that feedback from them. I think they could have done it quicker if we wanted them to. But it was really a minimum amount of time. So once we get the button to go, we were off and running. And there were some people internally, especially for the external reporting tool, who wanted to run a dual process and kind of keep the old way we were doing things anyway. And I was totally confident that we were going to adapt real quickly, and we just jumped in with both feet. And clearly, I staked my name on it a little bit, but having my experience with them back in Silicon Valley days, I was confident and then it all worked out.

Good. Thank you. Maybe also elaborating on your answer back, Jeroen, you talked about transparency being an important part of soft controls. How do you assure that your employees are actually including controls in an open fashion?

Yes. Well, like I said, GRC technology really has made more visible everything which is being done. And you can track when someone is starting to do a control or when he's doing the things in progress or what kind of evidence he is uploading to the tool and what the result is of the control, if it's effective, yes or no. So I really believe that -- or at least I advise all my clients to use some form of GRC tooling to increase transparency also.

Yes. Thank you. I think looking at the time, we have one question that we still can answer. And I have one. Maybe it's also one for Rosemary to answer. How can we improve the collaboration between the 3 lines of defense, optimization of resources and adequate controls at the right place?

Very good question there. And I think I'm sharing, everyone should be seeing the screen again of the 3 lines of defense model. And I think it really goes through your overall strategy on how you want to address controls. And as we know, the first line of defense always starts with the management controls and internal control measures. And then as you build your second line where risk management comes in, along with the other 5 areas. And then you end up with internal audit, your focus really needs to be on that first line. Because if you recognize what needs to be done there, the other lines should just flow very smoothly, and you'll see the areas that may generate a further need. But if you do the first line correctly, you've hit a home run.

Great. Thank you for your thoughts on that. So taking time into consideration, I think this was the last question we could answer. For any questions that we are unable to get, we will respond via our e-mail. If you have any additional questions about today's presentations, we will be happy to respond. You can submit them through the Q&A engagement tool or mail us at [email protected]. And we will get back to you in the next few business days. Thank you again for attending. And we hope you to join us again soon for upcoming workshops that we're planning, and we'll keep you informed about. Thank you again for all for your participations, and we're hoping you enjoyed it. Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for attending today's webinar: Is Your Global Statutory Reporting Putting You At Risk? Before we begin, we wanted to cover a few housekeeping items. If you have a moment, please respond to the survey questions to the right of the presentation. At the bottom of your screen are multiple application engagement tools you can use. All the engagement tools are resizable and movable. So feel free to move them around to get the most out of your desktop space. You can expand your slide area or maximize for the full-screen by clicking on the arrow in the top right corner. If you have any questions during the webcast, you can submit them through the Q&A engagement tool. We will try to answer these during the webcast. But if a fuller answer is needed or we run out of time, it will be answered later via e-mail. Please note, we do capture all questions. Our presenters today are Isabelle Bordas from Deloitte, Conor O'Kelly from Workiva and Nathan Newell also from Workiva. I will now pass over to Conor O'Kelly to kick off our presentation.

Thanks very much, [ Rachel. ] Thanks so much, indeed. So look, is your statutory reporting putting you at risk? Wow, interesting question. Let's go through this today. Myself, Isabelle and Nathan are going to talk you through that. I think a couple of things in my mind. I think, first of all, recognizing the shift in trends in statutory and financial reporting, what they are and how they affect you? And what are the different models and what are the risks inherent in that. Let's maybe look at again some of the key risks associated with the current state of statutory reporting and have a look and see how do we mitigate them. And then we're going to have a look at a platform-based approach to connected reporting and compliance and explore how that increases operational efficiency, improves the quality of the accounting disclosures. And so Nathan is going to talk us through that. But let's kick off with Isabelle. Great to talk to you again, Isabelle. Isabelle, is our statutory reporting putting us at risk? Wow, big question. What are the shifting trends you see? And what's your perspective on that?

Hi, Conor, and thank you. Nice talking to you again. Hi, everyone. Good morning. Good afternoon. I'm Isabelle Bordas. I'm a partner with Deloitte based in the U.S. I've been with Deloitte for over 20 years. Half of my career, I was in the audit practice in the French firm. And over 10 years ago, I moved to the U.S., focusing on finance transformation for non [indiscernible] clients, and I'm currently leading the statutory reporting offering. And as Conor mentioned, I'm going to walk you through some shift in trends, risk and how they're affecting you. Before going any further, I wanted to clarify what we mean by statutory reporting, so there's no confusion. It's the mandatory submission of financial information to local regulatory authorities, including periodic financial statements, disclosures about material events and transactions and nonfinancial information. For global organization, statutory reporting and risk associated with it is not a new topic. It has traditionally been very manual and time consuming process that provides little global and regional visibility for central teams. But in the past, we have observed that most company are actually looking to see how they can improve the efficiency and the process and mitigate risk. So what's changed? Well, the world has changed. And it's evolving very quickly in terms of globalization, technology advancement, social transformation and speed of regulatory changes. All of that is resulting in increasing level of risk associated with statutory reporting and increasing the demand from local regulators for more transparency around the information provided to them. Let's take as an example the flow and amount of data that is continuously increasing while coming from multiple systems in order to produce local financial statements. This is adding risk to report improper information to the regulators. This can also result in increasing tax risk since the statutory data is usually used as a basis for local tax reporting. Reporting inaccurate or incomplete information can result in fine and penalties and as important, they can impact the reputation of an organization. When a local subsidiary is in the press for improperly reporting regulated information, the news is spread globally in a matter of minutes. And the public does not turn to the local [ influencers ], they turn to the parent company. We listed here all the common drivers to those risks. So aside from the challenges with the flow of data, companies regularly mentioned concerns around the lack of coordination between the different departments: tax, accounting and other centralized teams; and the inconsistencies in the application of the policies and processes. I also regularly hear concerns that the local reporting team relies on very few skilled individuals. On the previous slide, we talked about the fact that process improvement can help better managing risks. But organization can also generate other benefits. Reducing cost is, of course, a major focus and not only internal costs. Companies want to assess how they can reduce the fees associated with the audit of local subsidiary. This could be achieved through adding standardization and centralization of activities or using collaborative technologies, one of the key feature of the Workiva platform that Conor and Nathan will discuss in further details in a few minutes. One of the other benefits I would like to highlight is about maximizing already existing investments in technology and centralization. Let's have as an example a company implementing an ERP. Reporting is an important component of the implementation road map. Eventually, companies would want to rely on 1 data pool for the creation of all reports and automate as much as possible the end-to-end reporting process. So it's naturally that a company in this situation would seek to add statutory reporting tools into the overall reporting process and understand how it can be integrated with the ERP and other technologies, providing a seamless experience for users and entering compliance with the different regulators. Last item I want to highlight on this slide is the relationship between tax reporting and statutory reporting. In fact, we have had many conversations around statutory reporting with tax departments as we have with accounting department. Because the 2 processes are so intertwined, improving the statutory reporting process can have a direct impact on improving the quality of tax reporting as well. I recently had discussions with clients around maturity levels that are applied differently by statutory reporting teams and tax teams, tax usually having 0 or lower maturity level. A lack of clear policy around the application of materiality and lack of coordination between tax and accounting teams can lead to [ rework ] for the statutory reporting teams and delays in the tax reporting filing. We look at risk and potential benefits in the previous slide, but what other different paths that an organization can consider to enhance the statutory reporting process? We usually see 2 different paths, one is to keep the preparation of the report in-house. The other one is to outsource the services. Keeping the preparation of the report in-house can include redesigning the operating model by adding more centralization and standardization. It usually also includes technology enablement like leveraging the Workiva platform and adding robotics, workflows and analytics into the process. So how do you decide what is the right statutory reporting approach for your organization? Based on my experience, I don't think there is one trend, but that the answer really depends on other factors that pertains to your company and specific situation. For example, I have seen companies seeking to outsource the preparation of the report because their local tax reporting process was already outsourced. I've also seen companies that used to outsource services, deciding to bring in back the preparation in-house to benefit from newly established shared service centers. Other key considerations include understanding the current process in terms of effort and requirements, the key pain points you want to remediate and what other initiatives are undergoing in your organization. We talk about ERP implementations, for example, but they can be also finance and tax reporting transformation initiatives. In any case, keeping heavily manual processes is probably not sustainable if you are willing to get additional visibility and transparency into the statutory reporting process. Leading practices systematically include the use of the reporting platform. I think that this is even more true in a post-COVID-19 world where remote work might become more and more of the norm. Preparers and reviewers of the report will make robust tools to collaborate and produce quality reports. In a minute, Conor is going to discuss the Workiva platform in more detail.

Thanks very much, Isabelle. What great insights. I'm Conor O'Kelly, I'm a Senior Director of Statutory Accounting with Workiva. I have a large experience and kind of background in business. So I'm going to give you a little bit of that perspective. I guess, from [ Mike, Isabelle, ] we're seeing 3 distinct phases, if you will, in accounting and accounting models over the last kind of 10, 15 years or so. Right at the moment, clearly, we're in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pretty clear that there's been a sharp macroeconomic shock related to COVID-19, and this is continuing to be felt on a week-by-week basis as business and controllers calibrate around this new normal and the impact. I characterize this as maybe distress accounting, maybe that's a little bit harsh. And it's a testament, I guess, to how quickly this is evolving over the last couple of weeks and months that we've seen 3 particular responses or phases to it. One is the kind of to react, the immediate kind of reaction. And secondly, is the response and now it's the revival as companies here in Europe start to go back to work. And the United States, of course, starts to kind of reopen, et cetera. But the accounting impacts have really been around employee welfare, liquidity assessments, management estimates, cash flow impairments, expected credit losses, government assistance and response. And as controllers, how can we keep the business going and how can we get that government response out of the business. But let's not forget that in the years preceding that, we've had a very fundamental shift in accounting models coming out of the financial crisis of 2008. And if I look at that accounting and those accounting models, Isabelle, they were largely focused on shareholder wealth and maximizing shareholder wealth. The typical kind of entity accounting models, of course, that have been prevalent parent, subsidiary, earnings per share, GAAP reconciliations, legal entity accounting and then, of course, we had the financial crisis of 10 years ago. And again, coming out of that, the rules of the game have shifted especially in the 10 years since the financial crisis. I don't mean just the normal rules set at local, global or kind of domestic level, but also the unwritten rules. The expectations users of financial statements have of the companies that serve them and the wider context in which those interactions take place. The environment we operate in has changed, including the regulatory mandate and the regulatory practices. And by that, I mean the generally accepted theory of how you regulate a market, adoption of how you regulate the market and indeed, the practice of how the regulators regulate the market and manage businesses. So the first wave of post-crisis regulation is done. Firms are better capitalized now and the personal responsibilities of the leaders are more embedded. And this is changing both accounting and accountability models. In fact, the changing accountability, I think, is driving changes in the accounting. Secondly, with the change in consumer needs and attitudes, long-term low interest rates means the search for a return is stronger just as a tolerance for loss lessens. Consumers are getting older and quite frankly have less saved and inherit assets later in their lives. And thirdly, innovation has gathered pace. We're moving from an era of digitization, so services moving online, to a truly digital economy, particularly in financial reporting, one drawing on artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and machine learning. And this digital transformation is reflected in the accounting models and of course how we deliver our accounting services. So those are the 3 really kind of macroeconomic shifts that we've seen over the last 10 years. And you have to ask, are traditional and have traditional accounting models and reporting tools been set up for this? Particularly with the global reporting process, we look at the reporting process as twofold. First of all, from the perspective of a parent, this is clearly a quoted United Kingdom IFRS parent with subsidiaries around the world. When questioned about the greatest challenge to the organization's implementation of intercompany accounting, the results were mixed. Disparate software systems, almost 1 in 5 said were a challenge to their reporting and close, but closely followed by intercompany settlements, complex intercompany agreements and transfer pricing compliance. Entities typically trade with each other in this parent-subsidiary model through specific purchase order and invoicing systems. All too often, they're somewhat disconnected. They don't always connect end to end. And sometimes, it's easier to book the transaction either offline or over the phone, in an e-mail rather than bring it into the disparate systems. Of course then, this can lead to the loss of important documentation like proper transfer prices, transfer pricing agreements, currencies or like you said, Isabelle, the appropriate taxes and taxes management. Merger and acquisition activity adds another layer of complexity with inherited heterogeneous ERPs, chartered accounts, invoicing and payment systems and different accounting processes. This increases the already tedious manual efforts required to complete some of these intercompany transactions. And in turn, systems complexity creates a lack of visibility from the corporate parent to the subsidiary. On the subsidiary side then, the ownership and delivery of statutory financial reporting and subsidiary entity accounting remains largely locally owned and locally delivered as the subsidiaries, of course, are regulated by their own country regulators and audited by locally affiliated audit firms who, of course, are locally licensed and locally managed. So that process still inherently local. The result of that, of course, is that processes remain localized and disparate. Localized for the individual market circumstances, local setup, local ledger setup and review cycles, which may vary from locality to locality and even from subsidiary to subsidiary. Local entity disclosures and narratives are not connected in traditional systems, the desktop systems, leading to ad hoc manual workaround and increased efforts to maintain key controls and integrity. Isabelle, you alluded to as well, a lot of this local knowledge both process, organization and regulatory is vested in individual staff members and desktop processes, which, let's be honest, are not always documented in full and actually may not even be understood end to end. So the processes, I think, over the last kind of 10, 15 years are still [ self ] automated end to end, as Isabelle has alluded to. It requires multiple manual interventions and iterations to manage the process in full. The process is owned, of course, as it pertains to statutory reporting of course. The processes are owned and executed locally a little vested interest to collaborate or share data with the corporate headquarters beyond minimum compliance and reporting. Inevitably, it, therefore, is not well understood at a central level, and the benefits from central investment which would have delivered economies of scale and efficiencies are not always realized. Of course, then we're left with lots of data wrangling. So in essence, the models of accountability have shifted, and this is changing how accounting is done. The R2R cycle, the record to report cycle is fundamentally unchanged. The nature of the accounting function is fundamentally unchanged. What we're trying to achieve is fundamentally unchanged. What has changed is how it's performed. The aggregation and assembly stages are becoming increasingly more technical and data driven. And this data is increasingly decentralized. Combined with management expectations around the promise of automation, the time allowed for review and the audit shrinks as the time from the aggregation and assembly increases, of course, the audit and regulatory deadlines remain the same. So what's needed then is an understanding of the problems in aggregation and assembly and some of those stages. So let's have a look at them. You could suggest, I guess, that with COVID 19, we're at something of a tipping point, and again, with the various new requirements and new reporting models, do we need a new approach? Well, my opinion on that, I guess, is that the socioeconomic, technological and regulatory change that we've seen across financial services has brought many benefits. The financial system and the economy is safer, consumer credit is better controlled and the conduct and customer outcomes are increasingly recognized and understood around the boardroom. Global finance though faces new challenges. Our processes feel increasingly analog in a digital world. And by that, I mean, many of these processes are simply digitized versions of the analog process, like outputting PDF statements rather than truly digital services. Technology may help us deliver solutions that meet customer needs. The fundamental qualitative characteristics of the financial statements remain the same. Understandability, they need to be clearly presented with additional information supplied in supporting footnotes, et cetera. They need to be relevant to the needs of the users. They need to be materially reliable, free from material error and bias. They need to be comparable to financial information presented for other accounting periods. Be GAAP compliant so that other users can identify trends in the performance and financial position, et cetera. And this is what makes financial statements useful to users. The changing nature of financial reporting means that maintaining these qualitative characteristics is becoming more difficult. Increasingly, as Isabelle alluded to, the processes are becoming more manual. They're error sensitive even more so now, both in terms of materiality and timing. They're reliant, still heavily reliant on individuals. The war on talent is very real. And expectations of the working community or the working population are changing. And the data is disconnected, the velocity variety, volume and veracity of data is all changing. So how does the cloud-based platform approach differ from the traditional desktop and ERPs? The reality is that investment in finance transformation over the last 15 years has been concentrated on ERP transformations and BI, data lakes, data consolidation and business intelligence and revenue-generating front ends. ERPs, however, don't often deliver the last mile of reporting well. And so controllers export this data to desktop tools to assemble the required statutory documents and the statutory financial statements. In recent weeks, there are new reporting requirements of course that have emerged centered on COVID-19 impact and response. And look on the right-hand side, look at all of those new reporting requirements that have emerged as a result of COVID. Board decisions, when to reopen the business, when to restart the business, when to bring employees back in again. Management estimates, expected credit losses, impairments, cash flows, IFRS 9 and expected credit losses. The auditor opinion has changed or is changing. It's particularly sensitive at the moment, sensitive to growing concern to both post balance sheet events and the gathering of audit evidence. And regulatory guidance and impact is changing all the time. And let's not forget the duty of skill and care that the organization has to its employees. No employee should be left unaccounted for. And the Board, in certain parts of the world, has a legal responsibility of [ skilling care ] to the employee. So cloud-based platforms really just combine the system of record, which you see on the left-hand side there, which is where our data is stored in the ERPs, with the system of work which is where we actually do our work. And they do that in an integrated end-to-end environment so that the document never leaves the cloud environment. It's the control traceability, the collaboration, the trust and the risk reduction in the systems of work -- between the systems of work and the back end integration with the systems of record that really differentiates a cloud-based platform. And yes, reporting is one small piece of this, but I could argue that it's probably not the most important. The most important is the control, traceability and trust. The trend across finance and compliance is to centralize the reporting process in the cloud. The rapid changes that we're seeing in accounting estimates and impacts require data collection and gathering from sources that may not previously have been used for statutory reporting. For example, World Health Organization, or local health statistics, hospital admissions or our personal health records. The ability to collate COVID-19 impact reporting, for example, for Board consideration, for management estimates, for audit opinions, post balance sheet events, impairments will all depend on the company's ability to both very rapidly and very frequently assimilate semi-structured and unstructured data on the fly, to curate that data on the fly, to orchestrate that data downstream and to formulate it into actionable insights based on the local accounting and regulatory standards. And frankly, these are areas where traditional desktop-based systems of work break down and are particularly difficult to control. And that's important now more so now than ever before. And it's the control of that traditional back office and shared services centers, the front end and the back end, have been particularly disrupted over the last couple of weeks. So even more so now, this requires a company to reassert both control and flexibility over their system of work to connect business insights with governance, with internal controls, with assurance, and this gives us back the confidence that the data we need and the data we're reporting is still relevant. So controllers are rightly preoccupied at the moment with building resilience and process resilience across their existing business continuity plans in areas like cash flow assessment, management estimates, liquidity estimates, entity specific disclosures, expected credit losses, distressed assets, et cetera. Our challenge now is connecting these new reporting scenarios to the data sources, sources that may not previously have been used for this type of reporting. Yes, the traditional trial balance and the hierarchy mapping we are familiar with, as we are with things like accounts receivable. But a bigger emphasis now on data sources such as enterprise risk registers, credit and loan agreements, restricted covenants, furloughed staff, staff working from home, physical workspace and real estate, et cetera, and real estate management systems, et cetera. Opening up the business and bringing people back to work. So our experience is that organizations that have already moved to a cloud-based platform approach experienced relatively little disruption over the last few months versus those still using legacy on-prem solutions or desktop solutions that are too rigidly built on templates or desktop processing and lack the flexibility to quickly adapt. Business continuity planning, of course, sustained the quarter 1 close. However, it's pretty obvious that on the longer term, a close with 100% remote workforce and 100% remote auditing has exposed significant gaps in the end-to-end process, and this requires now a more sustained platform-based strategy. That's what we're hearing from a lot of our customers. As the books closed on time, earnings were not delayed. We're expecting that investors will have less patience in any future delay and any future reporting. And look very much on the right-hand side there, majority of our finance leaders are producing P&L forecasts more frequently than monthly and cash flow forecasts more frequently than weekly. So a particular change in how we do accounting. Isabelle, maybe now is a great time to touch base [ our mind, ] our listeners to the core value proposition that a partnership like Deloitte and Workiva brings to the market? How do we solve some of these problems, do you think?

Thanks, Conor. A lot of great insight from you. Thank you for that. Yes. I mean, I'm actually very excited to be talking about that. It's the Deloitte, Workiva alliance. We've been partnering on services in the reporting space for many years. Workiva bringing the experience with leading technology, us providing finance transformation services and having strong accounting and reporting knowledge. And we also both have this global network that matches the footprint of our clients. And as importantly, we have common values. And this is why in 2019, we decided to go one step further and we started an alliance, which will allow us to collectively provide greater value to our clients. Our partnering, of course, depends on the scope of work with specific projects, and we take into account independent consideration if the company is a Deloitte audit client. So our joint value proposition is around 3 pillars. We assist with making better decisions by bringing on this side disciplinary changes that can address reporting challenges from different angles, technology, accounting, tax, risk management, for example. We can help gain efficiencies through leveraging the Workiva platform, integrated with ERPs, spreadsheet and other structured data. And we can help mitigating the end-to-end risk by increasing visibility and transparency, leveraging data pools, automating those key activities and ensuring compliance of the reports with local regulations. So we're very excited to have the opportunity to partner together, and I really hope that the clients we serve are going to also see the benefit of this relationship.

Yes, excellent. Thank you, Isabelle. Thanks, Conor. Hello, everyone. Give you a quick tour here of the Workiva Global statutory reporting platform. A quick note on our underlying architecture. We are in the cloud through Software as a Service. So any of our customers, Deloitte clients that have Internet access and the proper permissions can be up and running inside the platform very, very quickly. What you see here is kind of a natural landing page. You can see here, we have a global view as to the statutory filing requirements that we are responsible for. Important to note, everything you see here is highly configurable. I can resize and move these charts around. I can -- each user can have their own sort of tailored experience, they can build reports and capture the data that they need to track. We have status-driven updates where you really are trying to achieve that single view of risk to give you an idea across the entirety of your legal entity landscape where you might be at risk. From here I can drill in very quickly, get more data, relevant data. And then I can drill into a specific entity, for example. So if I drill down into this U.K. legal entity. You can see here a lot of different data that we can capture in terms of the subject matter specialists, for example, that are responsible for certain portions of the filing for this specific entity. I can associate specific documents in my platform that are relevant to this entity and the filing that we need to perform. And really, what this -- all the dashboard reporting that you see is the culmination of a series of activities and milestones, all highly configurable that kind of form the, again, the entirety of our filing cycle. Those that are responsible for these specific activities can come in and change these statuses. I can drill down on any specific procedure, get some additional context around when that is due, who owns it. And as I change the status on all of these activities, those dashboards that we showed before automatically update. I can also action on some of these items or all these items for that matter. If I want to send an e-mail to an individual that's accountable for this particular activity, I can prompt them to come back into the platform via a link and give us an update. As far as accessing the statutory financial statements themselves, for example, and the underlying data, there's a couple of different ways we can do that. I showed you before, accessing the file directly from the entity management system is one way to do it. Another way is through our central repository, which is another sort of natural landing page, depending on what the user is looking for. You can see here, we've arranged all of our documents data and presentations geographically to fit our operating model. The idea here is all of a customer's data, documents and presentations can all be stored in a central location. And then we govern access to those through what we call permissioning. 3 primary file types you'll find throughout the platform. We have our presentations, our documents and our spreadsheets. So if we drill into this U.K. statutory financial statement, for example, you can see here right away, very familiar user interface. This is intentional. The platform was built to mimic desktop publishing tools that the average new user is already familiar with, very quick as far as learning curve about 90 minutes for the average new user to be up and running inside the platform. And that just becomes so important for global statutory reporting because of what we mentioned earlier around just change -- people changing, turnover amongst individuals, amongst third parties, amongst entities. It really sort of stabilizes the degree of change that you're going to experience in global statutory reporting. You can see here, we just -- it's a full complement of financial statements and footnotes. We've literally just imported, for example, maybe a Word document into the platform. It's been refined over the course of many years by auditors and regulators. And so we're going to take it in its current state, build it -- upload it into our cloud environment and inherently gain all of the internal controls that we'll walk through here in a minute. From a data perspective, you can see here, your eyes will be drawn to these triangles, both green and blue. In this case, green, these are destination links. If you spend enough time with Workiva, you'll hear us talk about the concept of connected reporting. And what we mean by that in part is we really want to source data in a single location to the extent that we can as is shown here. So this blue bar is telling us that this 24,000 that I've highlighted here, in this case, great British pounds is -- resides read only on the face of our income statement, but we're sourcing it here in the spreadsheet in a single location. So these 4 destination links indicated by green are read only. And we're going to maintain and edit the data in a single location, right? So that's the concept of linking and I can go directly through this link. I can go directly back to the source and get a better understanding of where that data is and how it's maintained. It's going to take me directly to this cell. You can see now the blue color, which suggests a source link. And if I sort of reverse engineer here, you can see I'm now in my spreadsheet environment. As I make changes to this data, it changes [ read only ] in these locations. I'm in my spreadsheet environment now. You can see very familiar user interface, again, not much here that's foreign to the average new user. You can think of these as Excel tabs, for example, or spreadsheet tabs. We arrange those hierarchically, much easier to see, everything involved and it's easy to navigate and arrange these to help accelerate the process. Starting point for the build of these statutory financial statements, of course, is going to be the trial balance. Real quick note on this cube here. This cube is telling us that through our Wdata integration layer at Workiva, we have established a connection to the system of record. So now we've established our connection. So now adjustments as they're made to our system of record, any changes to our chart of accounts are automatically being reflected in the platform, and we are now ostensibly serving as an extension of the ERP. Now we may not have a nonleading ledger, a local GAAP compliant ledger to manage our local adjustments to get from U.S. GAAP, for example, to local GAAP. And so we do provide a mechanism inside the platform to account for any adjustments that need to be made. And we can categorize these, the nature of these adjustments, the timing of these adjustments, I can attach support to these much like I showed before. Good time to just talk about version control. Throughout the platform, and this goes for all of our document types. Version control is automatic. You will not see a save button anywhere in the platform. As changes are made to a spreadsheet, for example, it's automatically going to create new revisions. And then at the point at which I have a particularly meaningful revision, I can actually offset that through what we call a milestone here. So at any given time, if I want to tag a specifically meaningful version so that everyone involved understands that this is a draft that we need to make comments on, for example, I can do that. Good time to talk about version control. Version control is automatic. There is not a save button anywhere in the platform, and that goes for all document types. So as you can see here, I can track the history of this spreadsheet at a spreadsheet level. The platform is going to continuously save changes. For the life of this document, I can go back and recapture a prior revision at any given time. I can also offset any meaningful revision or version that I'd like to and name that and then filter on just those milestones that we call milestones in the future so that everyone involved knows that these are specific versions, perhaps they've been sent to an auditor and so they require special attention or specific commenting. I can also have certain visualizations from a data integrity perspective, where I can hover over cells. They'll be color-coded depending on the user, and I can tell who's made the most recent changes and specifically what those changes were. So we talked about history at the spreadsheet level. I can also capture history at a cell level. So if I highlight this cell, I can actually quickly see the entire life of this cell, what the values have been, what those changes were. And again, this is throughout the life of the platform. Okay. So I've got my adjustments accounted for. That's naturally going to feed into my GAAP to stat bridge, that's a particular interest to just about everyone involved, specifically auditors, reviewers. How do I get from that initial U.S. GAAP starting point, roll through the different types of adjustments that I've made and then arrive at what we call the -- the local GAAP compliant. In this case, perhaps FRS 101 or 102 in the U.K., local compliant trial balance. And then from here, my financial statements are automatically being built, right? So now we're kind of back to where we started. Here's our 24,000, and it's automatically linked again to our financial statements and a couple of our different presentations. We also have, of course, a full complement of footnotes that we need to account for. In this case, tax. We talked about having tax, for example, through our permissioning system, very easy to use. We would encourage those subject matter specialists both internally and external to our organization to come in and own this specific data and the related narratives in the documents themselves, right? And again, we're trying to eliminate e-mail based attachments in collaboration and really provide a single cloud-based location where everyone can come and work together in the most recent version of the document all at the same time. Okay. So now I have my financial statements completed and linked out to my document. So if I go back to my document and talk a little bit about how we accelerate these review cycles. Again, version control in the platform is automatic, works the same way as it does in a spreadsheet. If I have a -- again, meaningful revision that I want to tag as, for example, a final draft to auditors I can actually create a milestone here. Again, it will be visually offset here. And now I can send this for review. For example, if I want to send it to one of those subject matter specialists or an external third-party that we want to maybe keep at arm's length. I can do what's called a review, I can actually send the entire document or I can send just selected sections of that document for them to review the revenue section. I can title this review, final draft. I can add reviewers. You cannot accidentally send a review to the wrong individual. You have to have access inside the platform. Then I can decide whether or not I actually want to send an e-mail nudge to this individual to review. And at the point at which I send this, [ Jeremy, ] in this case, is going to get an e-mail, but it's going to be a link. Again, it's not going to be an attachment. We're really discouraging the use of attachments that cause risk conversion control issues. It's going to be a link, and it's going to bring [ Jeremy ] directly back into this document, read-only, only for those sections that we have asked him to review, and then he can actually provide comments. Language is also another significant investment by Workiva from a global statutory reporting perspective, very important, as you might imagine, that localization aspect. So I can support dozens of languages now, for example. And if I want to, for review purposes, for example, do a review from English to French, I can do that here. I can toggle from one to the other, right? And our customers tell us this is really, really important from a review perspective to be able to allow those non-English speakers to come in and, again, collaborate inside the platform together. And last but certainly not least, language translation, being able to accommodate foreign languages and all of the local nuances in-country like currency codes, number formatting. Our customers have shared with us how important that is, of course, to be able to, for example, translate dynamically within the platform across languages. As you can see here, French is the last language that I was working in. I have highlighted an English phrase here. If I want to quickly toggle to German, for example, I can do that here, right? And this is another one of those along with the audit trail, the automatic version control, the reviews, the linking, things that really accelerate that review cycle. Okay. So you can go to our website and learn more about our overall language and localization capabilities, but that really concludes the tour. That is how we define the global statutory reporting life cycle through the platform. Hope you found that helpful, and I am going to kick it back to Conor.

Thanks very much. You guys clearly have been busy. Isabelle, a bunch of questions here. Looks like a lot of them are for you. So we have one in here, it looks like it came from kind of the Dallas, Texas area. There are a lot of changing regulations in countries where we have to file statutory, local statutory reports. It's hard to keep up. Can you provide regular accounting updates as part of your services? I mean that's for you, Isabelle.

Okay. Well, thanks, Conor. Yes, that's a question we hear from clients a lot. There's a lot to keep up with pressure with all the different regulations. And the answer is yes. Of course, we're happy to help with that. So the way we work with our partner, Workiva, is we help with templates, local templates and we can also help [ prepare a bit to ] the templates, and we can also set up a regular cadence to provide accounting of debt. And the way we work is we centralize all the different regulatory requirements that we gather from our global network. And then we make it easy for you to be able to keep track of all the different changes and for you to be able to communicate them back to your local team.

Wow. Terrific. Here's one -- another, maybe this is for you as well, Isabelle, this is from [ Jeff ] in the United Kingdom. Thanks for joining this afternoon, [ Jeff. ] Isabelle, does Deloitte provide outsourcing services?

Okay. Yes, that's a great question, too. We actually, we do. We have a mature delivery model and the way we do that, we use a single pool of contacts for our company, and we deliver locally with lead in Europe, APAC and Latin America. As I mentioned, we have a local network over 150 countries, so usually where companies have subsidiaries. We also have [ direct ] offices. And so we can definitely do that and we leverage our tax and accounting delivery centers across the block. Yes.

So with that, thanks very much. I think we're running short of time. Lots of questions for Isabelle today. I'm very delighted, Isabelle, that you joined us. By all means, if you need to hear more, Isabelle's contact are up there or talk to us at Workiva at workiva.com/newnormal. We're going to get these slides out to you and you can download them afterwards. So you'll have those contact points. It just -- lots of questions for Isabelle this afternoon. It just remains for me to thank Isabelle for joining us today on behalf of Workiva. Thank you very much, Isabelle. Great insights, great knowledge, great practical advice on implementing IFRS and statutory reporting. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me, Conor.

Well, welcome, everyone, to our panel discussion here at Amplify Go. I think probably one of the hottest days of the year. So thank you so much for tuning in. I think we're just going to wait a few seconds for everyone to get here. So I'm hoping you're enjoying your afternoon here with Workiva. So we'll just give people just a few minutes. So I'm your host today, and my name is Jacqueline Whitworth, and I work in marketing. And you might have seen me in the previous session, the end-to-end process of your ESEF annual report with Katherine, which I hope you enjoyed if you hung around for that. Before we start this session, I have the usual housekeeping. On your screen, there should be a Q&A box. Please feel free to ask any questions. At the end of the webinar, we will answer as many as we can. And if we don't answer, we'll get back to you by e-mail, and we do catch all the questions that are submitted. If you do have a moment, please do respond to the survey questions at the top-left corner of your screen. At the bottom of the screen, you'll see a few engagement tools, which you can move around or resize, and you can also expand your slide using the buttons in the top-right hand corner. So this session, Compliance to Reporting Transformation. So I have actually quite a tough job here today because I have a lovely lively bunch with me. So without any further [indiscernible], I would introduce to you without any order of importance. So they can introduce themselves. We have Phil Fitz-Gerald. So go for it, Phil.

Hi, everyone, and thank you very much for inviting me to speak here. And good afternoon to all of you that are joining in. My name is Phil Fitz-Gerald. I'm Director of the Financial Reporting Lab which is part of the Financial Reporting Council in the U.K. For a number of years, the lab has been looking at technology and reporting and how technology can benefit better reporting and communication between companies and investors. And clearly, XBRL is one of those areas. I'm very much looking forward to the discussion. I should also say I'm a Board member of XBRL International, so also, I see things from that point. But very much looking forward to today's panel discussion. Thank you.

Thank you, Phil. And Andie Wood.

Yes. So I'm Andie or Andromeda, and I'm a senior director of data modeling at Workiva, and I spend a lot of my time at the moment working on our ESEF solution and associated areas with that. I'm also a member of XBRL International's best practice board and a couple of their working groups, primarily on how entity-specific disclosures work in XBRL and taxonomy architecture. I also used to work on the IFRS Taxonomy, which is a particularly relevant taxonomy for this mandate.

Thank you. And lastly, Hamish.

Hi. I'm Hamish Prince also of Workiva. I've got responsibility along with a team of bringing our ESEF solution to the European market to address this requirement that is going to be put upon your 2020 report. My background has been helping a number of companies meet the challenges of new compliance regulations, bringing that into their reporting process, looking for immediate gains, maybe things that they've not immediately addressed. But also I'm very excited with this one, especially about some of the opportunities for digital reporting. Once that information is now XHTML, the feedback that you'll be able to get from your users on what information they actually want and what they're hovering their mouse over, I think is going to really inform you as to how you want to report your following reports as we move into '21 and '22. Thank you.

Thank you, Hamish. So you can see we've got a great crowd here. So sit back and relax. So okay. So we've got a pile of questions to get through, so let's get going.

So firstly, it might be prudent to have a quick reminder on the ESEF requirements. So Andie, would you fill us in on the main points of this new mandate?

Yes, sure. I would hope that most of those listening are already at least a little bit familiar with ESEF or the European Single Electronic Format, but just in case, we thought a reminder was a good idea. So it results from an amendment to the transparency directive, which is a piece of European law. Therefore, it applies to issuers on EU-regulated markets. So for example, in the U.K., that means that companies listed on AIM won't be needing to follow this particular mandate. It's also the case, of course, that the U.K. is in this mandate. It came in before Brexit. So for those of you who were hoping that Brexit would remove this particular responsibility, I'm afraid it was just a little bit too late. And we're also announcing that the EEA treaty is nearing update, so we should also be keeping an eye out for issuers from -- on those EEA markets, particularly, of course, the Norwegian Stock Exchange in Oslo as they'll also be coming under as well. So the basics of the mandate are it's to do with annual financial reports, and they are, in general, for the -- for issuers on those markets to move to a generally more accessible XHTML format. It's a close relative of the HTML format that we all know sitting behind web pages on all the websites that we visit. Importantly, for all those issuers, however, preparing IFRS consolidated financial statements, so that's not the individual statements, the consolidated group statements, that XHTML has to kind of move up a level of structure and become in-line XBRL, which is a combined format, including both the XHTML and the XBRL in one document. It's just, at the moment, that tagging, that inclusion of XBRL is limited to a set of key company identifiers and face financial statements. However, they will be introducing another thing called block tagging in the notes in a couple of years. And I think a particularly key note at the moment is that this is coming in very soon. This regulation applies to financial statements from the 1st of January 2020, so that's the statements in the financial period we are currently in. So these will be -- being filed probably for most companies early next year.

Thank you, Andie. That was great. So exciting times next year definitely. So moving on. So the next question is a compliance question. So Hamish, can you tell us something about what compliance means in the context of ESEF?

Yes. So I think this is a question that's asked quite a lot, and we are hearing in the marketplace -- light touch, minimum compliance. Your compliance requirements are not changing in 2020. The scrutiny that you invest in your report, there's no less of that. What this is about is the format in which you report your document and exactly how you do that through to your regulators, specifically via the NCA. So the format is changing. A PDF is no longer functioning for that purpose. You need to produce this XHTML version of that content, and you need the XBRL of the content. So if you're talking about minimum compliance, you're talking about not tagging your notes. So we just spent -- or I spent quite a lot of time talking to companies. We just need to clarify that point. We also need to clarify the validation that the ESMA is producing is predominantly around making sure that they can actually read the information that you're supplying them as opposed to any functional validation of any regulatory controls that they have in place. So that's our view of that. And so that's why we tend to put the reporting process as very similar to 2019, and you still need to check the content in it. And we believe that the most assured way of doing that is to check it in context of the report that you're going to file through to your regulators and also put up onto your website. So actually, although we have a regulator here, I would say, be less worried about your regulator. I'm more worried about the people who are going to read the information in your report. Probably that's what drives your scrutiny in 2019 as well. That's our opinion. And I think the SEC backs that up. If things didn't work well in the SEC, companies were given a quiet reminder. They weren't put all over the Internet for that. But if your shareholders see information, if your stakeholders see information and your analysts who will consume this data in a very different format, that's where the assurance sits, so I think that's where you should be thinking about compliance. There is, however, a silver lining. I think the fact that you're now going to be publishing this format, XHTML, which, as Andie said, is a very close relationship with the HTML you have in your website, you are going to get a lot of feedback about how people are consuming this information, what pages they're on, what cell within a table are they looking at, which can begin to inform your reporting going forward.

Thank you. Thank you, Hamish. I know Hamish could talk massively on compliance. So thank you, Hamish, for that wonderful concise answer. Because I think we all have a bit more understanding now of that. So moving on to companies themselves. This one is for Phil. What are we hearing from issuers at the moment about their compliance readiness? Are they prepared? Excited? Nervous? Confused? How ready are they?

Thank you, Jackie. Perhaps before I answer that, I just wanted to echo some of Hamish's comments there on thinking of this as part of the overall work that companies are doing on their IFRS financial statements in any case. I mean, from a user perspective, the advantage of the XHTML format is it gives the user the option to access the data, either electronically through the tags or access it as they would at the moment by reading the paper-based document. And therefore, it really is all part of one package. And it is interesting to see, the SEC have had this for over 10 years now and there's been some analysis done as to how users are accessing the information. Are they accessing it through the traditional paper-based information or through the XBRL information? And the vast majority are actually accessing it through electronic means. So it's just as important to get those tags right and put in the appropriate IFRS category, taxonomy in this case as it is for the annual report. And a similar amount of attention needs to, therefore, be paid for it because users are going to be using it -- the information electronically. So I thought I'd just sort of add my -- or echo Hamish's comments on that. What we're hearing from issuers at the moment on how ready they are for this, the lab has, for the last couple of years, been trying to raise awareness amongst companies around the ESEF requirement, and we've run a number of events to raise that awareness. And Andie has spoken at many of them in the past, in fact, well. And what we're finding, we just issued a questionnaire to companies to assess the level of readiness. And what we're finding now is that, whereas last year, if we asked the question, a lot of people would say what's ESEF. Here, we're finding that actually awareness is pretty broad. But in terms of prepared, we're still seeing it at fairly early stages. And I'm just looking at the U.K. market at the moment. So companies may have got to the stage where they've identified the software provided that they're looking to use but haven't taken it to that stage of starting to think how the tagging process is going to work, how that's going to fit into the company's governance process, et cetera. And we would really encourage companies to start thinking about how that process is going to work, when they're going to start thinking about the appropriate tags, at what point -- are they going to involve the Board in the same way that they'd involve the Board in the paper-based financial statements. So certainly, awareness has been raised, but readiness is still at the fairly early stages.

Yes. I mean I think I just want to add a few things there to bring in some of the experiences and things that we see because obviously we're selling across Europe. So we get a little bit of a picture of how things are going with some of the diverse geographical differences. And it's quite interesting actually. Obviously, there is a reasonable difference between how ready we see issuers being in the different countries that we speak to. Obviously, it's a little bit biased for us because if we're speaking to somebody in the first place, then we know that they at least got to the stage where they know they need a solution, and they have some idea of all these efforts. But beyond that, there's been quite a bit of variation. And one of the differences, the big differences that we're noticing is that some of that's affected quite heavily by how active the local regulator has been. So we know, for example, that one of the differences we see at the moment that's affecting issuers' preparedness and to be honest, affecting software preparedness as well is that the different countries' local regulators who are required to implement this directive, EU directives all implemented locally, are at different stages in their process. They're still clarifying how it fits into local governance requirements and local requirements of companies to produce annual reports, what goes in those reports, how they're signed off and so on and so forth. And that's, I think, one of the things that's having a bit of an issue, and I know it's causing some problems for some issuers out there as they try and navigate what exactly it is they have to prepare for.

Thank you. Thank you, Phil, and thank you, Andie. And I think probably the takeaway there is that the mandate is exciting as long as you're prepared. So preparation is the key, and Amplify GO is a great start. So well done everyone for turning up. So moving on. So we're moving on now to the actual electronic document. Maybe Andie could answer this one. How does the view of compliance readiness fit in with what we hear about the production of the annual report in general?

So this is quite interesting. And again, we do see some of that country diversity that I just mentioned in terms of general readiness for the ESEF. Coming up again, when we look at how our new reports are produced, obviously, local regulations do have quite a big impact on this. But there's also other cultural trends, especially in the areas of design and the tendency to file either one annual report for multiple purposes or maybe to produce separate documents for different purposes and that kind of thing. So obviously, there's a lot of variation across Europe. But I think there are some things that we see in common in most places. So I think the first one of those is because in almost all of these countries, the annual report or the annual reports are produced for multiple purposes, they encompass different regulations. They encompass often stakeholder communication and so on and so forth. And that means that they also involve different teams, multiple teams. They might have different owners in different companies, or they might have multiple owners within one company. And that seems to be a very, very common factor of these reports. I mean, obviously, there will be some companies who've created this single unified team and/or process, but just with all the different requirements and even the legal compliance involved, multiple teams is extremely common. And of course, on top of that, it's very common for companies to be including design agencies and communication agencies in that process, which obviously adds both an extra layer of process as well as effectively extra teams in some circumstances. The result of all this of course is...

I think I...

Oh, yes, sorry, go on.

Sorry, Andie. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I thought you -- I just really echo that because where you've got multiple teams involved, where you've got sort of fairly detailed governance processes in respect of preparing a report, you've also -- you might also throw in whatever assurance requirements there might be in your country. It's really important to kind of map that -- map all of that out and see how different factors will interact with [ this ]. Apologies, Andie. I'm sorry. Sorry for interrupting.

No, no, it's fine. It's always going to be fun trying to talk to each other in a remote format anyway. All I was going to add is that, that leads to some pretty inevitable consequences for the actual processes themselves. As you just said, they're split everywhere, and they're distributed. They make heavy use of Word and Excel. Even where there is some kind of content or disclosure management system, I think we see that companies are often not using it for the whole process or have a tool that isn't capable of being used for the whole process. So I think there's a lot of -- I mean, basically, for something that involves this level of oversight from audit committees and boards and auditors, it's surprisingly risky. It seems to be one of the processes that's been a bit left behind in recent financial transformations. I don't know if that's something, Hamish, you're seeing as well.

Yes. I mean I've been doing this for a long time. And I think the question that gets asked the most when people are talking about annual reports is what did we do last year. So there is a lot of, "It worked last year. Let's roll it over and do it again." And I think that's what's exciting about a new challenge to the process, is, well, let's look at the process. Let's really understand what each of these sentences is referring to, why are we publishing it and why do we publish it in this format or why do we even publish it at all. Do we fully understand that? Now obviously, there isn't a need to do a sort of a full rebuild of your entire annual report. But I think it is worthwhile looking at what checks you do and why you do them and then what are you publishing. And I think that will feed in as we go forward with the XHTML. But right now, it's the case of are we doing things in the best way possible. We now have this new requirement. When are we going to look at it? Are we really going to look at this at the last minute? Or is it something that we feel that we have a responsibility to make sure we've done the very best we can. And that -- there's a challenge between Boards and the company themselves. The individuals involved in the reporting process have a responsibility to the Board. The Board have a responsibility elsewhere as well. And that's an interesting dynamic that I think companies need to discuss to make sure that everyone feels comfortable with the information they pass up to the Board is the best they can do. And if they've not looked at it or they've not reviewed it or they think it's something that's going to be done afterwards, then that does leave large gaps for potential errors to drop into. And the errors in XBRL can be very small but have significant impact around what is actually being reported in the machine readable data. And as if -- and as Phil said, if that is what your analysts are going to get hold of and run against your peers, that is going to cause an effect at some point. When it happens doesn't really matter. This data is not going away. It's locked in a vault, and it's going to be here from -- on your 2020 report forever now. So I don't think it's a case of we get a run at this and nobody cares because when somebody does a 5-year review in 2025, they'll be calling on the 2020 figures. So I just think that's something that we just need to be cognizant of.

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Yes. And the XBRL footprint is something we spoke about in the last webinar. So I think it's why we got to remember as well that it's the whole report that has to be in XHTML, not just the financial statements. There seems to be a bit of a confusion over that. So thank you, everyone, particularly on that. So next question. There's likely to be some kind of audit or assurance requirement for the ESEF tagging specifically. Does this affect how companies think about their implementation? So Hamish, assurance is your pet topic, so this one is for you.

Yes. I mean one of the analogies that I've used is that your auditors don't sign off on an Excel file. They sign off on the final file. So just think about when you're doing anything, whether it's mapping early, which is definitely something that is possible to do, and we would recommend doing, is to make sure you understand how that is actually going to work with the technology that's available to create the final file and then what comfort you want to put around that. So I think that's an important step around checking to understand the technology that you're actually likely to be using. XBRL tagging is something that you can lock down early. You're definitely not planning to rewrite your consolidated financial statements, so therefore, the description in XBRL should be something that you can do in Q4 or even earlier. And that's why the regulators are saying take the chance of tagging your 2019 report and roll that over in the same way you do and have some sort of audit trail based on that baseline. If you have that sort of capability, then this is something that can definitely be done concurrently with your -- with the process that you run in 2019. If it's something you're going to bring the XBRL in at a late date, you then have to think, well, what is it that we have a duty of care to our shareholders and stakeholders and Board to ensure that, that is the data that we think it is, and how we're going to do that. So it's not rocket science. It's stuff you're already doing, but there are ways of making it better, and we think it's incumbent on you to sort of prepare yourself [ for those ] if at all possible.

I think one of the advantages of the ESEF implementation is, in the first year, the minimum is the primary financial statement. And I think that does give an opportunity without putting a huge [ burden -- ] start looking at the IFRS Taxonomy to start experimenting with 2019 accounts. I mean it's certainly something -- I'm not an expert on XBRL, but it's certainly something that we started experimenting, as we were talking [ to companies ] about implementation, as we looked at sort of 2019 accounts and started to [ try to ] use the tags, and it starts to raise challenges and questions. And I think the earlier people can deal with those challenges and questions, the better. But it's not -- because it's only the primary financial statements, it's not a massive task that perhaps it might seem to be. And I really think if in this -- if there is some scope, I think it's well worth trying to have a play with it.

Thank you. Yes. Well, thank goodness ESMA's broken us in gently with just the financial statements. Anyway, here we go, next question. So let's leave compliance aside for a minute and talk about the investors. So Phil, is the introduction of ESEF not also aimed at them? And are there any other stakeholders to consider?

Well, I think I'd go back to Hamish's comment earlier, and it's really exactly the same question as the question around the annual report. At the moment, the annual report [ is ] to members, to shareholders and therefore, they are the primary users of that report. But that's not to say that other stakeholders might be interested in the information. And increasingly, with other regulatory requirements coming in, increasingly, companies are being required to talk about how they've had regard to [ stakeholders ], their customers, their suppliers, their employees, et cetera. And all of that information, therefore, might also be relevant for them, and it's no different for the electronic file. I think the one thing perhaps where there is a difference is the accessibility of that electronic information. And I think we're going to have to see some tools being developed to help people access the electronic information. Investors can -- with sophisticated tools, their graphs can already do that. But perhaps other less sophisticated or those without those tools or the resources to buy those tools will find it more difficult. And therefore, I think this is probably a question of, yes, the electronic file should be useful to both investors and other stakeholders, but we need the tools to be able to ensure that accessibility.

And just to add to that, I think if you look across the range of websites, a number of companies are already beginning to offer up tools to compare reports across the years, and they're embedding those in their websites to help people make that sort of comparative information available to themselves. XBRL just facilitates that. So yes, there need to be tools being built out, but that's not -- that's something that companies themselves could start thinking about when they are thinking about what sort of engagement they want with their shareholders and stakeholders. But I think, yes, the other side is that the sophisticated investors and the analysts, they have these tools already. They've been built out for the state, so the idea that they're not going to come across here and be used to analyze the information very quickly seems an odd one. We've not yet seen a data pool created where somebody hasn't tried to make some money out of it. So I think you should just consider yourself as a new data pool, and people will come and see what they can do with it.

Yes. I mean I think the only thing...

I was going to say, I mean I clearly agree with that, Hamish. I mean it's -- when you start to use these tools and the tools that sort of read XBRL data, it's quite incredible how quickly you can assess and analyze data on an instant basis. Even using some of the [ tools freely ] available that it really is astonishing. When I first came to this, I used something that was by XBRL US. And it was astonishing, the way that you could construct a sort of investment case and then pull the data instantly from whatever company was listed in the U.S. And it's incredibly powerful to use. And as I say, Hamish, these tools will inevitably come over to Europe as this is being implemented. But it's something to start thinking about as well.

Yes. I'm thinking the point I was going to add still stands, so I'll just add it quickly. This is going to play [ very happily ] with Jackie's timing obviously. So the only thing I'd add is that, obviously, one of the other groups of people to think about here, we talked about the institutional investors, is there's a bit of a worry about what about my retail investors, what about my more -- much less technological stakeholders. And I think one of the good things for there is that we already see there is -- their in-line view is available. They're very simple to use, and they can be put up on company's websites. And basically, they mean that, that information is now accessible to anybody. So not only is that structure accessible to those who have and can afford the analysis tools, the price is coming down, it's also available to retail investors. If -- you can put it up with an in-line viewer on the website and in many ways, even better than the PDF at that point because the structured data is visible to all users as well as the normal human readable format.

Thank you. Thank you. And I think how investors and stakeholders will take XBRL will be fascinating. It'd just be lovely to have a crystal ball, but thank you so much anyway. So watch this space for that one. So moving on as time is against us. So this question moves away from the annual report and one that I'd like to ask Hamish. What about the rest of investor and stakeholder communication? Do we see this update and reporting having any effects here?

Right now, as we stand, no. But I think the conversations are beginning to happen as we make various companies that we're interacting with aware of what the output could be. So well-structured XHTML is infinitely repurposable. I'm not sure that's a word, but it is now. It means that you can take it and use it elsewhere on your website. So I know, talking to companies, there is always a concern of the sort of the cut and the paste straight from a PDF, put it into our website. We then need to check it again. CSR reports, which feed both ways, is there not some sort of better process for doing that? That's what XHTML could do. It is -- once it's structured correctly, people -- you can lend it to people as a bit of data. You can put controls around it to say you can have this data, but you can't edit it or at least you have to be -- you have to positively do something before you can edit it, which means that your Chairman's letter can now appear in 15 different places. GLEIF is an interesting part of things. This whole digital signature. What should you be doing around that information when you pass it out and you make it so eminently reusable. Should you put some sort of controls around it? That's a conversation we will be having in the next 2 or 3 years. But it is based on the fact that the XHTML you produce is not just something for your regulator. It is something for you as a company to think about. If you didn't have the report -- if you didn't report in 2019 and you built your process out now, how many companies will be building a paper-based product? Effectively sending a MailShot to all their key investors. Or would they say, no, no, we want to control this through our website because we are now in the age of digital information and we want that information to be repurposed, sent on, reused but we may be able to put some sort of controls around that? You certainly want assurance around it. And the value of the effort that you put in to make sure your annual report is correct, you should realize that effort by reusing that content elsewhere on the website with absolute certainty because the annual report probably is more scrutinized than even your own website in terms of the content. So avail yourself of that investment and get some returns on it. That's where I think digital reporting is going to really take off.

Thanks, Hamish. You're right. I think the idea of structured data is such a good opportunity, and I think just don't bury it just in your annual report. Get it out there and make amazing Investor Relations sites. So as time is, again -- not against us, I should move swiftly on, so here we go. So what would you say are the key differences between solely aiming for compliance and implementing with a view to the future? So Andie, can I direct this one to you?

Yes. So I mean this is an interesting question because as Hamish said earlier, we hear a lot about this idea that we can just comply. And if we look at that from an implementation perspective, so not from a legal perspective, so on and so forth, we just look at what that means from an implementation perspective, I think we end up with kind of 2 ends of the scale. Compliance is kind of literally saying I'm just going to do exactly enough to add in whatever is required of me for this new compliance area. So in this case, it's literally just the format. Effectively, it's a bolt of just saying, right, I have my existing process. I have everything I already do. In order to comply, I'm just going to literally put the format into that existing process. It doesn't -- it's not additive. It doesn't add anything. That compliance is there. It's now complied with. We move on as normal. Whereas if we're implementing with a view to the future, then whatever we're doing in whatever implementation it is, we're trying to do something that adds to the process, that actively improves or changes it in some way for the better. So for example, in the case of ESEF, we might be looking to say let's add electronic reporting capability. Let's not just add the specific structured requirements that allow us to comply with ESEF. Let's add electronic reporting capability through our process. Let's add some resilience. Something else, something in that process then functions in an improved way. And since I know what the next question is, I can choose a bit and say, what we now have is a situation where we've got lots of companies who are in very interesting circumstances and may well have been saying -- sitting there and saying, well, obviously, it's pretty clear what the best thing to do here. It's pretty clear that the best thing is to go out there and improve my process, to do some transformation, some financial transformation. But as we know, lots of companies are potentially finding that quite challenging at the moment. Although as we heard very clearly in the keynote, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea to abandon that transformation. So I was going to pick out one particular bit of that keynote as a kind of recommendation or piece of advice for how to keep going regardless, how to still gain that resilience despite the fact that many companies are not necessarily up for spending either the time or large amounts of money on their finance teams right now. And the one I want to pick out was that concept of starting small but keeping the bigger picture in mind. So doing something additive now but doing -- picking up something maybe a tool or a process, something that allows not just compliance with ESEF but starts you along the journey to being able to do that wider transformation later. So that might be picking up something that is just a little bit more than compliance, something that already, say, improves the auditability of the process you used to get there because then, of course, if we're talking about assurance and audit, we also have to have the better the process we have, the less trouble it is on the audit side of things or pick up something that gives you a little bit of content management. And then as we move into next year, which will hopefully be significantly better than 2020, you'll be in a really good position to use that same improvement you've started to move on and get to something that's actually genuinely transformative and process improvement. And I think that's kind of going to be something key for companies to hold on to right now. Otherwise, again, it's the [ keynotes ] that they're in real danger of losing momentum because there is actually quite a big chunk of transformative momentum to pick up on right now.

Thank you. Thank you. Gentlemen, do you want to add anything to that? Or should we move on?

No [indiscernible]

[indiscernible]

[indiscernible]

Perfect in every way.

Andie, I know you touched on this, though I don't know if you want to move on. We spoke about 2020 being an eventful year so far, and my goodness, hasn't it. And many companies are saying they don't have the capacity. So do you want to add any more on that?

No. I think my final point there is probably where -- that main recommendation. I mean I think the only other ones to bear in mind were all pretty nicely covered by the keynotes actually. They kind of stole my thunder on this question.

Okay. So back to Phil. So now looking into the future, what about this sort of longer term, what else do we see affecting this reporting process?

I think, well, no conversation about reporting at the moment fails to talk about ESG requirements, environmental, social and reporting. And we're seeing an increasing urge from investors to -- for companies to provide more of that information, talking about how their -- the company's business model is going to be sustainable into the future and will respond to environmental, social and governance changes. And -- but the problem with that information, as many of you will know on the webinar, is that there's a lack of consistency in the way that information is reported, which is very different to the IFRS financial statements, which is very well established. So I think that is going to be the future area for reporting, is how can we create a structure that provides consistency and comparability and provides investors with investment useful information. And clearly, as we move it towards more consistency [ of our ability ], the question will be, is there a way that we can make that information electronic, apply a taxonomy to it potentially and expand the remit of the current reporting requirements around financial statements. It's something we, [ as a regulator, ] [ the IFRS ] are looking at in terms of what kind of frameworks are most suitable to capture ESG information. And then a question after that will then be, okay, well, can we make this information digital, and I'd be very interested to see where that goes over the next couple of years because the demand is just growing astronomically. But as I say, no conversation that we have doesn't have ESG in it when you're talking about reporting, and it's clearly very critical to us as well as wider stakeholders.

Yes. I've seen this is very much at the European level as well with comment letters [ back for ] the nonfinancial reporting directive. You see requests for structured data popping up in there. And also the reports that came out recently, the final report on capital markets union. Again, it talked about bringing the data together, making it accessible from a central point, which was always supposed to be one of the intentions with the European Access Point. And again, it talked about structuring it. So the demand is definitely out there in Europe as well.

Yes. And I'd just -- just to add to that, I think these sort of conversations now are probably going to be led by the marketplace, which are the regulators. What is it your investors want? What sort of information do they want to read? What do they want to compare you to another peer to? And I think there are people talking about this and trying to move this forward. It is possible to get that sort of information into your report even now. Easier to be somebody who starts it at a relatively low stage and begins to build that interaction with shareholders and stakeholders than to wait until the regulators come and tell you what you've got to do because, by that time, the people who drive your share price are not your regulators. The people who drive your share price are the people who consume your information. And so I think there's always that conversation to be had about why we're reporting this, who we're reporting it to, and what do we want to get out of this. If it was just the regulators, our reports would look very, very different. And so I think that as we think about going forward, maybe not in 2020, but as we think about going forward, let's look about -- look and see what the audience that we want to connect with wants to consume.

Thank you. Thank you so much. So anyway, let's look at the questions coming in. So could you just give me a second? Oh, this is a great one. This is great. Hamish, you will love this one. Why can't we just add ESEF to our existing PDF report? Go for it.

Okay. Well, there are issues with that, that I feel is quite important. You are going to pass this information to your regulator, and they will be reading not just the human readable but the XBRL. And sitting in the XBRL is a lot about how that data is presented to the regulator, and it's not necessarily in the human readable form. It's thereby -- so contextual information in human readable is not necessarily there in the XBRL. Get that relationship wrong and you're not making a rounding error. You're telling somebody that you've done something in millions and you thought you'd told them in thousands. That's quite significant when you talk to your regulator. He'll probably deal with that quite -- he/she will deal with that quite quietly. If that information is being consumed by your shareholders and stakeholders, that's a different kind of conversation. So I would say, be very careful about just pulling in some XBRL at the end of the process. It is public information, and you have sort of a responsibility about how you deal with that. There are also other issues around the conversion of PDF. PDF does not support XHTML. It can create XHTML. So you do have a duty of care around did the content that was in my PDF make it to my XHTML and did it make it without bringing anything with it. XHTML is a relatively new piece of software. Not everyone plays with it every day. And so you will need to review that if you want to have some consistency around it, and I think you owe that to your Board. That's one of the things your Board might well ask you to do, is how do I know that the content that left the PDF made it to the XHTML. Think about when you're going to be doing that. Is that just after you told everyone no more changes and we're just wrangling the audit opinion through to the Audit Committee 2 days before the Board meeting? That may not be an ideal scenario for your teams. That's why we think there should be an iterative process that runs alongside what you currently do. That seems to be a much more manageable process. And that fits into what Phil was saying, map your process. What is this actually going to mean to you? How are you going to look at it? When are you going to look at it? That's what I would account for you.

Thank you. Thank you. Right. Just in the last -- this one's for Andie in the last sort of 30 seconds. What is the difference between iXBRL and ESEF?

Thankfully, that one is a nice quick one. So ESEF is the European Single Electronic Format specifically. It makes use of iXBRL. So iXBRL is the broader XBRL standard, and then ESEF has some specific requirements on top of that, that say we want you to use this standard in order to only type the face financial statements for example. So iXBRL is that combination I introduced earlier of XHTML and XBRL in the same documents. Both of those together is called iXBRL.

That is totally amazing. We are finished right on the right time. So thank you so much. I've had such a great time, and I personally have learned a great deal. So I'd like to sincerely thank our guests, Phil Fitz-Gerald, Andie Wood, Hamish Prince, and most of all, thank you, everyone, for listening. So good afternoon, and enjoy the rest of your afternoon at Amplify GO.

Thanks very much, everyone. Bye.

Bye. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and on behalf of the Workiva team, welcome to this Amplify GO session. [Operator Instructions] We will try to answer your questions. We do have a section at the end for a little bit of a Q&A. So please do send in your questions. We'd love to hear what you think, and we'll answer them during that session. If we run out of time, if we can't get through all the questions or we need to give a fuller answer, we will come back to you via e-mail. All your questions will be captured once you've submitted them, and we will answer them for you. So presenters for today's webinar is -- actually, let me do the webinar title. So our webinar today is "Get Ready for the Future: Three Lines of Defence 2.0". My name is Tim Le Mare, and I'm an integrated risk subject matter expert here at Workiva, and I will be the host of this virtual event. And I'm very pleased to be joined by my colleagues, Imran and Charlie. So that's Imran Choudhry, Solutions Architect; and Charles Calovich, Solutions Consultant. And the 3 of us will be walking you through today's webinar. I'll spend some time at the very beginning talking about the 3 lines of defense model, and then hand over to my colleagues, Imran and Charlie, who will be taking you through a demo of the Workiva platform. So why are we here today? Well, as I mentioned, our webinar is "Get Ready for the Future: Three Lines of Defence 2.0." And for us, that's all about how technology and the Workiva platform can support and enhance the existing 3 lines of defense model. So this webinar will focus on continuous control monitoring and how continuous control monitoring can be used by both the first, second and third line of defense to support the 3 lines of defense model. From this session, we aim to give you 3 key takeaways. So firstly, we'll just walk through the existing 3 lines of defense model, its benefits and challenges just to level set, just to make sure that we all have a good understanding of what the existing model is. We'll then go on to describe how technology can help enhance that 3 lines of defense model, and for us, that's where the 2.0 comes in, how do we digitize that 3 lines of defense model. And then finally, we'll get on to a demonstration of the Workiva platform and our continuous controls, monitoring capability and you'll be actually able to see live how our platform can support continuous controls monitoring. I should say, because of time on this demo, we are going to focus on the first line of defense during the demo portion, but we'll also expand then on how that can be applied to the second and third line of defense. So let's start by exploring the 3 lines of defense model, and then we'll go on to share how we, at Workiva, see our platform bringing the model into the digital age with our 3 lines of defense 2.0 model. So I'm sure everyone is very familiar with the 3 lines of defense model, what we've called the original 1.0 model, but it's worth just spending a little bit of time running through this. So what you can see here -- so on this slide here, you can see the existing 3 lines of defense, what we call the 1.0 model. It's been well established and has been around for a long time. If you were to pick up a set of annual report and accounts and flick through it, you would see the 3 lines of defense being mentioned because it's a framework which helps to clarify accountabilities for risk, control and assurance. It's a model that I've used extensively in my internal audit career to help define the role of internal audit. And for that, it's got lots of benefits around just clarifying roles and responsibilities across all 3 lines. So what you see on the screen is the first line of defense. So that is functions that own and manage risk. Those are very much at the sharp end of risk and control. You then have the second line of defense, and those are functions that oversee or specialize in risk management. So that might be setting policies or procedures for risk and control, or it might be providing some form of management check, management control, testing or compliance, and you see that there are a range of different functions all listed out, all having some role element to play in the second line of defense. And then you have the third line of defense, internal audit providing independent assurance across the organization. And then you have what sometimes people call the fourth line, your regulators and external audit. And each of those 3 lines and feeding up to senior management and the Board and Audit Committee. And this model has lots of benefits. That's why it's been around for so long. It really helps to clarify, provides situational awareness around each function between those 3 lines, provides enhanced communication on risk management, enhanced clarity regarding risk and controls, and it really does help to drive focus and ongoing success on various risk management activities. So lots of benefits but like any model, there come lots of challenges. And most of those challenges are around the 3 lines can very often act in silos with information not necessarily shared or shared as easily as we would like between each of the 3 lines. So that can lead to inconsistent data for visibility into the process. And particularly, we see a lot of wasted time and duplicative work. So how might we, using technology, help to address some of those challenges? And that leads us to our 3 lines of defense 2.0 model because, here at Workiva, we believe that technology has a fundamental role to play in helping to align and coordinate risk control and assurance activity, providing greater transparency and accountability. And we see continuous controls monitoring playing a really crucial role in enabling that to happen. So what you see on the slide in front of you is the same 3 lines of defense model, but underneath that, we have our Workiva platform, which is, to the left-hand side, pulling in data from various systems, which Imran and Charlie will get on to very shortly. And then using continuous controls monitoring capability, informing both the first, second and third line of controls activity in real time as it's happening. So we see continuous controls monitoring being a crucial tool that will enable each of the 3 lines to get real-time insight into the performance of the risk and control framework. It will allow the identification and flagging of any policy and transaction exceptions, making these visible to the 3 lines for quick resolution and particularly using data to inform your priorities for control testing across both the second and third line, particularly around internal audit coverage. And while continuous control monitoring is not a new concept, there have been many barriers to organizations taking advantage of its benefits, particularly around the need for extensive technical knowledge and investment in additional tools and technology separate from your main risk control and audit platform. So our demonstration will show you how directly from within the Workiva platform you can quickly and easily set up a continuous controls monitoring program to provide that real-time control information for use by each of the 3 lines. So no large investment in IT technical skills, no installation upskilling on separate software required, your continuous controls monitoring activities built, run and the results actioned upon all within your existing Workiva platform. And on that note, I'll hand over to my colleague, Imran, who's going to take you through how we get data into our Wdesk platform. Imran, over to you.

Excellent. Thanks, Tim. So what I'm going to do is to take you through a couple of process slides, just taking you through how clients' current implementations work and then how our platform can actually automate a lot of these manual processes that we have around the integration side of things. So what you can see right now is this is how traditionally most clients' infrastructure is set up. So on the left-hand side, you can actually see, we have your source data. It can be any type of data source. It can be a cloud solution. That can be an on-premise solution. In this example, we can see Workday, SAP, BlackLine, Oracle, Anaplan and any other solution that you may have. That may be a structured data source or that could be a unstructured data source as well. And in the middle here, what we actually have is that data wrangling phase. So this is where you would export all your information into, let's say, a CSV output, which you can then go ahead and actually do all your manual lookups on, or maybe you have some other calculations on that information. Once you've actually finalized all of the data manipulation that you have done in this step in the middle, what you can then do is you can finally -- let's say you want to e-mail this spreadsheet out across to your colleagues, you can actually copy and paste your data results into that presentation, into that document, which you're actually going to be working with as well. But what happens if your data changes? You have to go through all of these manual processes again. So let's have a look at the next evolution with Wdesk. Excellent. So in this scenario here, what we can actually see is where you had all of that copy and pasting from all your data sources, all your spreadsheets there, we have actually automated all of that process. And we can see we have all of the spreadsheets, all of the documents and all your presentations in that one Wdesk environment as well. And of course, we have all of the great capabilities of Wdesk, for example, all the collaboration in there as well. So what we're actually missing here is this data wrangling step in the middle here where you have your source system and Workiva. So let's now look at the final evolution of what we can expect to see. So in this evolution here, what you can actually see is where we had that Excel [chaos] in the center there, we have actually addressed that issue with Wdata. Now with Wdata, what we can actually do is we can connect to those underlying systems, we can actually create integrations to those solutions, and we can bring all that information into the Workiva platform. We can bring all of that information into Wdata. Once we have all of that information within Wdata, what we can then do is we can actually create some calculations on that information, we can actually bring your business logic and create some queries upon that information and push that information into the Wdesk platform. So with Wdata, there's a few different ways of us actually creating those integrations. First of all, if we want to just have a CSV output, we can import that into Wdata, that will be a very easy method of us actually acquiring that information. The second method and the most popular method will be to actually create an integration using some of the connections which are available within our platform. So in our platform, we have more than 60-plus connections, which are available to those underlying systems. We can use those connections, and we've got a plug-and-play environment where you can enter your username, enter your password and you can -- and you can start building out all of those connections and have all your information coming from the underlying systems into our platform. And thirdly, we have the ability to actually use APIs as well. We actually publish our APIs online. So that will be available for you to use as well. And of course, once we've actually brought that information into our platform, we can actually use third-party solutions as well. So if you want to do some business intelligence, you want to use Power BI or Tableau, that's definitely something which we can do on that information. And also, what we can actually do is we can actually push to other third-party solutions. So if you are looking at doing some artificial intelligence, looking at doing some machine learning, we can do that within our platform as well. Excellent. So that's great. I've taken you through those couple of slides, taken you through the processes and how we can actually use Wdata and Wdesk to actually have a connected enterprise. I'm now going to pass over to Charlie.

Awesome. Thanks, Imran. I appreciate that. So this next section, we'll be diving into the first line of defense, focusing on operations. The first line of defense is defined as operations or the people within your organization that typically own and manage risk on a daily basis, while ensuring that the activities they execute are in line with internal policies and procedures and in a way that continues to meet the company's goals and objectives. Operations naturally falls into the first line of defense because their controls are designed into systems and processes based on their guidance. When Tim and I speak to various organizations, we see early on how embedded or uninvolved this first line of defense can be, it might be driven by the risk culture within the organization or the tone at the top. We also see private companies with undocumented but serious understandings of the responsibilities they own and the risks that they mitigate. One of the things that we hear quite often from the third line of defense in either of these types of organizations is that they'd really like to see the business take more ownership of their risks or controls, pushing the ownership of their own process into their own hands can really shift in the culture within the organization. But it also may be limited by the tools that are available to the first line of defense during this process and what mediums of communication between the first, second and third line exists. The first line is responsible for executing controls that mitigate the risk. This might be the accounts payable manager that ensures a purchase order was issued for any invoice paid and that the appropriate signers were obtained prior to the issuance of payment. The first line may also implement actions to address any deficiencies that are identified. If a gap occurs or an issue is found, these individuals revamp the design of their process to ensure the issue has been corrected. They should also then communicate with the third line of defense that these deficiencies have been resolved. Some of the gaps we see fall across the 3 lines of defense. They can come from the siloing effect of information. So we have participants on the line spanning multiple departments, multiple teams within the organization. Some people are here from the internal controls teams, the SOX teams, internal audit and teams that manage enterprise risk as well as anyone that deals with policy management within that organization. We're going to focus on how Workiva can enhance those lines of defense and break that solo effect that tends to happen as these processes get more complex. Regardless of what you're responsible for within your organization, Workiva believes that all processes can be broken down into 4 parts: identify, assess, evaluate and report. So after the session here today, think about what you might -- or how you might organize all the stakeholders within your organization as it relates to the steps in this process. Where do their activities overlap? Is one person or team accountable to another in order for the overall process to be effective? What does one particular group or stakeholder actually own? And why do they own that part of the process? Understanding these answers, can really help teams identify where each line of defense stands within the organization. Unfortunately, there's no framework out there that defines the line of defense with job titles. That would make all of our jobs and the jobs of the regulators much easier. Instead, we look to the organization's unique policies and procedures that define who owns what stake and who's accountable to whom. Some of the challenges and benefits that we're going to cross through -- as we've kind of perceived through the lines of defense, traditionally, we can see organizations struggling where they don't have the right tools to connect data and people to the processes that they're involved with. The first line of defense might have limited visibility to the findings of the second and third line, and that can really impact their assessment or understanding of the work. They may also struggle to communicate effectively with the other lines. Without a tool in place that facilitates communication and workflow, ownership [ of text ] and the expectations can drive issues. When we manage any risk process within a platform that allows us to connect people and data, we can also allow for collaboration between all 3 lines of defense in 1 centralized location. In this connected environment, the first line of defense is able to easily view what they're responsible for and remediate and address issues as they appear. To set the stage for the demo that we're about to walk through, I want to give everyone an understanding of what we'll be doing. So we'll be starting on the far left here of the slide, obtaining information from our SAP HANA and Workday platforms. This information will be pulled via a query that my colleague, Imran, has put together in our Wdata platform. The information that we're requesting is specific to a vendor invoice policy end process. That information will be aggregated here in Wdata, organized in a meaningful way for our test to compare this information to expectations. So is what's happening in the actual ERP system agreeing to what our expectations were? From there, we'll connect it into our spreadsheets and out to task creation, our processing controls dashboard, communication across the 3 lines of defense, the ability to drill down a piece of information back to that source and again, compare expectations from our database. Great. So as we proceed, now we'll begin the demonstration with my colleague, Imran.

Thanks, Charlie. Excellent. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to start off with a very simple spreadsheet in Wdesk. Here we can see, we have 2 different sections, I have my data sources and I have my testing. Let's have a look at my data sources. So on my data sources, as Charlie mentioned, we're actually pulling in information from 2 different sources. I have all of the information coming in from SAP, and I also have my employee information coming in from Workday. Right now, you can see my 2 spreadsheets don't have any information in there at all. So what we need to do is we need to go to Wdata. We need to pull that information in from that source system, we actually need to bring these 2 data sources together so that we can go ahead and actually view our results here. Let me show you what I actually have built within Wdata. So in Wdata here, you can see from my home page, it's very similar to Wdesk, I've got the same look and feel in this environment here. Rather than working with different types of documents, I'm actually working with the different types of data which we have in here. At the bottom here, you can actually see the different tables which I have. So I have a separate table for that information, which is coming from SAP. I have another table here for that information coming in from Workday. I'm then merging these 8 sources together, I'm creating my query. And then from that query, I can then go ahead and actually create the views, which I can then go ahead and utilize. Let's actually have a look at the Chain Builder, where we can actually build out those integrations to those underlying systems and then how we can actually have all of our processes being automated. Here, I'm in Chain Builder here. And let's actually have a look at some of the connections which I have in here as well. So in my connections, you can actually see we've got a range of connections which are available to you. We have cloud solutions, on-premise solutions, whatever solution you may need. Excellent. So let's have a look at the actual chain which we're actually running within Wdata. So what you can see here is that this is the start of my chain here. And as I start my chain, I'm actually connecting to those 2 different data sources. So I'm connecting to Workday, which has all my employee information. And then I'm actually connecting to SAP. Within SAP, what I'm actually doing is I'm actually running that SAP query, which is looking at all of my supplier records and it's looking at the actual individuals who have created those supplier records and then we're actually comparing that against the actual platform to find out which of those entries were created by the same individual who has gone ahead and actually created invoices and who has received those invoices as well within SAP. So once we actually get our results, what we're actually doing is we're going to be combining our 2 data sources. Once we actually combine those 2 data sources, the information within Workday basically allows me to start sending out some notifications. So the notifications I will be sending out will basically be email alerts, which are going out to the actual managers, and I'll have all my employee matrix coming in through Workday as well. As well as sending out those e-mail notifications, I'm also creating some tasks within Workiva as well. So for example, if we have any invoices, we would actually be creating some task for the individuals to go ahead and actually update those invoices as well. So let me go ahead and I'd like to execute this chain. So there we can see, we're connecting to those 2 data sources and bringing that information through into Wdata. Once I actually bring that information through into Wdata, I'm actually running a query within Wdata as well. So I'm putting those 2 data sources together. I'm enriching the results, which I have from SAP with all of the employee information as well. And then from that, we're actually sending out those e-mail notifications to development managers of those departments, and we're creating those tasks in there as well. Excellent. So that has now completed. So let's go back to that spreadsheet, which we were looking at earlier on. Excellent. Now we can see that this has now populated with all of the information we have from Workday, and I have my information, which has come from SAP as well. In SAP, the types of information which I'm actually looking at is, so I can see my user ID, I've got my vendor number, company code, I've got my document number, document type and then I've got some dates, and I've actually got some values in here as well. In Workday, I have just my employee information. So I can see things like user ID, first name, last name, I've got my e-mail addresses in here, I've got my department, and then I have the manager name and e-mail address as well. So what Wdata is doing is blending these 2 data sources together and from the actual results, which we are getting from that SAP query, we're then going ahead and we're sending out those notifications, and we're actually creating those tasks as well. If I click on my home section and go into my tasks, what you'll actually see is the platform has actually created some tasks for me as well. If I click on this task, I can actually see when that task was actually created as well, and that's what you can see on the right-hand side. Let's also have a look at my e-mail to actually see those notifications, which have actually come across. Excellent. And there, you can see we can actually have that one notification going out to the process owner, and we can have those results going out to those heads of those departments as well. So we're actually dynamically sending out that filtered list depending on the actual recipient of that result. That's really good. And that's basically showing you how we can connect to those data sources, bring all of that information into Wdata and then how we can actually apply some business logic to that and send out all of those notifications and those alerts in there as well. But let's have a look at Wdata and some of the other capabilities which we can bring to you as well. So in Wdata, let's actually look at some of these views, which I have created. So this is a very simple view, and this is looking at that same information which we have just imported from Workday and from SAP. I can now actually drill down through my results. I can actually look at this by my year, by my department. If I drill down, I can see my vendor number and I can see my employee name as well. And as I am drilling down, I can actually see the actual results that I have within each of these line items here. So here, I can see [ Babatunde ] actually has 3 incidents, which have actually come through positive. So what I can actually do for my view here is, right now, I'm just looking at the count of the number of results that I have in each of these lines, but I can very easily flip this to actually see the actual sum that we have coming from the actual underlying invoice as well. So here, I can see that I actually have some conditional formatting in here as well. And here, I can see I've actually set up my conditional formatting, so anything above 1,000 actually needs to be looked into. So what I can actually do now is because we actually have all of that underlying data sitting within Wdata, if I actually want to query any one of these lines, I don't have to go back to my source system, I can actually do that right from Wdata. So I can right click on any one of these results, I can actually drill through and I can actually see the underlying transaction lines which I have within Wdata as well. So in this example here, we can go all the way down and actually see the invoice details as well. So let's just have a look at some of these line items here. And here, we can see, so [ Babatunde ] has been ordering some iMAC Pros, so that looks a bit suspicious to me. Excellent. So that's basically showing you how we can actually create some of these views. But let's actually look at some of the visualizations that we have in here as well. So I can look at that same information, but I can look at that in a different charting format. In this example here, we're actually looking at a bar chart. And just like I was doing before, we can actually drill down through that as well. Okay. So let's have a quick look at what's actually happening within the Wdata and what's actually happening within those tables. So this is my SAP table here. And on the right-hand side, you can actually see where my data set is actually landing within Wdata. Now the way that I actually bring this information together is using a query. So in this query here, what you can actually see is on the left-hand side, I actually have all my different data sources. So what I'm actually doing is I'm bringing in information from SAP, I'm actually combining that with Workday. The way I actually blend data sources together is by creating these relationships. And here, you can see some of the relationships I have. So here is my information from SAP, the unique field, which I have on both my data sets is my user ID, and that's where you can see where I'm linking those 2 data sets together. Okay. So let's just wrap up my part of the demo here. So what we can actually see is we've got our results. That's perfect. Let's actually update our connected sheet. I can just refresh on that, and that's going to bring in that same information. Perfect. Excellent. So with that, I'm actually going to pass over to Charlie.

Awesome. Thanks, Imran. So what we can do now that Imran has brought this information into Wdesk is take it out to a dashboard and run comparisons to the information that we've set up in our database. So right now, I'm in our presentations, specifically, continuous control monitoring overview by process, that process being expenditures. As I progress through, I can see my risk environment. So I can compare this information out to my inherent risk ratings. I can see how they're progressing, where my exposure lies, run trend comparisons periodically and establish an understanding of where that inherent risk rating actually is. And what this information can then feed into is a dashboard over the controls and process. So you can see right now from my vendor invoice approval that we're lacking any graphical information, and that's because we haven't pushed any information over from our spreadsheet. So I can come back into my spreadsheet, I can open up my data sources and view my connected sheet. This is where all the information that Imran just retrieved from SAP HANA and Workday will sit. I can communicate this out with a push of a button to a number of locations and destinations. So to do so, I'll come back into my spreadsheet. In my top left corner, go to publish and I'll publish all 15 links that Imran has created. And in that moment, we'll see my dashboard update to reflect this information. And what's happening here is the information we pulled from SAP HANA and Workday is being compared against the information stored in our integrated risk database. And the result is that we get to see comparisons of what we expect to happen versus what actually occurred for that point in time. So here, we can see the trend analysis, the allowable exceptions that occur for this particular process, the number of compliant instances versus noncompliant. And of those noncompliant instances, we can see which owners or managers are responsible for that. We can also see the risks that have been tied to this particular control as well as progress into our other dashboards. For duplicate invoices, we can see the status as well as the overall number of exceptions. Understand is this actually an exception or is this part 2 of an invoice? Was it kind of clerical or admin stake? Can it be resolved by the first or second line of defense? And then we can progress into the third dashboard and compare a total to that master vendor list. Have all invoices been matched to a sign off or agreed upon vendor? Are there any instances where a vendor didn't exist in that master data list? And again, all the while being able to navigate back through to our database to better understand what risk is really attached to here. So what you see on the right side is my link properties. I can see an overview for this information and understand the source and destination related to it. So for Risk ID R49, I can see the source is my database. I can see that it's connected out to a spreadsheet as well as 4 different places in my dashboard. If I click go to link, it will retrieve back the information relevant for Risk 49 within my database. And once I'm there, I can better understand the description of that risk, what processes currently incur it as well as what controls mitigate this risk, what is the rating for the current period of time and if there's any financial statement elements that have been tied to this particular risk. So the idea is that you're not waiting hours, you're not running things overnight. You're not having to sift through any number of exceptions. You can establish parameters or thresholds to identify where there are instances of noncompliance or exceptions, have them provided in a clean dashboard to better understand where those exceptions exist and if you need to follow up. All the while being able to create comments and tasks real-time to better communicate the time line and expectations for resolving these issues, taking that nonvalue add time of sifting through documentation and false positives and giving people more of a chance to make an analytical approach to their testing. Great. So now we'll come back into our presentation and continue talking about the lines of defense. So right now, we're going to jump into where we see the future of the second line of defense. In a perfect world, you would only need one line of defense, and that would be able to block and tackle and execute flawlessly each and every time. Because in business, there's always human intervention, there's always a risk that something will go wrong. And that's where we need a second line of defense. The second line of defense is defined as risk management or the compliance teams. These teams often provide oversight to leadership. Individual contributors in the second line might be responsible for more than 1 pillar within the organization. The second line is also responsible for facilitating and monitoring the process. If they are responsible for the compliance alignment with EPA standards, they will likely sign off on a report to those stakeholders. So they do have a stake in the game. The second line and their direct reports are ensuring the organization is meeting laws and regulations as defined by their industry, nation or region. The second line of defense works with the first line to ensure that they are meeting those objectives and acting as the first-line defense in mitigating risks in their daily activities across the business. And where we really see Wdesk and Wdata as a platform coming to help increase efficiencies and drive operational efficiency in this process is by having a centralized and transparent location of all the underlying data. So what leads into those exceptions? What leads into an instance of noncompliance? Having a better workflow across the first line of defense to the second line of defense, being able to really drive collaboration with not just your team or your department, but also external users and teams. And again, being able to connect out all this information real-time into the management dashboards or even personal dashboards, so you constantly have eyes on what's happening and where your risk of bottleneck could be. Great. And with that consideration, I'll pass over to my colleague, Tim.

Thank you very much, Charlie. So Charlie and Imran have covered the demonstration of Wdesk solution for continuous controls monitoring. And Charlie has just expanded there on how it can be applied to the second line, and I'm just now going to cover third line of defense, an internal audit, which, as we mentioned at the very beginning, is the independent assurance function in an organization. So it works with both second line of defense, particularly looking to place reliance on work of the second line of defense, but also looking at the first line of defense and how the first line of defense is managing its risks and controls. So we very much see continuous controls monitoring and its extension, continuous controls auditing, having a big role to play in internal audit. I'm sure many of you on the webinar who work in internal audit are aware of just the increasing buzz around agile auditing and the use of data in internal audit. And that's all about moving the profession into a more dynamic stance, so taking us away from a very static internal audit program and approach to one which is more real-time and continuous. And continuous controls monitoring is a perfect fit for that strategy. And we really see it playing out in 3 main ways in internal audits. So the first is around audit planning. So moving from, again, a static annual audit planning approach to one which is more continuous, more dynamic, whether that be your audit universe or dynamic risk assessments, the business is changing constantly, and we certainly know that from the recent COVID pandemic. So using continuous controls monitoring help refresh. Our dynamic risk assessment is something which absolutely can add more value to internal audit and show that we are being more proactive rather than reactive. Continuous controls monitoring also helps to expand IA's coverage. Because as Charlie and Imran have shown, the Wdesk platform is linked to your data sources. You are moving from sample-based testing to one where you are able to have full coverage over many different populations, many different use cases. Obviously, you've seen vendor management in this particular demo. And that applies not just in terms of kind of audit planning but also drops down into audit fieldwork as well. Where rather than having to -- as I'm sure, we've all been there, I have many times, having to wait for data from your various auditees or your various IT departments, you can now get real-time access and provide comfort to both management and the audit committee on a full-population basis rather than a sample basis. And the third area where I think continuous control monitoring can really impact in a very positive way internal audit is around follow-ups. So traditionally, we would schedule a follow-up audit at some point in the future to check whether management has implemented our recommendations and have the control gaps we've identified been closed. With continuous control monitoring, you almost have a real-time follow-up process going on. And it's very easy through in your controls dashboard, your control alerts to see have the recommendations we've made addressed the issues that we identified. So those are kind of 3 powerful improvements. But over and above these, the key thing for me is really building that collaboration, communication. It's come through in what Imran and Charlie has said about first and second line, and equally applies to the third line, really driving enhanced communications. Sometimes, I think if you were to take the first, second and third line and all ask them, what do they think of the key control points in that -- in a particular process or area, you probably get 3 very different answers. So continuous controls monitoring. The fact that you are looking at the data, you're looking at control points, you're looking at control alerts, you're looking at control dashboards, really gives internal audit a great opportunity to help influence and be party to the conversation about what should our control framework look like. So I think that now brings us to the end of our demonstration. I do think we have a little bit of time for some questions. And thank you so much for sending your questions through. We've been looking at them as they've been coming in.

So I'm just going to ask my first question to Charlie. The question is how much does my IT team need to get involved in setting up my continuous controls monitoring program using your platform?

It's a great question, Tim. Thank you very much for sharing that. And again, having your IT team involved with the process will be very helpful for us to better understand how you want to make that connection, whether the connection will be made directly into that ERP or source system or to a staging center. Again, having that understanding can be pretty helpful when we come to implementation. And [ it's in that ] we want to make sure in those initial conversations we outlined to best set you up for success.

Thank you very much, Charlie. So second question, which Imran, if I can parcel this one off to you. What sort of systems can you connect to?

Yes, sure. So yes, with our connections, we can connect to, I'd like to say, pretty much any solution out there. We do have those connectors. So we can connect to on-premise solutions. We can connect to cloud solutions, ERP systems, consolidation systems, BI systems, whatever systems are out there. We do have those connectors which are available, which you can also access on our support page. We do have some generic connectors, which are available as well. And then if we don't have any of them available on the particular solution which you are interested in, we can also connect using APIs as well.

Okay. Thank you very much. Imran and Charlie, maybe this one for you. You've demonstrated vendor management as your use case for this webinar. What other use cases do you see for your continuous controls monitoring technology?

Certainly. So the thing about continuous control monitoring is going to be -- it's not applicable for every single control in your population. That's just the nature of it. The standard versus nonstandard controls. You'll have to go through and really identify what you're trying to evaluate and if it's the right fit. At the end of the day, if the process that you're putting in place doesn't really match up, then the information you're pulling out really won't be effective. So other instances you might want to have outside of comparing vendor invoices and things of that nature, it could be bank statement reconciliations that you want to take that time back. Instead having users go through and sift through PDFs of bank statement, you'll be able to kind of automate that process to better understand what balances exist and if it actually ties back to what your expectations were for that period of time. Imran, do you have anything to add to that?

Yes. So what I would add to that is exactly what you said there. So if you think of all of those manual processes which you have within your controls environment, and any one of those which we can kind of break down to individual steps, that we can definitely go ahead and automate them as well.

Okay. Thank you, both Imran and Charlie. My own personal favorite and the one that I've seen, it takes me back to my internal audit days is the leavers process, where you would normally do a reconciliation between your human resource management system, your Workday and your IT system to make sure that people who had left have been also deactivated from the IT system and the ability to kind of pull that information into Wdesk in real-time and run those sorts of alerts and control reports and actions just for me, provides that really great level of continuous assurance that actually people are being deactivated from the systems when they leave in the right way and that control point is working. So yes, many use cases out there, and I'm sure Charlie and Imran will be getting into more of those. I'm particularly focusing on the second and third line usage of continuous control monitoring in upcoming webinars. Now I'm very conscious of time. We do have more questions. So apologies, I don't think we'll be able to get through those on this webinar. But absolutely, we will come back to you via e-mail. If you have any additional questions about today's presentation, we would be more than happy to respond. You can submit them through the Q&A engagement tool on this webinar or e-mail at [email protected], and we will get back to you in the next few business days. So I think it leaves me to just finally thank presenters. Charlie and Imran, thank you, guys, for a stellar job on the demonstration. And thank you, the audience, for attending, and we hope you will join us again soon. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Tim. Thanks, everyone.

Bye.

Hello, everybody, and you're very welcome, it's Conor O'Kelly here, Senior Director of Statutory Reporting with Workiva, and I'm joined by Katherine Reynolds on this session. So you're very welcome. If you have a moment, please do respond to the survey questions in the top left corner of your screen. The bottom of your screen, you'll find a few engagement tools, and these are all movable and resizable. So feel free-to-play around with them in your workspace and desktop, however you like. You can also expand or maximize your slide area using the buttons in the top right-hand corner. If you have any questions as we go through the session, myself and Katherine would be delighted to take them. You can submit these through the Q&A engagement tool, and we'll do our best to answer them as we go through the webinar or towards the end. But for anything that requires a more detailed response or if we run out of time, we'll follow-up with you via e-mail. Please note that we do capture all questions that are submitted. So let's jump straight into it. I'm very pleased today to be joined by Katherine Reynolds, who's our Senior Solution Consultant here at Workiva. And for this session, Optimizing Regulatory Reporting for Financial Services. And straightaway, let's get into it and see what we've seen so far and some of the conversations that we're hearing so far. So obviously, we're in the midst of -- or coming out of the lockdown for COVID-19. The sharp macroeconomic shock of COVID-19 and the oil prices are being felt on a week-by-week basis still as businesses and controllers and bankers and risk managers recalibrate around the new normal. And I characterize this as distress accounting with topics at the core, including things like employee welfare, going concern, expected credit losses, operational resilience, stress testing models, liquidity assessment, management estimates, revenue recognition, et cetera, et cetera, cash flow, expected credit losses, government [ bond ] responses and assistance. We're really familiar with the business-as-usual landscape for financial services. It has remained somewhat unchanged for many years. Pre-financial crisis of 2008, of course, it was characterized by entity accounting and business performance. Reporting typically is characterized by large banks, often multiple legal entities, multiple management entities or structures such as joint ventures or other partial legal entities that they were engaged with. After 2018, of course, the rules of the game have been changed and are shifting, especially in the 10 years since the financial crisis. And I don't mean just the formal rules at a global, European or domestic level, but also the unwritten rules, the expectation users of financial services have of the companies that serve them and the wider context in which these interactions take place. The environment we operate in has changed, including the regulatory orthodoxies. And by that, I mean, a generally accepted theory, doctrine or practice of how markets and businesses themselves are managed and regulated, particularly within the financial services space. The first wave of post-crisis regulation is done, firms are better capitalized and the personal responsibilities of their leaders is more embedded. This is changing accounting and accountability models and risk management and corporate governance inside the sector. Secondly, there's a change in consumer needs and attitudes. Long-term low interest rates means the search for return is stronger just as the tolerance for loss lessens. Consumers are getting older, they've less saved and they inherit assets later in life. And thirdly, and lastly, innovation has gathered pace. We're moving from an era of digitization, moving services online to a truly digital economy, one drawing on artificial intelligence and machine learning. This digital transformation is reflected in some of the new products finding the way to consumers over the Internet, some good, some bad, and frankly, some of them downright fraudulent. As we go through COVID-19, and this was taken a couple of weeks ago, it bears testimony to how quickly the environment is changing. Investors are asking different questions and seeking different responses and different management insights from organizations around the availability of cash, the short-term liquidity, the short-term cost management, viability of the company and protection of key assets and value drivers. We got these points here from the Financial Reporting Council, and it's very clear that whilst the Financial Reporting Council were addressing key questions across industry, there are a number of areas here particularly relevant to financial services, including the availability and nature of government support, stress testing, reverse stress testing and viability of different parts of the banking group, intercompany guarantees and commitments and Board decisions and management estimates and how they are monitoring the situation, evaluating that and documenting their decisions, including on the very far hand right there, plausible scenarios and the review of scenarios and risk modeling around liquidity and capital risk management. Financial services companies, of course, are complex operating models that require cross-functional coordination. Continuity, control and confidence of business data is critical to successful execution of daily operations and long-term strategic plans. As we look across the banking, insurance and investment industries, we found common challenges in reporting processes right across the industry, and they include manual and time-consuming data preparation and validation, limited controls that are error prone and lead to high levels of operational risk, disconnected processes from data sources and final output and slow and inefficient collaboration with extended teams. And these are the challenges, I guess, that we've seen and we've heard from our customers, which Katherine, I hope, is going to talk us through in a couple of minutes. So for today's discussion, we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the banking industry to show how Workiva brings you a system of work that connects and automate processes to deliver the highest quality information through controlled and a governed framework of linking and collaborating. The banking industry, of course, houses many frameworks across their organizations. We can see that the Board reporting and corporate governance heads are the main frameworks, which break down further into finance, risk and operations. So let's look a little bit closer into the finance framework. And we see 12 different reporting regulations that this bank must adhere to. Each of these frameworks will require cross-functional collaboration across the other teams in the bank, of course. For a large international bank and multinational bank, these teams will work together across many countries and time zones and create 1 regulatory report as is the case in CCAR/RRP. Even a Capital management, or ICAAP report, will require multiple teams to coordinate and input data and narrative to complete the required templates. So in the last year, with this in mind, Workiva has conducted a comprehensive in-depth study of the compliance microsystem of the United Kingdom banking sector. The study highlights the nuances of all elements and interactions across the various stakeholders for banks in the United Kingdom to satisfy the regulatory compliance regime. Within the U.K. banking sector, the banks will report to at least 10 regulators with 14 different submission platforms. As if that wasn't complex enough, there are at least 300 different forms that every change -- that every bank must comply with. Each of the reports should have 7 or more forms and disclosure data formats inherent to it. To submit the regulatory report, there are more than 6 modes of submission, not to mention the different periodicity and frequency of each of these reports. So we understand that all of these risk and complexity leads to risk across the banking sector and compromises and challenges the teams to complete this in a timely and efficient manner. So how can banks reduce the complexity and provide better governance across this risk compliance regime? Workiva provides the power of connected data by transforming your capital planning process into a dynamic risk management practice that delivers fast and reliable information about financial strength and viability. There are 5 key areas that companies look for to improve their current processes, the first being data technology, security, structure, control and operational resilience. The second being process confidence, the ability to process orders and regulatory expectations with internal governance and executive responsibilities. The third one being operational efficiency to workaround manual processes, hands-off and distraction from value-added work. The next one being reporting, which is the trade-off really between people and technology, dependencies and the domino effect. And then enhanced data analytics, drill down into data reliability and connectivity with back-end systems, systems of record with limited drill down capability and analytical flexibility, and the need to bring that to the floor. So by using the system of work, Workiva connects data, systems and team collaboration through a single process to complete each of the capital planning applications inside one platform. So what does this look like from a practical standpoint? Following the examples of the ICAAP regulatory report, Katherine is going to walk us through an example of current process with disconnected data and a future state with a connected system. So very exciting. Katherine, I'm going to hand it over to you to walk us through it.

Great. Thanks, Conor. All right. So this system of work, the current state versus a future state. So the current state of the disconnected data is what we've seen from many of our customers before we've come into Wdesk, and this is on the same scale of a large multinational firm as well as those local financial services and the banking industry. The common key points that we have found inside of here are there's multiple data sources that have to be aggregated, manipulated and analysis performed on each of those. Updates will happen to this data multiple times throughout the process and send the teams back into this data wrangling stage right here in the middle. And then back again, to push the data into the final template or the documents in themselves. Because the data is disconnected, those teams inside of that data wrangling there, such as the IT team, financial analyst, business analyst, system liaison or whatever your team is called, working across these multiple data sources will be a multiple step process for all of that aggregation and manipulation and trying to be able to get to that analyzing of the data. This is a very inefficient process with little to no transparency into the data lineage for the reporting team and upper management to review the information. The lack of an audit trail and data lineage increases the risk of the banks don't have a full oversight into the governance of their regulatory information. So how can we fix that? Looking at the future state or a more connected system by using Wdesk, we are able to offer multiple source systems, which flow into Wdesk by using Wdata. Having a direct API connector will reduce the manual efforts that the teams currently use to aggregate the data. Once the data has been aggregated and any manipulation that also need to happen, the teams will then run a query to pull the exact information needed into their masters list spreadsheet for any additional manipulation or analysis. The data has been linked into the final regulatory template or document. This entire process using a connected system allows for a single point in data aggregation, manipulation and analysis. The controlled environment will have a full transparency into the data life cycle, they have full auditability across every single thing that is happening during your reporting process. We also allow for the collaborative efforts by having multiple data iterations and ease of analysis for all the reasoning and results that then have the narrative written up inside of the reports. We can link the data to automatically feed from that master spreadsheet and regulatory template every single time there is an update. Again, getting rid of all of those manual changes as we saw in the previous current state. And then finally, we have the embedded governance capabilities enabling easy, accessible audit views because everything is sitting inside of one platform, fully auditable, everything is tracked, we can trace through the entire data lineage, all of the narrative updates as well as having the review process inside of this one platform. So in a moment, I'm going to provide a demonstration of some of the Wdesk functionalities that will provide a connected system of work for the end-to-end process. But first, let's take a look at 4 example teams across an ICAAP reporting process and how they'll benefit from a system of work that provides this connected reporting. So looking at the analytics, the reporting, the oversight and not to mention, one of the biggest, the IT with access control and security information. So from an IT standpoint, what are they looking for? They're responsible for the access control and security of the entire reporting process. We can't have this information falling into the wrong hands. It can't get released publicly. It has to stay in a tight secure location. So Wdesk will offer a single platform for the entire ICAAP reporting process. All contributors will access 1 document and 1 master source data spreadsheet according to the permissions they are given. The data will then be linked from the data source system and flow directly into the final output documents. All reviews for legal and upper management can also take place in Wdesk. This allows the information to be maintained in 1 location and no longer requires the team to send an e-mail attachment of the document for review. You're not sending notes for commentary. We're eliminating the need for digging through old e-mails to find the most recent notes and data. And I'd say on top of that, and we've heard this from our customers before, sending those e-mail is very easy to send it to the wrong person, so the wrong team could get the wrong information. That is not ideal. That's not very secure. So by forcing all of your users to come to this 1 location, everything is tied together and it's nice and secure. Next up, looking at our financial analysts. So you need to receive the model updates in a timely manner. By using Wdesk, we can help automate that process, and we can also set up the predetermined threshold or triggers at various levels to then push the data throughout the process. So every time that data is coming from that source system, that general ledger or anywhere else of those multiple systems that could be based on, again, those predetermined thresholds, we then tell the data where it's going to flow to you next. So what part of the ICAAP document? Is it the stress-testing scenarios? Is it some kind of management information deck that needs to be put together that can be automatically pushed out? We can also then have that further analysis because we're taking away the very manual efforts of getting that data from an Excel file, copying and pasting it into the Word file and tracing it back and forth every single time there's an update. That's no longer a problem. We're giving them those automation through the connectors and APIs. You will also see through our linking functionality that I will demonstrate in just a moment. And then again, we're permissioning the information of who have access to what and when they have that information. Next up is our reporting team. So the reporting team can leverage the prebuilt templates. As Conor mentioned, there's quite a few templates that in the U.K. alone has to update themselves and those are always changing. We always want to make sure we're up-to-date with all of that information. So we've got those prebuilt templates and style guides to help get that uniform look across the board. We can also complete the narratives very easily because that data is going to be coming directly from your source system automatically, flowing into the documents through the linking, the narratives can then follow-up. So sometimes it is a separate team, sometimes it's also the exact same team, right? The modeling team or the analysts are also writing the narrative around the data that is flowing in. So all of that, again, can be permissioned out. And then again, every one of these teams are going to access the same live documents and spreadsheets at the exact same time to update the relevant sections of information. So how is that important to then our oversight or the upper management team? Well, mostly because it's live, right, business decisions are being made every day on the most recent set of data. So in a current state, if you're using that Excel and that Word, the copy pasting of information, you're not always sure when the most recent version was done. And do you have the most recent version of the information, right? Are you looking at a document that was saved final, final final, final for real, and I've seen those names before. So I'm not making that up. I've seen a lot of version of what the documents look like before they come into Wdesk themselves. So once everything is inside of this one platform, all of that data is connected, all the linking has been done, the narratives are complete, you can feed your management and your information presentation decks directly and know that the data is live. So the charts, the tables, the narrative, all that information is going to be updated in live time to make those decisions off of. You can also do your review and approval process directly inside of Wdesk with every single team that can link directly to their information so they know what they're fully attesting to. So in that current state, a lot of the customers that I've previously worked with, the sign off process is not very robust. If you have any changes to the questionnaires you were answering for the final sign off, you have to go to an IT team for that provider because everything is hardcoded. Inside of Wdesk, everything can be done ad hoc. We can also then set up templates so we can roll forward this for every single year. It's very easy to update the teams and then users who get this information and have that full sign off and auditability happening at the same time. You can also then force the users to provide commentary as to why something might not be signed off. So when we're attesting to that full end-to-end governance and that reporting process, have somebody come back and say, no, my information is not up-to-date, it's not correct, you then have to send an e-mail why. And however long it takes for them to reply back, then you finally get your answer. Maybe it takes 2 or 3 e-mails of you saying, "Hey, can you let me know? I need this for final sign off. Still waiting." Those are very real examples that I'm sure everyone has seen before of that back and forth. And so we're eliminating that for you to give you, again, those automatic insights. So this will give you, again, that full insight of the reporting process to now make your business decisions on the most up-to-date pieces of information. All right. So now I'm going to take you inside of the platform of Wdesk and show you what this actually looks like. All right. So the first thing we're looking at here is the home screen inside of Wdesk. So Wdesk is a cloud-based solution written in our own proprietary code. What that means for the IT team is that there are no downloads, there are no manual updates that take place. Everything being cloud-based, means we're able to spend updates automatically to the platform. There's no disruption time for the teams on the regulatory report. This also means, you can see that I have my ICAAP document, my master spreadsheet and my management information presentation all inside of this one place. So again, we are no longer going to a shared Drive or a SharePoint for all of our information. It's live inside of this one location based on the permissions that we have given out here. So if I go ahead and open up my ICAAP document, I've got that done over here for us, we can see the document's set up. We have my outline on the left-hand side. And now I can have as many contributors as I need inside of this process. So I know that ICAAP is a little bit smaller than some of the documents that you might be working on, but you still need that collaborative effort and the full audit trail of information. So to apply that information around the permissions, I can simply come over here to my permissions and my advanced permissions tab. I already have this open. And you're going to see, on the left-hand side, the exact same outline. And this is what allows us to break down those permissions per individual sections. So previously mentioning how every company has the final final, version 1, version 2 of information. We also see it broken down. So Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3. Those would be 3 separate Word documents getting sent to all the individual contributors and teams to update their information, get sent back to my core reporting team to then consolidate all of that, and that's just the narrative. And then we have to, again, consolidate all of the data pieces and map that all through. So it's a very time-consuming process. It's a very manual process, and there's a lot of risk involved, making sure we have the correct version of the document, making sure we're placing information in their correct order and then making sure we have the correct data flowing through. So by applying my different permission sets inside of my one document, I've gotten rid of all of that risk and all of that worry. And you'll see here, I have 4 different types of document permissions that I can apply. And these same permissions you will see across the spreadsheet or presentation inside of Wdesk. The first one being none, and it means just that. There are no permissions. There's no access. You can't see any of this information. So when you're not ready for a legal or upper management to see that information or it's another team who should not have access, we can give them no permission and they see nothing. The next level up is the viewer icon, and it's just that. They can view the information and they cannot make edits, but they can leave comments inside of here. So this helps with that review process. You're no longer -- when you only have a question, you don't have to send an e-mail, hey, where does this number come from, get another e-mail back, maybe sticky note because you guys are close to each other in the office. Currently, that's not the case. Thanks to COVID-19, we're all sitting at home, soon to hopefully be back in our offices, but we can then still have all of that commentary in the live document no matter where we're sitting. This is great for legal and upper management as well as the individual teams to know why numbers were updated or narratives were updated and the reasoning behind each of that. Next level up here is my edit icon. So we're giving a little bit more flexibility, and edit is just that. Now I can edit the document. I can still leave comments. And this is based on the permissions I have, whether it's the data point or a narrative piece of information itself. And then the highest one up is the owner. So an owner allows the person to control the permissions of the document, they can accept or redirect tracked changes as well as update the style guide that I'm going to go over in just a few moments there. So by having all of these different permissions, I can then apply them to a group or individual users. So here, we can see, right now, my all users defaults to an editor. I'm an owner. [ Alice ] is a viewer on the document level, but I'm giving her edit access to the executive summary. [ Matt ] has defaulted as an editor. Then if I scroll down, I'm giving him ownership to my stress testing and scenario analysis. And to make any of those changes, it's very easy just to click inside of here. Let's say, [ Matt ] is only a viewer of the cover. So I just click for him to be an owner -- or sorry, [ a viewer ], click save, and I'm done. So it's very quick to make those changes and no longer have to worry about, again, that consolidation of information that we previously saw. So now jumping into our analysis then or the modelers. If I jump back into my document here, I'm going to go ahead and scroll down to my stress testing analysis section of information. How can we automate this? So I talked a lot about that automation and flexibility inside of here to get rid of those manual efforts and reducing that risk of information. So inside of my stress testing scenario, you're going to see in the top left-hand corners, I have a green triangle. Inside of Wdesk, that lets me know it's a destination link. If I go ahead and click inside of this common equity value here on the right-hand side, I'm going to open my linked properties, you'll see I have one source of B5 inside of my master spreadsheet feeding 4 different destinations. So now we're starting to reduce that risk of information. Anytime B5 is updated, all 4 destinations, we can see 3 different locations within this document, as well as linking out to my management information presentation deck, will get updated at the same time. So I'd like to say, with linking, you're right or wrong but you're consistent. And the nice thing about this is that once that's done, you're good for the roll forward for next year. The links are maintained and it's very easy to roll forward and move on here. So if I follow this 85.1 million to my source value, it's now going to take me into my master spreadsheet. We see the exact same pretty table inside of here and know that, that blue triangle in the top left-hand corner is now that source of information. So that's the starting point of an implementation, of just taking the current Excel information, the current Word, importing those into Wdesk and connecting that data point. Now we want to take it a step further. We really want to trace all of this data information. We can see on the right-hand side my full audit trail, every single time I've made an update, and I've made quite a few of those today. But where does this data specifically come from? So I've mentioned before that data lineage, in a current state, does not exist. In a connected state, it does. So clicking inside of my 85.1 million, we can see this information is coming from my stress testing within my source data. And this icon right here lets me know it's coming from Wdata. So I've done that full connection back to my true general ledger information, where I can pull this, my modeling and forecasting information via an API connection through which I can then again set up to those predetermined intervals and trigger events based at certain thresholds to update the spreadsheet here. And then again, from this spreadsheet, it will then feed out into my final documentation or that management information presentation we can see up here. With all of that information, I freed up all that copying and pasting, all that manual typing of information across the data points themselves. And now I can provide better analysis on the information. That's what all of our customers have said. If you're the person doing the modeling and the mapping of the data and the stress testing or any of these scenarios of information, you wish you had more time to actually analyze that data. So by having this automatically set up to update, connect trigger points out and feed into your documents, we now have time for that. And a lot of that can be done inside of Wdata, which I don't have time to show you today, but we do have those drill down capabilities to allow you to look further into the documentation themselves for all of those data points. And Wdata also maintains a full log-in record of that audit trail of data. So you have that true data lineage mapping for legal, for upper management, for anyone else looking to see where does that information come from and where is it now going. So now if I jump back into the document, I mentioned before the template version of this and the preset version. So as I scroll through here, we're going to see it's pretty clean. I've got the same headers, the same formatting of my narratives, and I'm just going to scroll up here, the same formatting there. Go 1 step higher, we can see my 1.1 is now slightly different as well as my executive summary #1. So we can start to lock down the style of these templates, to make that consistent format, to match those prebuilt templates that you're submitting to the regulators. And that can be done up here underneath the edit toolbar and inside of our style guide themselves. I've already got it open for you. So inside of here, we can see it's very easy to update and lock down the style so that each contributor will automatically be editing within the same format. This will save a lot of time and effort from the core team that has to do this today. So again those same teams who are not only consolidating from multiple Word documents into one final output -- most people tend to write within whatever that generic standard of, when you open a Word file, whatever format that's in, that's what they're using. It also works with the customer who likes to use navy blue as he's drafting and then would change it to black when he was done. Navy and black are very hard to tell the difference between. So when that consolidation of the information is happening, it was almost missed between those different colors because the teams didn't have style guides to know that, that one individual was not done editing his information that he had saved on the shared drive. So that on the final version, almost made it to the final cut of the regulatory filing. We don't have to worry about that anymore. It's as simple as you can see I've got normal, my 1, 2, 3 different heading styles. I can even call my table style as to what a normal should be. And changing my font sizes, the styles, the different colors. And then, it's simple, by clicking this little prevent changes, now my changes are prevented. So if there is an instance where information has been typed up outside of Wdesk, and you just want to copy and paste it in, because I've locked this, if that font was previously, let's say, in Times New Roman, it's now going to come in as Arial as soon as I hit paste. So we are eliminating again all of that manual effort for something that has nothing to do with the regulation. This is truly just to make the document look uniform and consistent for the regulators by a simple click of a button. So it's something that not every team will think of but is a huge deal to the people who are working on that consolidation of the document themselves. So the last thing that I want to show you today are the outline labels within the document. So you've probably already noticed the green, orange and blue circles on the left-hand side here. And this is a very quick and easy visual way to mark the status within the document. When I hover over the green, we can see I have final, yellow is my in progress, blue is my not started piece of information. I'm going to go ahead and expand this out so you can see, I'm working with 9 different labels right now, again just for a simple visual indicator during that reporting process. This is something that could have helped that team. For the contributor who uses navy blue versus black, he could have marked his section as in progress and the team would know it's not final yet. I have seen companies use nearly 20 different labels to help with this process. So it is quite a change to bring your end-to-end users, from those data providers to the analysts, the modelers, the people who write the narrative, management who's reviewing, legal who is also reviewing this information, inside of this one collaborative framework, you don't always know when it's your turn if you're towards the end of that process. By adding in these simple visual indicators, you can easily see where this is sitting. And I know this has been a huge hit across our customers, especially on a larger scale document. We can see this one has quite a few sections to break apart really around this legal, right? So legal ready with comments, no comments. Now it's someone made their updates, it's ready again for round 2, here is legal round 2 updates. Keeps that system very simple, very easy to navigate and again keeps that entire audit trail within this one platform. Plus it's very satisfying to see all of these green finals at the very end. I don't know about you, but when you start to see 20 different colors, that final green, I think, is very nice. So this has been a very high-level demonstration of just a few of the Wdesk functionalities that our customers have told us have provided many optimizations that they didn't previously have with their disconnected data systems. So I hope this gave you a small insight into how Wdesk could help you process towards a more connected system inside of your regulatory process.

Wow, thanks very much, Katherine.

You're welcome.

Okay. Let me go to this one. So we've got a couple of questions here. We've got a large group of international people with us today. And first question comes from David, Katherine, who's working in a regulated bank in the city of London. So thanks for joining us this afternoon, [ David, ] you're very welcome. Question, Katherine, is does the platform have any workflow capabilities to assist the reporting process?

Yes. That is a very good question, [ David. ] So we do have multiple options that help assist in a workflow. So the outline labels that I just showed during the demonstration is one visual indication that our customers like to use for status updates. You also have the ability to leave comments, you can create tasks and send the document for review, just again keep everybody inside of that one central platform so you have that full audit trail of information. And then we are also working very closely with our development teams to create a more automated workflow where we can design a process that triggers an event after a previous item has been completed just as we see on the data lineage side.

Excellent. Next question, Katherine, comes from New York City. And this is from [ Raj. ] Again, thanks for joining us this morning, [ Raj, ] a little bit early this morning there. And [ Raj, ] again, he looks like he's in a U.S.-regulated bank, so thanks for joining us, [ Raj. ] So question is, what does the review process inside of Workiva look like, Katherine?

Yes. So that's a very good question as well, thank you. So within each document, there's an option to send the document for review. And you can send that to -- from a very specific document history that I very briefly showed today. So when you're milestone-ing your different histories, you can send the important ones out for review. And it's going to provide a link to the recipient, bringing them right back into Wdesk where they can leave any commentary that they have inside of here as they're reading that information, again, permissioned out to what section they do have access to. And this, again, I cannot iterate enough on how this keeps the full audit trail within this single location. We also have -- I touched on very briefly on the final sign off process that can take place within Wdesk using our certification tool. And certifications will allow that core team to create a template that can easily be rolled forward for each submission and sent to the appropriate teams for that final attestation to ensure that all information is correct and ready for submission.

Very good. Excellent response. Katherine, thanks very much. Next question. And I think we just have time for maybe just 1 more. This question comes from [ Marcus. ] And [ Marcus ] looks like he's in a regulated bank in Frankfurt, in Germany, clearly a very heavily regulated market. Thanks for joining us this afternoon, [ Marcus. ] So his question -- [ Marcus' ] question, Katherine, is when regulators change their template, do you update these? So I guess the question is around regulatory change and how do we capture regulatory changes in some of the templates, how do we do that?

That's also another great question. Thanks, [ Marcus. ] And I hear this one also all the time. So we do work -- we have in Workiva a customer success manager who is your continued support throughout your entire Workiva journey. They are here forever for you. They work very closely with you to ensure that we are aware of any template changes. As we saw before, there's over 300 in the U.K. alone that doesn't even touch Frankfurt. But quite a few different template changes that get updated all the time. So we do work closely with you to ensure that you are aware of what those changes are and how to make those changes yourselves because, once you're inside of Wdesk, those are live documents, and you don't want us to edit those because your legal and your audit teams don't know who Katherine from Workiva is. So we will make sure that you are comfortable with making all of those changes yourself.

Very good. Excellent. Thanks very much, Katherine. We do have 1 or 2 more. And it looks like we're a little bit out of time. So we've got your contact details. We've got 2 more, looks like one from Dublin and we've got some from Singapore as well. So we will follow up on them off-line. Unfortunately, we're out of time just at the time being. Myself and Katherine would, of course, be delighted to answer any further questions. So -- and we're going to reach out to you guys when we can get to. In the meantime, you can e-mail your questions to [email protected]. It's been a terrific session. We've been really delighted to have you all this afternoon. We look forward to joining again. And it just remains for me to say, thank you very much for taking the time out. And thank you to Katherine. Take care, everybody. Have a good rest of the day.

Thanks, everyone.

Hi, everyone. On behalf of the Workiva team, welcome to this Amplify GO session. Before we begin, I just wanted to cover a few housekeeping items. So at the bottom of your screen are multiple application engagement tools that you can use during this webinar. All of the engagement tools are adjustable, so feel free to move them around to get the most out of your desktop space. You can also expand your slide area or maximize it to the full screen by clicking on the arrows in the top right corner. [Operator Instructions] So thank you so much for attending today's webinar on the topic of ESEF. We're going to be covering Why ESEF and Other Regulatory Changes are Challenging Organizations to Think Broader about the Record to Report Transformation. I'm Francesca Van Oss, I'm a Senior Manager of Partnerships at Workiva over -- across EMEA. And I will be your host of today's virtual event. I'm joined today by David and Robert from Trintech. David is Director of Partner Enablement; and Robert Michlewicz is Chief Strategy Officer. So Robert, perhaps you can start by just giving a bit of background on Trintech.

Yes, absolutely. Thank you very much for having us today. And it's a pleasure to be here in this Amplify event, Francesca. Some may be familiar with Trintech, some may not. So I'll just give a very brief overview. Trintech is a leading global provider of integrated record to report software solutions. So if you're familiar with your Workiva relationship and working with Workiva on the reporting process, Trintech works more upstream from that in the office of finance, helping facilitate the financial flow cycle. So we have over 3,500 clients around the globe that rely on our cloud-based technologies to basically try to bring more efficiency, reliability and strategic insights to the overall financial operations. So been doing this for several years with our companies. Trintech's been around for over 30 years. And it's really a pleasure to be here today.

Thank you, Robert. So I thought we would start with a little bit around the background of what is ESEF and who does it affect. So for those of you who might be fairly new to the ESEF mandate, I'll just provide a little bit of background. And for those of you who are very familiar with it, it's just a bit of a recap. So what is ESEF? So ESEF stands for the European Single Electronic Format. And it's a new rule mandating the issuers on EU-regulated markets will have to use [Audio Gap] Data [ map ] when they're preparing their annual financial reports. So what it means is that EU issuers are going to be required to produce their annual financial reports in a machine readable way. And it makes them more discoverable, and it brings the EU capital markets into the digital information age. And who does this affect? It's around -- there's about 8,000 issuers in the EU regulated market. And those with consolidated statements, which is around 5,300 of those, will need to produce their report in XHTML in line with the XBRL tagging to their main financials, so the cash flows, the balance sheet, the income, equity statements. And those without the consolidated statements will need to publish their reports in XHTML only. So what it does is it creates more digital, unambiguous, accurate, readable versions of the financial statements. And it's really one of the core capabilities of the [ old ] standard. So ESEF in that way, [ is changing ] the way that annual reports are not only created, but how they're filed and consumed and also how teams work together. What it means is that [indiscernible] does require standardized reporting, and it can provide for consistently structured data. And it means that it's been accessible across different storage mechanisms. And that's how ESMA, the European Securities and Markets Authority was tasked with developing this to improve accessibility compared to the [Audio Gap] Process. All of these companies have to file their report in XHTML rather than the format of present, which is a PDF. And this, in doing so, provides greater transparency. And what it means by transparency, is it means it makes it more machine readable by identifying barcodes to the data. And I guess that's an easy way to think about it when we talk about XBRL. And the data is embedded in the HTML document that can be opened in common web browsers, and it's then placed with the regulator in each of the local jurisdictions. But it can also be publicly available via the company's website as well. And ESMA has also translated all the main tags into 23 European languages so that investors can compare the companies without the language being a barrier. So issuers can then extend the tag by making narrower or wider in meaning relating to themselves. And it's really creating that broadening of understanding and making it much more standardized. And so it means by -- this is really going to transform the way annual reporting occurs. So at present, there's quite an archaic medium, which does not really fit the purpose if you think about it. [Audio Gap] The company. Most of them recreate documents, [ specializing ] environment that's designed for print or HTML. Other issuers often just use Excel. And this is where the ESEF opportunity comes about. So the iXBRL. [Audio Gap] Now becomes the principal under the transparency directive. And it means that the PDF is no longer the principal document. And therefore, this iXBRL document, which is required by mandate is then the document that is subject to enforcement reviews by the national regulators. And as such, [indiscernible] seem to be obviously a great positive around this, which is because it's a great opportunity to actually assess your current processes and the key [indiscernible] and ultimately, in doing so, companies can look at the internal systems that can help mitigate these risks as well. So when we meet with existing and future customers, and we discuss there the processes and how they're going about them and what existing tools they're using, we actually also discuss with them where does the data come from, how does that come about. And I think that's one of the great areas that we -- is important to look at when you're going through an adjustment of tools and looking at your processes as well. They already have a very highly stressful time line and then you go and add tagging and XHTML conversion on top of that without them extending the time line [Audio Gap] How to mitigate these risks. So. [Audio Gap]

If I can ask you, with Workiva and Trintech, I think part of that story together, when we look at these key challenges and risks, you wouldn't necessarily automatically associate XBRL tagging and Trintech. So but how are you seeing this new mandate impacts your customers and decisions they're making around tool sets and how they are now looking at the regulatory landscape differently?

Yes, yes. It's a great question, Francesca. And what I love about this slide right here, these 4 pillars that you have on here is the regulatory compliance piece or the -- in this case, the ESEF filing is just a component to it. So what we basically see is that regulatory change is constant. In this case, it's the ESEF mandate that is being introduced to many of the people here attending today, but what that really impacts is that does impact your financial close process, your filing process. You mentioned earlier, XHTML, in line XBRL or iXBRL. These may be new things to an organization to have to adjust to. And with that, that involves looking at internal processes as well as how to meet the actual mandate. I think -- but the good thing is that, to understand the mandate and the schedules that are associated with this mandate, it is manageable. To your point earlier that Workiva has been working with SEC filers for XBRL for years, Trintech, the same. When we look at the SEC filers, some may be here today, they've been managing this now for well over a decade. This was a gift to the -- from the SEC to SEC filers back in the 2008, 2009 period. But to understand that, it's not a point in time, just make the filing to be complete. It's truly an evolutionary process. In fact, the SEC's most recent update to their 2020 taxonomy now introduces data quality standard rules. So even your first pillar around here, around data consistency, that's extremely critical. It's critical to our customers, just as much as it's critical to Workiva's customers because we have to have the consistent data that's actually driving the process of what's actually going to go into the actual report. Because when we think about mandates like ESEF for utilization of XBRL, what's the real purpose of them? The real purpose is to really get the regulatory agencies clean data sets that they have not been able to get from organizations before. So they're trying to do this so that they can run their own analytics but also provide the best accessible data back into the investment community as they evaluate the different organizations. The other thing that's important too beyond just the mandate and XBRL and the data is, part of the ESEF requirement is that the auditors now have to provide an opinion on these filings. Well, this is key, especially for our customers because what they're trying to do is mitigate a lot of audit risks that could occur or be a part of this new process. So it's [ extremely an area of focus ] for them. So we're seeing that quite a bit. So the other 2 things you have on here, the process reengineering and then the collaboration component, this is extremely critical because, as we all know, finance teams are more virtual today than they ever have been before. And this is likely to be a continuation. So the real key is how can you utilize technology, reengineer your processes and look at your virtual teams to meet mandates like ESEF but also drive an effective record to report cycle.

Yes, I think that's a really important piece, particularly that last piece around not just looking at ESEF right now but also the possibility to look at the full record to report process as part of this. Sometimes mandates encourage change and it can encourage a great review of all processes. And I think it's great to look at how technology can automate a full financial reporting process, which is what you are saying as well and, therefore, decreasing the risk, increasing efficiency and reducing costs ultimately as well. I think that leads me to David. You obviously see this from an enablement angle as well and working directly with the customers. So what have you experienced in the client side at Trintech? And what are you hearing? And what are the key areas of focus you're seeing at the moment?

Yes. I think there's 2 particular areas to focus on here with the reporting side. One of the key areas around the process of actually managing that whole operation, especially across multiple companies across multiple jurisdictions, there can be a significant number of submissions that need to be made on a monthly, quarterly, annual basis. So actually just trying to manage all of those particular activities within the process can be quite time-consuming and often lead to a lot of manual spreadsheets to be able to track the progress of that. Also, what we see are potentially multiple teams actually engaged in the end-to-end process. And that sometimes lead to some clarity on roles and responsibilities and often leading to potential duplication of workload or clarity on actual responsibility. The second area, that is around probably the confidence in the numbers. As we said, there's multiple teams potentially working on those activities. And that creates a time delay from, say, for example, a monthly R2R reporting to actually an annual submission. So the teams that are actually pulling and producing those reports together need to gain some comfort in the actual figures below the underlying sort of reports. That may lead to supplementary data as well. So trying to drill back into an audit trail, who's approved it, who's actually reviewed the figures, is there any history that's needed because, again, there may be a different focus from the R2R teams, the statutory teams as to what they're all trying to produce. So again, those areas are sort of some of the challenges that we see organizations facing. I'll pass across to Robert now.

Yes. So Francesca, what -- to kind of build on what we've been saying here is when we think about, like you said earlier, some people may not totally understand why Workiva and Trintech would naturally come together at a time like this to help companies manage an ESEF mandate. So I think it may be helpful just to say, look, what are we trying to achieve? Because you -- if you're part of a reporting -- part of the organization responsible for external reporting, me in the ESEF mandate or the like, you may not always interact with those people that are working in the financial close cycle. So these are actually 2 parts of the organization that maybe historically, in the past, have worked in a siloed approach, a little bit to what David was talking about within the organization. There's things happening [ upside. ] But if you look at the 2 components of the organization, what they're both trying to achieve is just the production of reliable financial statements. It may be an ESEF mandate, it could be a different type of regulatory report they're trying to make. But essentially, both parties share this in common is that they really want to produce reliable financial statements. That's why they exist. That's why they're doing it. But also, what we work from is these -- what we call these magical 4 arrows that we always try to make sure is a part of the actual process, which is how do you do that in a way that you can effectively increase efficiency and effectiveness of your team in the process while simultaneously reducing cost and risk. I can recall early days when people would say, hey, I knew -- had this new mandate, so I don't have 60 days anymore, I have 45. Or I don't have -- from a date of an execution, I don't have 7 working days, I now have 3. So I have less time to work with. Or I'm just trying to cut this many days out of my financial close. So we've had people say, I have less time to work with, so I need to work faster or more efficiently. But that could also come with an increase in risk. So what we don't want to do is have an organization meet the time deadline but produce very bad data or very bad reports or filings or such. So the real key to these 4 arrows is how do you make sure that these actually happen in concert in a way where you're actually driving a proper transformational way. So what we thought we would do is maybe just for the benefit of the group that may not know the entire upstream process, let's start with the end in mind. Why are we doing this anyway, why is there a financial close, why is there an ESEF mandate, why is there different SEC reporting requirements? It's to generate a report, right? So we have to do this. It could be a Board book. It could be something like that to just your different stakeholders. But this reporting component is obviously where the Workiva platform works at its best, managing the entire creation of that report, getting that filing submission done, to your point earlier, of managing the XBRL and such. But the real question is, where is that data coming from? It's coming from the systems of record within your organization. So for most organizations, these are your ERPs, okay. There could be tax systems and several -- other third-party systems that you utilize, but these are your systems of record. These are your systems of truth that you rely on within your organization to actually use for your reporting purposes. So you never want to change that source of truth or that system of record. So you want to make sure that remains as your source of truth. . But you ultimately have to get that data from there, make sure it's in a cleansed way to get to a reporting cycle. So between those 2 is actually the financial close. And this is where the Trintech solution really lies, to take that data from those systems of record, make sure that they're verified actuals and that actually all the tasks associated with that financial close are occurring in the right way that's in accordance with how that business needs to operate so that the report is of the highest quality standards they can possibly meet but also within the time line. So what -- it's very easy if you start to look at the components there. This diagram gets very confusing pretty quickly. But from a linear perspective, it's very easy for companies to say, well, I would do reconciliations. Then I would do journal entries. I would do that in accordance with my close list, but also in my overall compliance tasks. And when you draw it linearly, it looks very simple. But in actuality, and I think you see this, too, in the reporting side, it doesn't really happen that way. All these other things get in the way, like Excel and phone calls and these other files and stuff to verify all of that. So what should be a very streamlined process starts to get very complex very fast. And in all of my years of working with companies that are trying to adhere to reporting requirements, typically, they're usually waiting on those financials. They're waiting on to finalize those F-pages, to actually meet that filing mandate. And the real question is why. Well, here's what's happening upstream. So if you're on the reporting side and you don't actually have visibility within your organization of what's happening, this is what's happening upstream before those actual verified financials are able to come to you so you can use them in your reporting process. So again, back to the question earlier of we don't do XBRL, but where is the connectivity? The connectivity between the office of the controllership or the financial close team and the reporting team is right here because when we cleanse those actual financials to use in the reporting process, we want to make sure that we're doing it in accordance with all the controls in place. So just like Workiva puts a process or a control process around reporting, we then take that and we put a system of controls around the entire, what we call, financial close process up to the reporting cycle. So what we want to do here is capture all those different processes and put them in a way where all those users are in 1 system, so you can optimize the process, but you can also get maximum visibility to what's holding up the process or potentially introducing additional challenges. So one of the things we hear from companies around the globe, because we work with some of the biggest companies in the world, and whether you're big or small, every company typically will say this, yes, but our close is unique or our process is unique. And I smile when I say that because here's what I've learned throughout the years, right? Every company is unique. That's what makes everybody a unique company. However, every company goes through a financial close and reporting process. So everybody shares that in common. What I believe makes them all unique is the compliance framework to which each party runs their organization -- and we identify that compliance framework as what are those risk thresholds, what are those risk areas for your business that you actually have to uniquely manage in your financial close process to actually produce your actual report or what you're going to report in ESEF or in marketing -- to the market? So this is what we look at, putting a control system around that but then making sure the uniqueness of that organization is leveraged into that process in terms of their individual compliance framework. So with that said, I'm going to turn that over to David because I know David, from a client side, can give even more perspective into what I was just describing.

Yes. Great. Thanks, Robert. So as Robert has mentioned here, we've got organizations now really trying to drive to reduce cost and risk whilst also trying to demand that data to be first time right. There's a real push now, rather than just the compilation of the end result, but actually to get finance to add value into the overall commercial process. So it's a case of trying to get that data out faster. Certainly, when I was in operations, we were probably spending 80% of the time pulling the data together and only enabling 20% of the time to actually review it. We need to turn that around now. We can turn the organization to only spending 20% of their time pulling the data together and allowing 80% of the time then to actually review it, help with finance -- the commercial areas make the decisions that they need on that. So the automation really does start now acting as an enabler to do this. And in particular, experience is showing that the core ERP systems do not always provide the depth of functionality that's needed to enable finance now to move faster. And as Robert said, we don't want to move faster whilst compromising risk. We don't want to be taking shortcuts. As a colleague once said, we need to actually achieve a faster, smarter close. So high level of accuracy, but doing it a lot quicker, and that's with automation. So where Trintech helps to do that, it helps ensure that the R2R can maintain the quality control needed across a number of core processes. And as we see on the diagram here, as Robert says, every business thinks they are different, but actually, the core process is fundamentally, under these R2R, tend to be the same. High-volume matching, intercompany -- significant pain points around intercompany transactions. We all need to validate our balance sheet. We all need to make sure those figures are valid within the balances that were carried, highlight those high-risk values that might be sitting in their journal entry or core area to actually control the posting of that. Again, a lot of the ERP system, most postings are now directly into the system. So journal entry introduces, especially with manual journals, that risk profile. Managing the close, whether that's again on the monthly cycle or actually looking at the work around the submission for any statutory reporting. Controls, auditors are relying on those controls, want to be identified, the risks identified. But also the performance of those controls, which then allow the whole process there to be managed more effectively. So we're seeing that each of these then really starts to drive automation, helps to drive the transparency and the control within each of these areas. It helps an organization define that service delivery. So it actually defines what each team is looking to do and therefore, ensures continuity of the full [indiscernible] and also provides a full audit trail on all of those activities. And therefore, to come to the reported piece, it allows for the comfort, the acknowledgment that those figures are correct. And what we see now is that all of that moving away from sort of spreadsheets, we're not needing to be hunting on shared drives for that data to be reported through. One of the other areas that we just mentioned earlier, one of the challenges around the regulatory reporting piece was the multiple hand off between teams within the finance organization, where we said that usually, the monthly R2R reporting is carried out by one team, and the monthly quarterly statutory reporting is then completed by different teams. And often resulted in the time-lapse with the work that's actually performed. So those teams performing the upstream need to be far more reliant on the downstream. And again, with all of the system of controls and the checkpoints within these various processes, it gives great visibility to those upstream being able to rely on the quality of that data. The integration between Trintech and Workiva helps drive this integrity and should ensure a smoother process for the regulatory reporting. So Francesca, how does this new partnership facilitate the actual ESEF requirements?

Yes, that's a good question. I think it relates back to what you were just saying as well around regulatory reporting in general as well. And I think that's why we're excited about the partnership from that angle too. It's because it not only -- we can work together on this ESEF process, but also transforming global financial close, statutory reporting, regulatory reporting, in addition to ESEF. So I think it's exciting and it enables you to have a streamlined process, where you don't have to have lots of different tools to work together. We can actually see Trintech and Workiva working together for a lot of different areas of business, which I find particularly interesting. And I think for me, the 2 platforms working together provide that as a comprehensive solution. Often customers indicate that it's a unicorn tool that can solve everything. And I think the way to look at it is look at tools that harmoniously talk to each other and work with each other, such as the Trintech-Workiva relationship. And I think when you start to think of it like that, and you start to see the efficiencies you can gain from having 2 best-in-class tools, I think it starts to become very interesting around all those sorts of things you can start looking at your business to start solving. And I think of particular interest as well is around transforming sort of execution of that global financial close process. And in doing so, gaining -- no matter the use case, gaining greater transparency, accuracy, control across the full record to report process, which you were both just talking about. And I think like -- I mean ESEF is one of those processes where, like I mentioned at the beginning, the time line is already tight to do annual reporting. And then adding in the complexity of tagging plus also reviewing that tagging and producing the XHTML conversion, it just tightens that time frame even more. So I think with that, you want to make sure that the process, it has as much transparency as possible, it's efficient as possible. And then one of the great ways to do that, is obviously improving the collaboration, which you mentioned as well that both tools enable you to have that collaboration. And by being a cloud software, you can access them in real-time, updates are made in real-time and the audit piece is there as well. So when you pull in that information from the Trintech platform and you start working on narratives and financials, those can auto populate. And I think it really speaks to the fact around not having to utilize various SharePoints or shared Drives by having a single collaborative platform. And that's something that we often come across with new customers that we're talking to across our customers is the current need to have those documents, this [ softened ] process or fragmented approach across shared Drives because there isn't necessarily a better way in which to get a process done quickly. But by having a single platform where you can bring everyone to the platform instead with controlled access, with confidence in the control of the data coming through and the confidence in your numbers, you don't need to have those documents split over shared Drives or have multiple spreadsheets that aren't necessarily going around with the right information. So it has that true integrity in that data. I think key to the ESEF process as well is the style and the look and feel. And we're not saying XBRL comes in and styles goes out the window. Styles obviously are still very important. But instead, the style guides can be created within Workiva. And we work with design agencies and the designs all links with the [ XHTML ] as well. And it flows back into Workiva. So you then are tagging your financials within the same system. You're applying your styles, you're working together. You've got that integrity of data. And if your numbers -- if you have a last-minute change or anything, all you need to do is refresh the numbers and it populates across your reports, presentation decks as well, if you want them. And then the XBRL tags don't need to be retagged because that's the great benefit of having integrated XBRL. So audit can therefore take place at any time across your process. The Board can come in and they can review the content. The document can be in multiple different languages as can the tags because we support the different -- the 23 different languages. And then the end of that process is then exported to XHTML, iXBRL and PDF simultaneously. So you're not having to wait on one to be able to get the other and in that time worry about any changes happening or anything. So the transition into starting a new process for ESEF is you're a new filer. If you've done it before with SEC as a foreign filer such as Robert was alluding to at the beginning, then this isn't necessarily a new process, but it is actually a new mandate and a new way of working and obviously have the added complexity of [indiscernible]. So Trintech plus Workiva just really makes that transition a lot easier by having that -- the true cadence of that information flowing through. And I think, it means you then don't have to make any compromises. You're not compromising on the data, you're not compromising on the narratives, you're not compromising on the XBRL. So -- and in doing so, because it's a cloud software, cloud platforms across the tools, we can -- both teams can provide you with hands-on support that you need to feel confident in that transition and also throughout the process. So whether it's your first transition into the cloud or whether you transition to a new tool now or whether you're an existing customer of Trintech or Workiva, and you're adding ESEF to your toolkit of existing processes. But I think it's definitely an interesting concept to evaluate and look at the 2 tools in tandem with each other. And I think the final pieces around the workflow here is around document management. So it's integrated in the XBRL process we mentioned. So that means that you have a single up-to-date document that's also updated in real-time and eliminates the need to then synchronize multiple documents and try and synchronize and aggregate data from a different team. And so with the XBRL updating in real-time with the documents, you then don't need to worry about that additional time that people are trying to find to sort of compensate or to accommodate this new mandate as well. So I think Trintech and Workiva, in terms of ESEF, we've covered a few pieces now around that. And I think you probably can bucket it into just 4 main pieces, and I'd love to hear Robert and David as well. I think leading into that, part of that Trintech and Workiva integration is focused on this full record to report process which ensures the visibility via real-time dashboard to upstream activities such as the reconciliation that you guys have mentioned, the journal entries, the [ close cash ] management and the controls monitoring as well as the downstream activities and the disclosure of the statutory reporting and coming into the ESEF process as well. And so it's for me -- and what Workiva [ just likes about this ] partnership is the real-time visibility into both solutions. So that organizations can have confidence in the numbers they're disclosing. And that's particularly important for ESEF because that annual report drives the shareholders to take part of discussion and it's incredibly integral data. And it means that you can then access the data and keep working real-time from anywhere around the world. I think particularly important nowadays with everyone working from home and potentially being a fragmented team as well. So I mean, David, what do you think is the biggest gain for the company if they're looking to evaluate a tool in order to streamline their processes and what's the biggest gain or how Trintech is the key that can solve or try to solve the ESEF issue?

Yes. Certainly, that collaboration there, as we said, between the various teams, that ability for them to be able to be comfortable and confident of those numbers and to be able to, obviously, as you said, mentioned especially today, to be able to work remotely. Having the checks and balances within those figures because I've got one source of truth, as it were. But I know that when those figures move, that's going to follow through and fall through to the end result. I don't have to worry about going back in, downloading data onto a spreadsheet, making sure kind of work out what's changed, what's going to be the impact of, if I change that figure on Page X, then I've got to change then the figure on Page Y, making sure it all balances through. So I think that whole element. We've also started now as well to see with the increase of automation, that ability to speed the process up as well. But by directional impacts there, so being able to post top line journals back in so that I can make sure that I can at least keep my process moving along while having the comfort that obviously my source data is going to be correct at the end of the day. Our systems all need to balance, as it were, as that's obviously quite important. And I think having tools that are easy to use -- there is a demand now from the workforce, to actually have tools that are easy for our teams to use and also that we have to be more agile in our approach when we're making these changes. It shouldn't be a case now where we're waiting 6 to 9 months to come up with an idea and deploy it. We should be able to get those in now, test them and update the processes very, very quickly, which working in the cloud, working with those -- these types of tools really helps us to do that. So I think there's a number of areas there that organizations are looking at when they make the decisions for these types of tools.

Yes. And Francesca, just to add on some of the things that David said and you as well. I mean, I think here's the exciting part, right? I think about how our 2 organizations are looking at bringing our 2 solutions together to solve a multitude of things. You touched on it earlier. I mean, ESEF is a -- it's a hot item right now because it's a mandate. And will this combination help further -- help drive organizations to meet that mandate? Absolutely. But I think it does so much more than that, and that's what's exciting to me is it can help break down some of these silos. So even we've seen on the financial close side, the silos, where you talk about different SharePoint sites, I mean, the number of Excel files that are used in the financial close is enough to make your head explode, right? I mean -- and it's kind of crazy when you think about it, too, because we're talking about -- from a technology perspective, we're talking about a technology that I think just turned, what, 40 years old. So if you think about that, if today you're trying to manage a close to 40-year-old technology, I think something else might have come along since then that might be able to help you a little bit better. But it goes along the lines of what we're seeing, too. The need to automate is key, but there's a way to automate now in a much more holistic approach. And I think that's what's exciting about when you look at the Trintech/Workiva teams together. To what David was just saying, look, there could be top-sided journals that need to be created at the reporting cycle. But the fact that those now can be captured, and they can report back upstream to the team that actually facilitate the financial close, and then because of that financial close, we can reconcile those back to the systems of record, that didn't exist -- that capability didn't exist before. And that would have created a whole new workflow requirement for all these teams to have to chase down to make sure that, that was actually checked and verified, which could have jeopardized the financial filing, right, could have jeopardized the filing date, could have jeopardized an actual quality of the standard that went in just in case it wasn't verified. But the -- which brings me to the audit risk piece. I think the audit risk piece is such a key component. I think there was an article in the Financial Times just a few weeks ago about how organizations throughout all of Europe are commenting about how the big 4 that they may be using for their auditors are already coming to them now and insisting on validation of controls and controls testing that probably should have been done before the pandemic, but even now since the pandemic has been done, should be being done. And it's going to be required for them to give them a complete audit. But also, as it relates to ESEF, there has to be an opinion on these filings, and these are annual filings. So it's those types of things, I think, it's important for organizations to look at. Look, am I looking at my processes? Am I looking at my technology partners in a way that they're looking at a holistic approach to help me not only meet what I'm trying to do today but what I know I'm going to have to handle in years in the future? And I think that's the exciting part for us from a technology perspective and working with Workiva is that's how we're looking at our 2 platforms working together for the customer base. So I just -- to me, that's the part that I go back earlier. It's a starting point. It's not an end. It's a continued journey that we go on, but it's definitely one that we see where extended value will be offered well beyond just [ manning ] the ESEF.

I think that's really interesting, and I'm excited to see or curious to see as well where this all goes and then the decisions that companies make and also what's to come next with ESEF now, but interested to see what happens with this. And I think, particularly, like you said, looking at it all holistically is a great approach to -- in terms of what's next. I think a lot of companies are probably thinking, "When do I need to start thinking about this? When do I need to be making these decisions?" Or maybe if they already have started thinking about it, "Okay. Well, what comes next as well?" And I think that's something that there's a lot of conversations going on. And I think that what we're trying to do is provide webinars like these where you can talk about it, put it on the table and have these conversations just to make it a bit easier with all the complexities that are happening. And so in terms of, I guess, short term, when do people need to start thinking about it and what's happening, ESMA has released the taxonomy that will be used in 2021. And this is now ready in the Workiva platform. So Workiva, for those that might be quite new to the company, Workiva has been doing XBRL for -- since the last 10 years, and Robert talked about at the beginning around SEC. And Workiva is a global leader in XBRL filings globally. And so ESEF is something that is a new taxonomy. But it's certainly something we've been used to doing for the last 10 years. And so as ESMA introduces the new taxonomy updates or the more updates to the mandate -- because they are expected -- our subject matter experts are ready to inform clients of those changes and, of course, incorporate them into the system. And more of these changes are likely to be integrated as we come up with the first filers after the 1st of January. And audit, as you mentioned before, they've also recently seen a change. And so because, like you mentioned, the audit, they now have [ to have perspective on it ]. And that's now being done in XHTML. And the tags will also most likely have to be reviewed as well. And so when you're looking at a system and thinking about what decisions should I be making, what should I start thinking about, make sure to look at a system like Wdesk that has multiple output solutions because they then only require one audit, whereas a dual process workflow, for example, having compliant iXBRL document in one tool and maybe a design PDF in other, will probably require 2. So it's small things like that, that I think is really important to start thinking about and building into that decision process. I think we talked a lot today around control, and I think that's particularly important. And I think that's also what this transparency directive is aiming to do, is obviously the transparency of the standardization and providing that control as well. And I think what -- looking at systems like these is it allows you as the customer to stay in control as the content never leaves to go to a third party. And so that data flows right through, and then it's then tagged. And so that time line remains the same, but it's all captured in a single system. It's not being outsourced. And then also, the design -- the design just flows into the platform, allowing for the PDF and the XHTML all at the same. And what happens then is that the connected data protects from the public scrutiny and the analysis that ESEF will also now make possible, so you can have confidence in your data, which is what we were talking about today as well. And the final piece of that is that Workiva will sort -- help sort out the ESEF in terms of -- with regards to its mandate, the XHTML with iXBRL design. And in doing so, the XHTML looks identical to the PDF. So from a single-source document with the transparency directive, the connected data piece that we've been talking about today, it means that the transparency doesn't have to be such -- or data transparency doesn't have to be such a frightening process. So from data through to XBRL compliance, it's hopefully -- and we can help with that to make it a streamlined process. So whether you're starting your research now into it or whether you're well-acquainted with ESEF, I think there's hopefully a lot of takeaways from today and something for everyone to think about in terms of looking at not just ESEF but also looking at how does that reflect in terms of the full record-to-report process. How can I look at also evaluating that as part of my regulatory reporting and look to the processes I have, the tools I use and how I can also future-proof for future mandates and controls that might come along as well? So please do get in touch if you -- we'd love to discuss the ESEF journey with you and also to support any discussions that you're having as well. If you do have any questions, please do submit them to the [email protected] so we can -- both Trintech and Workiva can get back to you and answer those questions as well. And I'd like to round up by thanking Robert and David very much for your time today. It's been a really great discussion, and I'm looking forward to Trintech and Workiva working together more going forward. And that was very insightful for me as well. So thank you very much for today.

Thank you.

Thank you. Bye.

Thank you very much, and we hope you'll join us again soon. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining. We're just going to take a couple of moments just to wait for some people to join this session following the previous breakout sessions. So we'll start in a moment or two. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our final session of our Amplify GO event, our panel discussion, Customer Reflections, Navigating the New Normal. And so if you have just joined us from any of the previous sessions, you will be familiar by now with the ON24 platform and how to change the size of the widgets and adjust the space however you prefer. So please go ahead and do so if needed. If you do have any questions for our panelists during the webinar, please submit those using the Q&A box that you'll see at the bottom of your screen. And we will attempt to answer as many as we can at the end of the main discussion. So for anything that we don't get time to address during this session, we'll be sure to follow up with you directly via e-mail afterwards. So my name is Rebecca Wallace. I am the Director of Customer Success here at Workiva, and I will be moderating this panel discussion today. So I'm very pleased to welcome our panelists to this discussion. I will allow them to introduce themselves to you all. We'll start from left to right on the slide. So Jana, if we could ask you to please introduce yourself first to the audience. You're on mute, Jana.

I knew I was going to do that. Right. My name is Jana Middleton. I work for Anglo American. I've been there for now 7 years, and we have been implementing Wdesk since 2018. So it's now our third year on our journey to Wdesk implementation.

Great. Thank you, Jana, for joining us today. And over to you, John.

Hi. I'm John Phythian. I work at Lloyds Banking Group. I've been there for 12 years, and I lead a team of about 100 finance professionals that produce a range of internal/external financial reporting for the insurance businesses at Lloyds. And we just implemented Workiva at the end of last year for 3 of our most significant entities.

Excellent. Thank you for joining us today, John. And last but not least, Megan?

Hi. Hi, everyone. My name is Megan Daniell. I work at TomTom and have been for the last few years in the capacity of external reporting manager. So I work mostly with our external press releases and annual reports. We implemented Wdesk at the end of 2018 and have been using it successfully for 2 years in that external reporting space. And we will be implementing the ESEF in non-XBRL products in the next 2 months as well.

Exciting. Thank you, Megan. Yes, thank you for joining us as well today. So let's kick off this discussion. So a very hot topic at the moment, and we'd be really interested to hear from you about how you and your teams have handled this shift to work remotely. Megan, I'm aware that at TomTom, this was actually -- the remote close that you did with Workiva was the first remote close during this time. So we'd love to hear about your experiences and how your team managed that.

Yes. Sure. So our team is actually likely not such a big team. So for us also, the switch to remote work was not too much of a challenge. We already had all the technology that we needed to be able to collaborate effectively at home, also to communicate effectively. So I think after we got over the initial realizations that we wouldn't actually be able to see each other, we just had to organize ourselves and the way we would communicate so that we got the work done on time. And for us, actually, it wasn't so bad. Make sure to schedule calls when necessary and working on a platform like Wdesk, which is where all of our documents are stored, and we have one single set of numbers that refer throughout all of our documents stored in the platform. It actually made that collaboration really easy, really effective and made our close possible on a normal time line with no problems at all.

Excellent. That's great to hear. Thanks, Megan, for sharing that. And John and Jana, I understand that by the time you made that shift to working remotely, I think you'd already published or finalized your year-end close. The same question to you, perhaps we can start, next with John, how does your team handle that shift to working remotely?

I guess surprisingly well. I think in many ways, it's been quite a helpful catalyst to get people to sort of push the boundaries in terms of working with collaboration software and also people adopting slightly different working patterns and working practices. So it's been quite positive from that point of view. Obviously, we're very conscious that it has been quite a stressful time for colleagues. And we try to give people as much flexibility and recognize some of these sort of personal strains that they're under at the same time. And more generally, in terms of how we're managing the work, trying to also get more visibility of key performance indicators and [ have super short shopper ] updates when we're catching up. But that seems to be going well.

Thanks, John. And Jana, how about you and your teams?

Yes. I think similar situation, I think technology took a little while to set up initially to make sure everybody had the right workstations. But we all adjusted really quickly, talking to each other on these -- various video calls. In terms of Wdesk, I think -- so we have a Wdesk year-end project manager, who is normally based in Scotland. And what happens is she usually comes down for year-end and interims to join the team. And even before COVID-19 happened, there were storms in Scotland and she couldn't come down. So she was actually coordinating remotely and said that actually having Wdesk really, really helped. So we are just about to kick off our interim process next week or week after next. And so I think it's given everybody confidence that this is absolutely doable. We can do what we need to do. We don't need to bring people into our offices from around the world because usually, we do have colleagues from around the world coming and joining us in London. And we can now use Wdesk and achieve the interims results quite well. So I think it's given everybody comfort.

Great. Thank you, Jana. So let's move on to the next question that we have here. And we'd love for you to just talk a little bit about your journey with Workiva so far and how your organization is looking to expand the use of the platform in the near term. Jana, perhaps we can start with you on this question. I know that Anglo American are starting projects with ESEF, and you mentioned already as well, which is exciting.

Yes. So we started -- we looked to Wdesk in 2017, and we bought it in 2018. And that was primarily for the XBRL requirement in South Africa for the CIPC requirement. So we implemented it in our business units in South Africa initially. What we then did, we already were thinking about the same requirement coming in the U.K., coming into the U.K., so the ESEF reporting. So what we did in 2019, we implemented -- we put our back half, so the financial sections or the financial statements of our annual reports into Wdesk already, which achieved a lot of process improvements. So we already have all of our financials in Wdesk. Everybody is working on it, and that has been [ -- granted, we did the ] 2019 year-end in that. Where we are going now is we are now incorporating the front half into Wdesk, and I'm going to use the interface with InDesign, so we've just [ spoken ] with our design house colleagues. And they are going to -- so we are going to work with the content all into Wdesk, run it through InDesign, bring it back into Wdesk and have the complete report in there. And you can then submit in the XHTML format and have it XBRL-tagged. So that's what we have just kicked off, and we are hoping to get that completed in the next few months. So that's really where we are focusing. In the meanwhile, what also happened, Kumba and platinum business units, they also started using Wdesk for their integrated annual reports, too. So they're also producing their reports in Wdesk, push it -- and Kumba pushes it into InDesign and published it after that.

Great. Thank you, Jana. And Megan -- I'm sorry. Did you have another point there? I didn't mean to interrupt.

That's fine. I just -- it's -- in the future, it's just going -- I was going to add the next steps. We've just purchased the -- our policies and procedures solution. So that's the next one we are planning to implement and also the internal control SOX platform. So that's also going to be implemented over the next few months.

Excellent. Yes, some big projects coming up, that's exciting. Thank you, Jana. And yes, same question over to you, Megan.

Yes. So actually, just listening to Jana's story, ours is very similar. We also had a look at Wdesk in -- earlier, late in 2018, and we actually had a very short time from having a look into the platform to actually purchasing it in 2018. The only difference is we actually included our full annual report front and back section in the tool that first year that we used it. And also, we saw great process improvements, especially on the back half, handling the numbers and making sure that everything was linked and easily updatable and just giving a lot of comfort on that edge. We also used the interfacing with InDesign. And so we exported the InDesign readable file and also collaborated with our designers to basically produce the final product. And in the next few months, we're going to expand and also implement the ESEF XBRL tagging in our Wdesk document as well. So that was also one of the main reasons why we purchased Wdesk in the beginning, was the tool offered both process improvements just on a normal quarterly basis but then also with a view on the fact that we were going to -- because of the ESMA mandate, we needed the iXBRL tagging. And that was also a big motivator for us to take Wdesk at that time. But definitely, I've seen a lot of process improvements just having everything in one place. And it's been great for us.

Excellent. That's great to hear. Thank you, Megan. And John, over to you. I know that you've experienced some improvements to your reporting process as well since adopting the platform. How are you looking to take that to the next level on Workiva?

Yes. You're right. So we really require quite a lot of manual sort of [ get some ] controls from our process [ design ]. We've also noticed the nature of this sort of review queries on documents has changed quite significantly where historically, it was sort of basic hygiene checks on the document where we're getting picked up with the review, particularly by our senior executives and auditors. But when we reflected on our recent year-end, the nature of the queries, they were much more technical in nature. And so building on that, we've now decided to move beyond just doing the 3 legal entities that [ we have ] so far. And we're seeking to put 7 more legal entities through the system to produce their financial statements. And we're also exploring the potential for a slightly different use case to produce some regulatory documentation, which is sort of quite complex documents with lots of different teams needing to contribute to them and obviously lots of data that they need to input. So we see the platform as being quite well suited to that. I'm also aware that across the wider group, some of our -- some of my counterparts, they look after the reporting of some of our banking entities. And they're also doing their own implementations. And they've been observing us quite closely along the way.

Great. Thanks for that, John. Moving on to our next question here. Thinking about what advice would you give to other customers to showcase the value of the Workiva platform to perhaps other parts of the organization? Jana, perhaps we could come back to you on this one regarding the expansion you referred to, to internal controls and policies and procedures.

Okay. Yes. I think the best advice would be just talk to your colleagues about the successes because I think what happened since we have had Wdesk, there have been huge savings, hours shaved off our review process. And so users loved the solution. So practically, what we do, we share those successes across the business. We also set up a knowledge-sharing session. So we demoed Wdesk to our other parts of the business. And of course, when we heard of a project like when we were looking at internal control solutions, we just made sure that, look, don't forget Wdesk, let's have a look at that as well. So being involved with [ IM ] and with other parts of our business, to be involved in various solution evaluation, that's also important. We actually managed to -- because Wdesk is such a different tool to everything else in terms of document offering, we managed to get Wdesk on our preferred list, so Workiva for document offerings, [ specific risks on our XBRL ] preferred tools across Anglo. If anybody across Anglo American needs to use something similar, it's already approved and they can ask for it. So that's another one that makes it easier. It's just no -- I think we just love the tool, and then we tell each other about it. We also -- if somebody is interested in using it for their purpose, we allow them to try to create some of the documents on one of our testing platforms or workspaces. They can actually test it out, try it out and see how it would work for them. But it's only just to try it down before we go and buy whatever solution we need. But we actually like to do this to try whether it works for them, and I think that's also a very good selling point.

Great. Thanks for that advice, Jana. Excellent. And same question to the others. Perhaps, John, we can come back over to you.

Yes. Look, we went on a slightly longer journey from sort of deciding we needed something in this space. So there was quite a long process internally within the group to assess all the different solutions before we landed on Wdesk. So there was a collective view and -- that this was the right thing for the group as a whole before we adopted it. But as I mentioned earlier, others have been quite interested in our initial implementation. And we've been doing some demos. And there's working groups to think about the best ways of sort of maintaining the relationship with Workiva on an ongoing basis and how we optimize the implementation across the group.

Great. Thanks, John. And Megan, how about you?

Yes. I must say I don't have too much to add on the other panelists. The one thing that we also do with working groups or our colleagues is also just say all of the process improvements that we've got from Workiva. And we also have a [ great ] finance program, which promotes using the best technology tools, purpose-fit technology tools for the purpose of projects and procedures. And Wdesk has landed on that platform. And we're also starting to try and do the non-sharing of cost in the business to see if there are any other use cases for any of the other departments and whether this will benefit them or not.

Excellent. Thank you, Megan. And moving on to our next question here. Again, looking for advice from our panelists here. What advice would you give to other organizations who are starting to look for ways to improve their reporting or compliance processes? John, could we start with you on this one, please?

Yes. I think a big thing for me is trying to get the people who are doing the work on a day-to-day basis just helping to identify the opportunities and drive the change. And certainly, in terms of our implementation of Wdesk, it -- that stems from ideas that -- within the team. And there's a small group of people who really owned that and implemented that. I think that was key to some of the success there. Something else I would recommend is just thinking about getting your data sort of organized and structured upfront. We do get a bit of feedback that we benefited quite a lot relative to sort of other implementations because we invested a lot of time thinking about all the data that we needed and the best way of putting that in a central place for the platform to read it from, so capturing that in the right way as early as possible in the process. And I think more generally, just in terms of trying to strive for as much improvement as you can and challenge -- I tend to find working with lots of finance professionals, it can be a little bit cynical at times in terms of really sort of adopting new technologies and seeing the opportunities. But trying to create the vision for everyone to gather around and strive for and just sort of relentlessly pushing for that is quite important. And as leaders, I think that's our job to kind of get people aligned behind that.

Excellent. Thank you, John. Yes, absolutely, the piece you mentioned there on the data structuring is certainly a common piece of advice that I'm hearing from other customers that we've been speaking to as well. So over to the others, how do you respond to this one? Megan, perhaps we can come over to you next.

Yes. Sure. So for me, it was all about starting with -- because I had actually just started at TomTom, I have only been there for 3 years, and it was really trying to understand the process and how all the bits and pieces fit together. And what I did find is that there wasn't a process where there was an input, a period of change and then an output. What I found is that at different parts along the chain, there was also more processing going on. That really frustrated me because I could never really identify what version was in the final version, at what point did it change, why does it change and where did the change come from. So I really tried to understand the process. And then, at that point in time, try to understand what are the things that frustrated me the most along that process and what could I change and then really trying to make incremental improvements. So it was not that I could revamp the process in a short space of time. It was really trying to -- I started with trying to organize, the data, even before we got to Wdesk. And once I got to that point, we decided to purchase Wdesk. And that also reinforced us to structure our data with one source of input, making changes in one place and getting to one point of output that would then be reviewed by multiple people. So standardized processes and organizing your data for me was really important and then just incrementally looking and saying, "What can you improve?" And really trying to get everyone on board that making improvements is great for everyone because I really don't like to do inefficient or repetitive tasks. And I think it also really drove engagement across the team to be able to reduce the number of those kinds of tasks.

Great. Thank you, Megan. Jana, there were some great points there made by John and Megan. Is there anything else that you would add to that?

Yes. Absolutely. I think for me, the biggest advice I would say is, don't try to get a tool to fit your process. Be really open to changing your process and get champions across the business that are prepared to actually step back and say, "This is a great tool. It can totally change what we do and how we do it. Let's change it." Because I think that's where you get the most benefit from, just start from scratch, look at the tool, redesign the process and get people excited about it. It does take time for people to change their mind because they are used to doing things one way, and it is a different way if you change it completely. But it definitely paid off. So I think that's probably the biggest piece. The other thing that I would say is for -- and I'm not sure how much we've touched on it. But getting data into the tool, there's obviously -- there are 2 ways of doing it. There is the Excel add-in, and then there is the integration -- direct integration with the tool. And we had one business unit that tried to go with integration straight away. And actually, it took them a lot longer because it was a much bigger piece. What we found, doing it via the Excel add-in first, it gave us time to think about what data we want, what the data should look like, and it really get our heads around. So now I think the transition into the direct integration must be much faster, and it allowed us to kick off with the tool sooner. We already -- and also, another business unit of ours, they -- even just getting the report into Wdesk and get benefits from the linking, that's already massive improvement. And don't get bogged down on how you're going to get the data in. There is a way. And I think our next step is -- so we are going to now move to direct integration to improve our data integrity and make sure there's no manipulation. And just kind of get it quick, quickly in because you'll start realizing benefits very early on if you do.

That's some great points as well. Thank you, Jana. And our final question before we move over to a few questions from the audience is around how are you thinking about your long-term plans for technology transformation in your department and across your organization? Jana, perhaps we can come back to you again on this one to give a perspective in terms of the broader system.

Yes. So our finance team are on a journey to transformation. We are trying to digitalize finance. So we are looking across various systems. And what we are trying to do is, again, be smarter and move from kind of not having to look at our past financial reporting but look forward on to planning, forecasting and so on. So yes, we have started. We have got various projects going on. But I think with Wdesk, in particular, it's really -- because we have seen benefits and it's very quickly to implement, I think we are trying to see where else we can utilize Wdesk or systems like Wdesk that are very user friendly. And I think that's another big selling point of Wdesk is that, yes, where training is available by where -- [ what do we do ] use that, but it's also very easy to show users how to use Wdesk. And they pick it up very quickly and they get very comfortable very easily. So tools like this are very beneficial to the business because they are very quickly adopted, and then we can start using them. It doesn't take 2, 3 years to implement something.

Great. Thank you, Jana. Same question to John and Megan. Perhaps, Megan, we can come back to you next on this one.

Yes. Sure. So within our finance department, we are really looking to try and simplify our IT landscape. Having multiple sources of data, and they're all structured differently, really makes analyzing the data and working with it is much more difficult. So that's one of our top priorities. And I also think to enhance the collaboration between the different tools that we have, so enhancing the technology collaboration and also see our trend of moving more and more to cloud-based solutions, and I think also now in this current situation where we're working from home a bit more, that really helps. And that really made our transition to working from home really easy. For instance, Wdesk is in the cloud. So it was really simple to just have an Internet connection at home and start working. And one of the things that we also really are trying to do in our finance function is to find purpose-fit tools that are based in [ cost. ] Wdesk was an example of that for me and in my function and then trying to spread that -- basically, that message across the finance function to also plan to [ do mass ] finance and also to automate any repetitive tasks where we can. So we were also looking a lot into robotics space and trying to improve even some manual processing tasks that are maybe not directly related to finance but maybe things like invoice processing and these kind of things.

Okay. Thank you, Megan. And finally, John, how about you from your perspective on this one?

A lot of the problems in my processes stem from either it taking too long to get data available or it's not always available in its most granular form. So to actually then go interrogate why the numbers are what they are is quite a difficult task. So what we're trying to do is develop one version of the truth that's easily and markedly accessible, which there's lots of challenges in doing so because you're talking about massive volumes of data and lots of processing power required to do so. But once we've got that, then it's about having that accessibility on the back end and the tools to enable people to collaborate to understand and analyze the data. And generally, the tone I'm trying to set for the team is that we want to be doing sort of the value-add and driving insight and trying to understand the numbers and what they tell us and get -- copilot the business rather than be spending significant chunks of our time doing manual processes and updating documents and that sort of thing. So -- yes. And I think that makes it a bit more inspiring for colleagues when they're coming to work if that's what they're working towards.

Absolutely. Great. Thank you, John. So at this stage, we will hand over to take questions from our audience. I do see that there are a few coming in here.

We have the first one asking our panelists, "If you have any examples of accelerating or how you've accelerated the close process that you could share with the audience." John, perhaps we can come back over to you on this one. Is there anything that comes to mind in terms of examples of accelerating the close process?

The -- I suppose, aside from the nature of all these sort of review queries, and generally, there have been a bit more confidence in the outputs as a consequence of implementing Workiva. Then it was quite noticeable that when we had to -- what we tend to have is multiple versions of documents. And quite often, there's late adjustments that come through as a result of the review or audit points that get raised. And the speed at which those updates were getting made once we implemented the system was a lot, lot faster. And it was quite noticeable that the word trust kept getting used within the team where it felt like people quickly got a lot of confidence in the platform. And that if they updated the data, they could just refresh the document. And they didn't need to go and sort of take back the numbers or that there wasn't any concern that voided the integrity of it. So that's the major acceleration in terms of how we've implemented at year-end.

Great. Thank you, John. Megan, it looks like maybe you have something that you might be able to share on this one in terms of accelerating the close process as well.

Yes. For me, I was just going to agree a whole lot with what was just said. The most simple thing that accelerated the close was being able to have one source of truth, so just one document that linked -- or one place where the numbers are stored. And in linking and being able to process changes, I can't describe how massively that was accelerated just by having that functionality. One of the other things that I really also enjoyed that accelerated closes for me, especially on the annual report cycle, is also being able to give auditors access to the annual report in the working copy. So that means if they needed to leave comments or anything like that, they just actually left it directly on the document that I was working with. And I didn't have to go and find a PDF file, compare where they had maybe left a comment and it was maybe changed in our version by them and try to understand what they said. That process was really improved for me. And yes, that was also another measurable way that we improved our close times, for sure, on the annual reports.

That was a great tip, excellent way to help accelerate the communication, collaboration and actually keep everything in one place so it's more secure as well. Thank you, Megan. Jana, was there anything else that you'd want to add to that point in terms of acceleration?

Yes. For us, the process prior to Wdesk was very manual, and that wasn't the close process itself. What it was, when we complete the input, so when we finished our financial statements and our commentary, that would then be passed on to our design house, either manually or via e-mail. And it would be Excel spreadsheet, and it would be Word documents. And then they had to put it in. And then you have to come back to our business, and we had to track and double check and triple check all of the output. So what we have done now is we have the design house now have access to Wdesk. So what has happened, there would be something like 6-hour time lag between the time you'd finish your numbers in the Excel and Word documents and pass it on to them before they put it in -- before it could go then for review to management. What happens now is from the moment when it's closed, when we [ log ] Wdesk [ from anybody ] and then it's passed on to our design house, that time is much shortened. And we have saved something like 4, 5 hours in that -- just that piece of the process. So that was a big, big process change. So effectively, because we feed the data in from our source system, which is HFM for group, we feed it in. And then all the reviews are happening. Everything's linked up. That process has been fully automated. So there is no waiting to have -- before we can send out for review to management. So that was the biggest achievement really, biggest really [indiscernible].

Great. Thank you, Jana. And we'll take another question from the audience here. "What is the main benefit gained or the most positive change for you or your team since adopting the Workiva platform?" Perhaps, Megan, maybe we can come to you first on this one. I'm trying to mix it up for you. I'm going too fast. So what would you say is the biggest change or benefit gained?

For me, the biggest benefit, I would say, was just having confidence in the numbers when it starts getting crunch time. So we have a couple of hours before you want to go out and somebody wants to make a small change. I really have a lot more confidence and could almost go over with a lot more of a relaxed mindset to actually making changes because I trust that the tool, that I would be able to change it everywhere it needed to be changed. So that got a lot of -- got rid of a lot of risks for me, and that was a benefit. And also, even just personally, it improved my job satisfaction because the manual processes is not something that I enjoy. And just having one tool that got rid of a lot of hours of work every quarter for me was also a great benefit.

That's great to hear. My personal job satisfaction, of course, is very important as well, so thanks for sharing that. And John, what would you say would be the biggest benefit or something that you gained from adopting the platform, you or your teams?

[ I saw it certainly in the ways ] that we're still sort of working on that. I think it's quite a key feature here. We report on lots of different legal entities within the group, and the platform effectively gives us the opportunity to create almost like a master template of all the key disclosures. And historically, again, through the review of the statements for all the different legal entities, there's been -- a lot of those have been dominated by inconsistencies between the different sets of accounts. And so far, we obviously have only done 3 entities, but we're already seeing that there's a lot of scope for us to channel that consistency. And obviously, instead of doing the work multiple times to update things in multiple documents, you can just do it in one place. The other thing I'd add to answer it slightly, the question, in a slightly more indirect way is I've noticed that the team now, they've understood sort of what's possible in terms of the use cases that we're already applying the platform to and are starting to come up with lots of new ideas about much broader use cases that they can in collaboration and features it could be useful for. And even if -- whether we pursue those or not, I think developing that mentality of a bit more of a can-do, we can change our process, there's better ways of doing things, is really positive.

That's excellent. Thanks for sharing that, John. And Jana, over to you, what would you have to say the main benefit gained or value added, what would that be?

I think the biggest one really for us was people didn't have to work that longer. Our finance colleagues, they're going home in decent time during our year-end and during our interims. They didn't have to stay until late at night. I think that was the biggest change for us. So that's why it's been so well received. So that's one of them. The other one that was a really good benefit was for management. So our -- the head of financial reporting, he loved the fact that he could review the report on his mobile on the way to work, on the train and pass the comments that he could be messaging from his mobile, commenting on the press release or the annual report and getting feedback straight back from the users. So that was the other.

Great to hear. Thank you for sharing that, Jana. Another question we have here from the audience kind of relates back to one of the responses Megan gave earlier. "Did you -- how did you go about getting your auditors on to Wdesk if they haven't used it or aren't familiar? Or have they used the system before?" So perhaps just sharing some experiences of how you work with your auditors on the platform or perhaps how you approach that with actually getting them to use the platform if they weren't already. Maybe -- Megan, maybe we can come to you on that one.

Sure. So basically, what we did is we just engaged with the auditors actually quite early on in the process and said that we will be using a new tool. I also tried to exhibit the benefits of the tool because it does eliminate quite a lot of risk, especially with late changes and things like that. And I think it also makes it easier for them to audit because they really only have to look at one source. And maybe if they want to look at the integrity of the tool, they can do that. So we engaged with them quite early on, said we will be using the tool, and I also demonstrated to them how they could actually get on to the tool and review a PDF. And the tool is actually really easy to implement because it's on the cloud. It was really easy to add them as users in the capacity as an external auditor. And we would then just generate a review for them. And then they can actually go online, review it as if it were a PDF document and leave comments. They can also then see comments in later reviews. Their previous comments on new versions of the document, they can see how we've answered their comments. And I could also always generate a blackline for them as an additional review so they could see exactly what text was changed. And after demonstrating all these features, I think they also realized that it would be really beneficial for them. And they actually had no problem. And there was not really much of a steep learning curve with using Wdesk because in my opinion, it's very much like other word processing software that a lot of people use, and it's quite intuitive. So they were all for joining us on the journey.

Thanks, Megan. And Jana, how does that compare with your experience at Anglo American and working with the auditors?

We have actually held back on auditors as yet. So that's very recent. It was only a few months ago that one of our business units asked to add their auditors into Wdesk. So we are yet to see how that's going to go. So we are a bit behind on that part.

All right. Thanks, Jana. And John, was there anything for you to add from Lloyds' perspective on that one?

Not much. Likewise, we've -- we haven't taken the power of the platform to the full extent yet just because of the time lines of other implementations, this was the first cycle we've been through. So we're still experimenting. But look, the auditors did recognize an improvement in the quality of the initial outputs that they received from us. And they recognize the potential for quite significant benefit, particularly the more we scale it to cover all of the things that we do, I think you'll get to a tipping point where they really do get quite a lot of value for it.

Okay. Good. Thanks, John. Another question from the audience for our panel here. "How do you tackle the issue of poor data quality in your own reporting process?" John, perhaps we can come back to you on that one.

Yes. So I think it's as -- I suspect it's a challenge for most organizations. The -- I think the key thing is to try and relentlessly push the data quality controls as far as sort of upstream as possible to catch the problems at the earliest point and avoid the fallout of multiple sets of people trying to fix the issues in different places where issues materialize downstream. Our key point is ownership, I think, which is quite difficult to get right and, again, push the ownership for preventing and detecting issues back to the people that should be capturing these things at source. We're, at the moment, trying to sort of make issues much more visible by putting in place data quality dashboards and, as part of our monthly reporting, when issues occur, make sure that there's an awareness of them. So yes, that's probably the advice I'd give.

Thank you, John. And Jana, is there anything else that you would add in terms of tackling the issue of poor data quality in your process?

Yes. We've designed our Wdesk in a way that we have got -- when it comes into the spreadsheets in Wdesk, it becomes the source data from HFM. Then we have got adjustment of columns. And we protect that data that comes from source so that users can't change that. And then we have adjustments columns, which should mainly be used for rounding adjustments. But there are some manual data input that's required. Or if there is an adjustment to the underlying data, what we are doing is saying to the users they have to go back to the source system, update it, and that can be refreshed. We try to discourage from making last-minute adjustments anywhere outside the system. So if there is any adjustment, it's in Wdesk, but that should be by exception. And it's also -- it's very clearly visible as to what has been adjusted. And also, if the adjustments are done in Wdesk, everything is tracked. Everything has got audit trails, so you know who has changed the numbers. So we have now -- from our group process, we have removed any manipulation in tools like Excel that can be audited. So that's one thing that has happened. And the other thing that became very apparent with Wdesk is because you can now assign different sections to different users, the ownership of those sections became much easier accepted because if it's just one user that can access a particular section, they know they are responsible for it. They know the numbers will not change unless they change them. So that has been quite good for us. And we did that the spreadsheets. We did that with documents. So we have different colleagues responsible for different parts of our financial statements and the notes. And then they've taken that responsibility. They own the sections, and the quality has improved as a result.

Thank you, Jana. We only have a couple of minutes left. So Megan, I just wanted to ask if you had anything else that you wanted to add on that point in terms of -- okay. All right. Thank you. There are a few other questions from our audience. Unfortunately, we won't have the time to cover those in-depth. So of course, we will follow up with you via e-mail afterwards. So thank you for submitting your questions for our panelists. So finally, we just wanted to summarize some of the key takeaways from today's session but also from some of the previous sessions, as you're all navigating through these new normals. So we've learned from other organizations who have shared their best practices for driving transformation in their own process. For our existing customers, we've also explored new ways to use the Workiva platform in your organizations and also showcase the value you did see from other teams and departments. And finally, we've also found the starting point for new ways of working and start thinking through sort of long-term change, what that looks like for you and your teams. So finally, just to close this session for today. That will be for our panel discussion and our Amplify GO event, so thank you very much, especially to John, Jana and Megan for coming and also for sharing your experiences. It's been really interesting and insightful, so thank you very much for that. And also, thank you to everybody who's attended today's event. We really hope that you've enjoyed it as much as we did. If you would like to follow up on -- with Workiva with any of the topics that we have covered today, please reach out to your Customer Success manager or your account manager, who would be happy to help you. And for those of you that are perhaps newer to Workiva, you can also reach out to us via [email protected], and a member of our team will be in touch with you. So thank you again.