Workiva Inc. (WK)

Amplify GO 2020

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Jun 25, 2020

Hello, everyone, and a very warm welcome to the opening session of Amplify Go, modernizing data and reporting to drive 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. 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 And 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 email. And please note that we do capture all questions that are submitted. Our presenters today are dermot Murray of Workiva and Simon Aperton of Deloitte. I'll now hand you over to Derma to kick off today's presentation. Thanks, John. And afternoon, everybody. And, Simon, thanks for joining today. It's gonna, be a very exciting presentation from Simon as well over 15 years in the business and a 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, and listening to this. And I hope it'll be of a great bench as we move through the, the session today. Jumping right into it, Hey. Here we go. Jumping white into it. They're really tricky takeaways we want to, talk about today. This concept of, you know, 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 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, that's really 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 where it's at a very high level co really 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's collaborating very closely, that level of trust is not as tested as it is when you move into a remote environment. And so, disability 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 and systems where we had problems, etcetera. And then finally capturing the momentum for best practices. Certainly, for me, running the Lakeiva business here in Europe, there have been a number of best practices we've 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 could 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 the Deloitte is viewing, this, what they'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. Yeah. The brief, brief intro, I'm a director with Deloitte's part of the controllership practice. I'm also the EMEA lead for our Alliance work even. And you're right. It it has been an interesting 2 or 3 months. It it it's not, you to being out on the road quite a bit and being being stuck in one room in the house has been interesting, I suppose, and and engaging with client, online, was difficult to start with, but I think we're all kinda getting used to that now. So I wanted to start off, thinking about where we were at the beginning of the year. We're fine at 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 and A transaction on the horizon. You were thinking about, you know, the finance year was going to spend a lot of time integrating that new team into your existing team. Then obviously COVID arrived in March. And and actually for a lot of people we've spoken to, it's been fairly seamless. You know, you you may have gone through a full 3 month ends by now, and and that's been okay. It's almost as if you haven't been out of the office. So when we worked we we put out a piece around virtual clothes and all 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, you know, the feedback was, well, we're not doing month end because there's nothing to report, you know, 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 I've put up on screen there, we we set out, Deloitte set out some predictions around where we thought finance might be in in 2025. You know, that that focused on a lot of things that you you would expect, standardization of data, automation of processes in this idea, of a finance factory. It it's talked about what our workforce wanted from from the work now. And and how that might change the workplace and and, obviously, how that then impacts upon the role of finance, how then we move to a place where we're adding even more value to the organization, which, you know, ultimately has been a theme of the discussions I've had throughout my career with with CFOs. And and I've presented this slide a number of times over the last 12 months and often, at least one person will ask me at the end. Okay? Do you really believe that's what finance is gonna look like in 2025. And and perhaps it was a bit of a provocation, in us presenting that. Because most organizations will look at it and go, well, the challenges that we have to overcome, we'd be lucky if we manage even half of what's on that slide. I guess what we couldn't have foreseen is where we are now. And I and I guess what, you know, a a question to start with is do all these predictions hold true. And and I think they do. I think actually what you might wanna think about is is whether the horizons are closer as a consequence of what we've been through 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 to discuss digital Technologies and digital enablement within 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 from the the stats there, I think I think there's some quite starks stats there, really. I mean, 80 percent of the workforce around the world has been impacted by COVID. There were 44,000,000 daily users on teams. During March. And I suspect that's increased through April May, and and and Zoom as well as well as, you know, the sort of portals we're on now. You know, we we just couldn't have imagined that before. Of the c f c 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 and that makes things quite significantly different, doesn't it? You only think about the the people you could recruit now. You know, I was speaking to a a group financial controller of a large retailer last week, and and he's based the wrong side of the pennines for the, for the retailer he works with. And he was saying, well, actually, you know, now given where we are, it may well be that, you know, this this job's now a lot more viable for me because I can work at home half the time. So it'll be interesting to see where that goes. I think the key shift for organizations and and the bottom half of that slide in terms of stats around how productive people are And and, dermit, you spoke about that at the beginning, is is those who have been more productive are those that were recently 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 greater collaboration already. So certainly the research shows the CFOs are keen to use the current situation as a catalyst. And and I guess we we've got this kind of sliding scale in terms of scenarios where where we think this is how people will go back So, you know, right right at the top scenario, we've got other idea of a rapid return to pre COVID BAU. You know, so so that that view that there are probably plenty of people in the audience are thinking when can I get back into the office? I just wanna get back to normal. It's not working for me. And, you know, they'll they'll go back to the office in in in 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 and perhaps, by the way, that that's a missed opportunity for those. For those people who who do go with scenario away. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got scenario c. Those who 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 and clearly, the key for those organizations is how digitally enabled they are, how they leverage the technology because that's going to make it make it best work. So as CFOs grapple with the, the options to thrive in the new normal, there's a number of uncertainties that they need to start thinking about. So if 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 and, you know, the number of delivery trucks that are up here and down here every day, delivering absent parcels, and I'm sure you're saying 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 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 what we've been used to, has that changed? Will we see differences in in in our in our weekly, monthly annual cycles of business. And with all of this, I think, you know, some of the questions you might wanna think about is more digital interaction means more data. What do we do with that? Analytics is gonna be key here. Equally working capital. So if you're interacting more with digitally, do your working capital policy stand up to that? Are the buying patterns changing that you need to think about working capital in a different word? If we move on to our employees, because it's not just customers, clearly, our employees, that that that's critical. The last three months has been the biggest virtual working home experiment ever. You know, we we've all had the old Friday where we've worked from home or, you know, some of us may even have 2 days a week where we where we generally work from home, but but this has been 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, 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, you know, collaboration tools like we're using today, tools like work, even a number of the other automation tools on on on the market, which enable workflow and now enable collaboration and enable you to engage using mobile devices have existed. But we haven't had that burning platform to do it, and and now we have. The 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 the the the the solutions you were thinking about at the beginning of the year, how do you how do you accelerate those? How do you speed those up to to enable some of this to stick? And and I think you mentioned this right at the beginning, and it and it isn't just all about technology, although that's going to be a large part of it, then all of this changes the risks and controls that you face as finance leaders, how how is your risk and control framework looking now as people are operating from home? And how do you 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 on change, to enhance their operating models. They were, you know, and we probably have had this sort of conversation over the last 5, 10 years on how 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 how do we how do we enable that operating model utilizing digital? Now the thing is I've where where we see that shifting is now that digital is the strategy rather than an enabler of the strategy. And that that that's that's a difficult mind shift but it will be important to think about how you utilize digital to improve your competitive position. The finance, this is gonna mean a significant upheaval, skill sets, tooling we think are gonna accelerate and the ability to be agile to that is going to be really critical. CFO is going to need to think about how they involve their operating model shared service centers, how how do they develop with more virtual work? And do they 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 to automate. A priority for CFOs in normal times is to ensure cash, liquidity, and financing arrangements are optimized for operational effectiveness and growth ambitions. So with this with this COVID situation, there are new set of uncertainties that have emerged across customer supplier and financing landscapes. The CFOs, you're really gonna need to think about how you 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 costs to reinvest in some of this technology, but equally, you know, M and A opportunities may well present themselves to 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 I've spoken a lot about digital as we've gone through, but clearly, you know, all of those things that you were thinking about you need to think about how you accelerate those plans, shrink the timelines, 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, invest, think about what financial technology is gonna gonna help you, but clearly I spoke at 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, you know, through March April, we saw projects paused, we saw projects canceled as organizations begin to think about where they prioritize investments, where they prioritized 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 what is important for the whole business versus what's really important for finance to do for their organization. So I I I encourage you all to think about where to be clear on the digital accelerators, which are gonna truly make a difference for your organization. And those ones are the ones that are going to have a really compelling case. And and and in the difficult environment we are, it's gonna 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 gonna 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. You know, Simon brought up a lot lot going on. I think there's a debate, and we're gonna see it as business leaders around what does digital dexterity mean, the desire, the ability to transform your system to 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, you know, 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 prices 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, our ERP or CRM, our HR system, initially on premise. And then it's the cloud, again, anyone on a S4HANA transformation thing, we'll 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 a reconciliation, the DI, intelligence perspective, planning, etcetera. 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 do we have multiple versions of truth in where we're working? Do we have the information at our fingertip 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 the particular decision, what the auditor 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, you know, simple example was one of our customers was talking about having to to go back into the office to actually print something out so they would have documented versions of 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, etcetera. 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 lining on paper. 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 and I always like to, you know, what I what I call my 5 eyes 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 100 of versions of the 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 gone today showed us that risk and how we view risk and how we look at, the the risk as it relates to the continuous nature of how the business is changing so quickly. Do we have interdependence in the data and work to allow us to look at the risk and and the pressures on that list. Are we including everyone in the platform? So not just the case of are we to the back end systems and do we have access to the data, but we really have how we created an ecosystem of inclusion that brings all our partners all the supply chain people, etcetera, 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 you take you a long time to develop them and you've got somebody who's, like, 1 week away from you know, getting you the data, is that really the insight that you really need to be able to manage your business today? And so those are the five eyed 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 letting the risk build into your system. You know, access gap I talked about again. Do people really have access to what they need information? I would say, yes. Work environment, I think it's difficult. Control gap, I think, again, we see 72% 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, Warkiva, we are continuing to develop big investments to build this system of work, the platform where you will have that integrity, that trust, interoperating the inclusion of multiple vendors from outside, your partners, your auditors, etcetera, onto the platform. The inclusion. And of course, the integrity to know that that data, whether it's narrative or whether the 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 it 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, as Simon and I spend a lot time talking about this as it relates to the transformation, please. 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 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 to to we we need to solve. How's 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 wanna 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 events, 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 the social events, these things we need to be able to act fast around business and finance plays a really key role to be able to provide, I think, what Simon described is 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 five eyes, 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 Waikiva. We are so excited to be with you today. But first, the usual housekeeping. On your screen, there should be a Q and 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 email. 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 ECEF annual report. As you know, workkeeper is a huge multi functional platform and too much to show you in 30 minutes or so. So for this session, we're gonna use ESF as an example of a WDS case study. EsF is a hot topic at the moment and is 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 fingertips, along with full design integration. There'll be a much longer demonstration available shortly, which you are all invited to. So let me introduce your presenters today. I have with me, Catherine Reynolds, a solutions consultant at Wakiba. Catherine work with multinational companies located in the US and here in EMEA, on reengineering their reporting documents and processes. Introducing myself, I am Jacqueline Whitworth, and work in marketing, I have a special interest in design reporting and the final product that the investor actually receives. So Butkeeper is focused on delivering 1 central cloud platform. All of a 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 will is just a visual example of how many different processes work either can support. But is certainly not limited to these areas. Wdes 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 for multiple teams over the businesses. We would like you to take you on a w desk 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 expiry on route. Including with the actual final report, which you need to file next year. So thanks for your time today and over to Catherine. Thanks, Jackie. What we've understood so far, so working across many of our different company we found a very common theme at working through the ESAP annual report process. Some of the key challenge are the manual and efficient and costly reporting process, disconnected data across reports resulting in a high error risk, disconnected team. There's no version control, no over side duplicative efforts. There's a lengthy manual review and our processes, which are very cumbersome for all 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 those positive business outcomes? They would like to have a sustainable, efficient, 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 one place, increasing that visibility and audit ability, reduce the manual non value add work and spend more time on buy ad analysis. Now how did they get there? 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 reoccurring data throughout reports, controlled collaboration, which allows us to have quickly and easily produced comparison reports for review, integrate that spiral 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 in Excel. Many different teams working on all of those documents, which we're going to many different versions to get us to that final end state and that final beautiful annual report that then gets published. Now what does that actually look like? If we look at the current state where your system's a record to the 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, experimental, investor relations, etcetera. So if we start in the left hand side for our systems of record, our companies we find will spend, you know, 100 of 1000, if not millions on systems records 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 non financial information, BlackLine or Anaplan to do those consolidations. And aggregation as well as emails 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 gonna have multiple versions of that aggregation as numbers are updated across the general ledger. Non financial information gets updated. The core team is constantly going back to that truth source of information to make all of those updates. Those updates, then we can see going to additional Excel files, additional documents, and PowerPoint presentations to get to our review stage, which should 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 gonna 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 that consistency or the control over that data. You don't have the collaboration because everyone is working on one static document at a time. Most of the time, those files are being saved on a share point or a share drive being labeled as version 1, version 2, final final final. So by the time it gets that review stage as the 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 the 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 auditors drop a lot tougher to follow that data back. There's a lot of back and forth emails 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 play from that tons 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 exterior 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 your our customers, before Wdesk are coming in, There's many inter iterations pencils down moments just adding to the end and 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 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 started our systems of record, we know those aren't gonna change. You've already put in the investment for each of those, the oracles, the workdays, and plan of black lines. Those are gonna stay, and that's perfectly fine. Once we then connect directly to a 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 gonna show you later on through the linking capabilities of Wdesk, how we can collaborate and providing that consistent and continuous monitoring of the data, updating the narrative pieces of information all within sign of one platform connected again back to the ResourceSource System. So anytime an update is currently being done, it will push directly into all those documentations, all those presentations at the same time. And on top of that, and this is a big key. You can see the design is tagging is happening at the same time as the assembly, the review, and the audit. You're no longer working with a pencil 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, etcetera. Returning it back to you, Jackie. Thank you. So let's look at our real use case for Wdesk. ESEC 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 and 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 expiry 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 expiry or 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 X HTML. Board committees can easily add their report and all that can be given access as and when necessary. Wdesk is secure and flexible and must in annual reporting. So that's a persona overview. So let's get going over to Catherine. Thanks, Jackie. Alright. 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 and 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 our source system 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 W data connections. 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 of Zenwood. 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 presentation inside of Wdesk is one 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're 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. So touching again on the linking capabilities, we just saw how we can use W data to bring in all of your data from your truth source system. And now we are looking at the leaking on the left hand side here of that same income statement we just saw. My revenue value a green tran sorry, a blue triangle in the top left hand corner, letting me know it is the source value. The source is feeding off. We can see on the right hand side is 3 different destinations as shown by the green triangle in the top left hand corner. So anytime that value in these 7 and my master spreadsheet gets updated. Every one of those 3 different destinations will get updated, and we can see it's going into two different locations within the same document as well as feeding my investor relations deck. So, again, we are reducing the manual effort of updating all this information for every single one 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 dispute. So, again, each of those three 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 Esa, You collates 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 of the end product and the end product is the X HTML file. For professional design, you need to send this content from Wdesk to your designer. Would like to introduce you to our new ICML exporter. It's very slick. The benefits are there is no disconnect between editing in Wdesk and the designers designing in in design. Upper both in our minds with complete data assurance wherever that data is. And we can do this as the content is locked to Wdesk. We're still allowing designers to do their job and create professional report ready for this new format. So this is how we interact between Wdesk and your designer working in in design. 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've typed loads of zeros. 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 that I am the designer here on the right, The ICML file is received by the designer where she overwrites the previous ICML files from Waikiba to update the new content, all those zeros. Then she goes to the link 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 carry through into indesign without disturbing the design. So tagging, The extern 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 help from our team of experts. Once EXPRL 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, but 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. Experiral mistakes can easily be spotted like here on the right. You have total control and a maximum timeline with full data assurance, Now for the fun review team. So now we're adding a the finance team, upper management, board committees, and anyone else who would be reviewing your annual report. We wanna create a remote robust with speedy reconciliation and sign off process. But once again, because we have one set of documents, one that, the data sources, we've linked all of that information together. Your upper management and board have one location to go see all of that information. They can leave comments directly inside of the document, so you're no longer sending emails 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 clients. We've mentioned many times that everything inside of a Wdesk is fully auditable. Do you 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 1st review, second review, 3rd review, and so on. And then by running a black line 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 review. We can simply send off this of information that have been updated for that final sign off piece itself. This sign off process can also happen inside of Wdesk. So we have certifications where each of the team members can attest 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 lead to the document so the users can see exactly what they're signing off on and get the all the information into that one place for the support team to manage. If there's ever a chance that someone would say no more information is not up to date yet, they would be forced to leave a common tree box to fill it out. So you can see why they're not signing off on their final attestations rather than, again, having an email 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. It's all done at one 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 one 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 to trace 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 approve where this number came from? Where does it feed to? Did I catch every location that number is being reported? Again, inside of to the truth source system as well as linking and hitting every single time that number has been has been referenced Anna 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 one central location, but these up the audit time as well, We've had several customers, report back that they've had a good a deal of savings from the audit team because we save them time and efforts with that clear audit trail for the governance and traceability of the entire end to end process. Thank you. So in Wdesk, the tagging 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 esign report will look exactly like the PDF you are used to, but with the amazing functionality ESF can bring. You do not need 2 documents. One boring one for the Easter's mandate and one lovely one to stakeholders? No. You can have it all in one 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 work either. So here, imagine again, I am the designer on the left. From in design, 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 X HTML. This process is seamless so long as you follow Workiva's design guidelines. Now, the XVR layer containing the tags is incorporated into the design 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 HTML files to to change content, which the platform will be aware of. The X HTML will be part of your file system and can be viewed by clicking on it and opening it up in your browser. W Desk is great for designers because they have a maximum design time and their design flows into the XHDMA. So the best eServe report that you've filed and placed on your website is a one where there is trust in the data, and Warkiva 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 stage of assurance is when every output comes from 1 data source. This is the work either 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 X URL will leave a footprint downloaded and shared in seconds. We don't exactly know how investors will take EXPAREL. It might take a few years for regression analytics to show its power. A three year old mistake will be embarrassing at best by quite possibly damaging to reputation and brand. Whakiva is a fully integrated system, and one where EXPAREL 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 then that 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 timeline with full data assurance. This is perfect for EsF and perfect for the footprint. So in summary of everything we've shown today with having 1 form that is quite different than anything our customers have seen before moving into Wdesk. So data consistent see efficient collaboration and process control. The three key points to get to those positive business outcomes that we saw earlier. I hope you've seen how we've walked through having that data and narrative updated automatically from that single source of truth, increase data integrity by using W Data connecting through your API 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 periods again because everything is done inside of one platform, one document, one spreadsheet, you're not going to multiple share points, share drives, 2 different source files. It's all in one place. Adding an 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 internal annual 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 IX Bureau Tagging process and 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 get us to 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 have looked pretty familiar to you. 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. Alright. Do we have any questions? Oh, Jackie, I think this first one is for you. The first question here is how does Workiva think about relationship with design agencies. Okay. That's a great question. Woodlacking hearts to build on our relationships with design agency. We totally understand the hard work and the dedication they give to clients. What we want to do is make their lives easier by giving them the best ICUMA exporter. We want to totally reassure our designer friends that they would be absolutely be working with the 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, restatement or late filing. And we're aiming to be the best citizen of professional publishing with type code suitable for swift download. We're putting together loads of new content welcoming design agencies. So please look out for that soon. Awesome. Thanks, Jackie. Let's see if anymore 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 for my com content point of view. Sorry. I misheard 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 W 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 black lining 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 ESAP report. The code will be well formatted and every output will look the same. No, you know, glossy PDFs and a compliant filing. Everyone will look the same. And we're really proud of that. And and we hope companies, designers, and investors will be too. Hope that answered the question. Awesome. Let's see anymore. Anything not designed? It's important. I'm definitely impressed. Oh, here's one. I'll take this last one here. What's the implementation us 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 pulling inside of that implementation. So there are 4 key phases during the implementation process of an annual report. We have the documents set up. Linking, EXPAREL, and data mapping itself. So that first page of your document set, we're gonna take your existing word documents, power points, Excel files, anything around the annual report that you would like to bring in so that 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 moved to the linking of the data. So by using your existing information, so right now, we would use your 2019 and 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 gonna link all of that information to the financial statements. You could 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, XRail does is live, and it lives on top of the documentation. So we do have teams in side of Fortiva 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 the of these 4 is the data mapping. Where does the data actually come from. So we took that original Excel file. We've imported that in. We've linked it to the documents. Now we wanna see how far back into the true source system we we can go. And so some of our customers will take the information, and we make sure you we allow for the manual inputs inside of that spreadsheet because we know there'll always be adjustments surrounding that need to happen. So maybe that data mapping requires adding in an adjustments field within there, we can also look at using an Excel sync. If we can't quite connect to your true source to somebody in API, we do have a plugin to an Excel that will allow you to simply push that data from the Excel file in the Wdesk. So in that instance, it could 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 that highest level that we may and before of getting that API connection through W Data itself and what does that look like? So working with your IT team, but really the only IT element that we need in the entire implementation process is just confirming that API connection, making sure we have set up again to have those predetermined automation runs that will trigger at the following events. So how often do we want the data to update and then where does 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 fill 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's flown 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, very easy for you to do. You have your training, and I guess that's step number 5. That's the most important out of those key cases that I mentioned. You will be trained by your customer success managers on how to use Wdesk. We don't just leave you leaving 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 maintains the port going forward. That way you're ready to go with your annual report when that time comes. That was a brilliant answer. Thanks, Jackie. Alright. I think that's about all the time that we have today. Any questions that were 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 non financial reporting. 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 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 also expand or maximize your slide area using the buttons in the top right corner. If you have any questions as we go through the session, you can submit these through the Q and 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 email. Please note, we do capture all questions that are submitted. Our presenters today are Sarkis Cottontonis, and Natalia Koletta, and they'll be covering off the terms and challenges in the of ESG reporting, a demo of the work either 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 Kareta Shahra 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 ASG management and reporting process. Before I do that though, I would like to invite our very special guest, Safis Kon Konstantones, 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 to that that include, also extremely high level subject matter expertise in the field of ESG reporting. Seth is over to you. Please, tell us a little bit of CKS Advisory and then walk us through your presentation. You, Natalia, and thank you for the valiant attempt, at my surname. I it's not I have no it's not easy. So hello, everybody. My name is Saksco Santonis, and I'm the managing partner of KKS Advisors. KKS is a strategy consulting firm. He 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 non financial reporting. Nathalia mentioned, we're very excited to partner up with Fortiva and bring subs and subs and mother expertise, in the system of breathing space. Combine it with workivas and parallel 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's enough complexity in the AC space. So let's make our lives a little bit easier. And I wanna 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 a exactly the same graph that has been produced every year pretty much. 10 years ago, the top global risks in terms of impact would include only one ESE issue. At that time, we're talking about asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, and chronic diseases as a major risks. But today, ESU is 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 $302,000,000,000 in damage from extreme weather events in the US alone. That's in 2019. We also witnessed the 1st so called climate change bunker see. That was of the Pacificas And Electric, which is California's or actually was California's largest utility, overwhelmed by a rapid clamatic 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 and E filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and it was estimated that they had $30,000,000,000 in liabilities and about 750 lawsuits from wildfire. Keep in mind that PG And E was once an S and P 500 company that moved from a 25,000,000,000 valuation in October 2018 to below 4,000,000,000 at some point, with its shares basically falling to the lowest level since 1972. So these issues are real. And they're prompting multiple stakeholders to us companies to report on what they're doing in terms of ES 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 environmental solutions. So what we believe we're witnessing is actually a transition. The same way that we move from an agriculture economy economy and then the 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 a company's operations on employees and local communities? And if you take this from an investor perspective and 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 fairly specific practice and 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 of an impact economy, it takes a number of years to diffuse and penetrate. You might actually need to reset the care at times. So firms that make this transition, I realize that this is not easy. So, for example, if you wanna 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 three main reasons why companies have difficulties. 1 is cognitive barriers. So companies don't believe this is happening. They don't accept that these changes is happening. We've seen that a lot of times, 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, you know, 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. And 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 failed to make that transition, but that doesn't mean that this is not happening. And actually, the data shows a 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 the issue information in the early 1990s, there has been an exponential almost increased to over 9000 companies in, 2018. On the graph on the left, the light blue line refers to a worldwide sample of about 4900 companies And what you see on the graph is, a 100 companies by revenue in each of the 40 nine countries, the research 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 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 UMPRI is an international network of investors working together put their 6 principles of responsibility investing into practice. And their goal is to understand the implications of ESG and system of baby. For investors and support their signatories to incorporate the CSG issues into their investment decision making and their access. 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 1,000,000 of assets under management. And so the next time you probably come across in the news, a letter from the CEO of BlackRock Larry Fink, you can assume that there are a lot of pressure and influence been approved from organizations like PRI for Larifing 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 as such as renewable energy or clean transport and their issuance has reached over, I think, $200,000,000,000 in 20.19. And the investor interest in ESG data has been growing at a very fast pace. The number of customers using Bloomberg GSE data has more than tripled in, the past 7 years, similar trend across most of the data providers, market spend in ERC content and ERC 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 VST data availability and quality by including listing requirements related to ESG reporting, providing appropriate guidance, appropriate training, and so on. I, I believe now we have more than 15 stock exchanges that produce is to report in 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 CSE information? A recent survey showed that a proven link between ESG issues and financial performance is probably the most likely to cause investors begin considering ESG issues in the investment analysis. And think this has significant implications for companies because it gives a clear indication on the type of information requested by investor And I will come on, at at a later slide about differences between different s and a bigger 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 lease of community give backs in a very nicely, closely report, especially if that has nothing to do with your company's business model. And having worked with most CTC 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 or revenues costs, new products and services, competitive advantage, etcetera. 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 as the euro European parliament adopt the EU directive, and that was on disclosure of, non financial and diverse information by large conferencing groups. This companies have to publish a report on policies they implement in relation to social responsibility respect for human rights and corruption diversity on company boards. And this report could be either part of their sustainability report or, an an additional report that goes hand in hand with their financial filings. These easy rules applied to large publicly listed companies, we with more than 500 employees. And I think it covers approx monthly 6000 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 TCFT recommendations. And as much as I hate acronyms, there's quite a few in the agency space to see if this stands for the task force on climate related financial disclosures. And, whoever's not familiar with this initiative, it's an initiative that develops voluntary, consistent, climate related financial risk disclosures for use by companies, of a T50 published, final recommendations on these disclosures in 2017, and the second half of twenty seventeen and have actually currently attracted interest by over 1000, 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 the CFT, their headquarter team, over 50 countries, and they span Public and private sectors, like companies, national governments, central banks, our regulators, stock exchange, etcetera. But, the key take here is that better disclosure of this climate related information can have a really direct benefits. I have listed some on the slide, increased awareness and understanding of these risks and opportunities, but there is 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 all those slower than the developments that are happening in the European Union toward them, 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 ESE 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 months ago, the SCC's investor advisory committee edge the organization to take the global lead in mandating easy 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 pro right, but not everything is perfect. And, this progress has come with some difficulties and challenges. Verizon the demand for ESD data has given an equal rise to organizations that are active in the space and this span from NGOs that develop reporting frameworks and principles to EAC data providers and EAC rating agencies. And as much as these organizations have the best intention to help with creating this infrastructure for better use information and and for Easy data to be readily available, they have unintentionally, I would say, created an element of complex 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 system and build reports, but then a company might say, how is this different from SSP? Systemability accounting standard board that has created its own framework to identify material 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 this safety. And I'm just working left hand side of the slide because then on the right hand side, what you see is you have multiple EAC data providers, that, 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 EAC data providers issue questionnaires to companies that have to respond with the fear that if you don't respond, then you're probably going to be penalized, in the scoring, non disclosure, Equally worst score. And it's interesting because I've had conversations with, companies that have over 20 full time people or more just responding to service 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'll be discussing soon. And Natalia will touch upon how technology solutions can solve this problem where you have multiple informations 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 and they have a number of ways to do so. This could be through a standalone document or some company actually integrate some of that content on their website. It can take the form of a non financial report which is a smaller, usually add on document to the financial report, and that pretty much what's regulated by the EU directive, that we discussed in previous slides. And these reports present only base information about these issues or an integrated report, which is considered right now, at 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 1, what investors want from, EST reporting, but, more importantly, how companies can get a benefit by doing all this hard work of collecting the data, setting an ESG strategy, and, basically, how is 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, there is tremendous progress on the HD 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's not just one framework follow. It's not as clear cut as that. And 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 need from different stakeholders. We have multiple data providers within companies, but also we have multiple data providers and data requests, 3 question information from companies. And, again, the the problem with all this is that A lot of the times you see misinterpretation of this public available data and companies complaining about ASC 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 presents exactly the performance of a company. And a lot of the times, there is not an effective way to have a a good audio trail of the data. Again, because, some of these requests could be ad hoc. You could have too many people working on satisfy all these different stakeholders. And unless this is, becoming very systematic within the firm, it can be very difficult to to trail how data flows. I I have this little screenshot on the right hand side. We wrote a paper with a colleague of mine called the 4 things and no one will tell you about DSC data. It was published in the journal of Applied Corporate Finance and it discusses some of the major challenges that we have seen with ERC data and why some company see major differences in the ERC scores they receive from the major HD data providers. So whoever is interested, it's a, it's a conditioner, it's not an academic paper. So feel free to have a look. So with that, I'm gonna 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 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 1 centralized platform, whether it's my, CDP, information request, or whether it's my Dow John's questionnaire, or whether it's, it's, some other reporting frameworks such as GRI or SABIS or CCFD 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 the, ESG portion of an annual report that I'd like to walk you through. And I'd like to 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 the solution in which we no longer need to create our documentation in 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 introduce the single asset document, introduce, 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 had 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 and it's it's managed through our concept of permissions. I'm not gonna go into the detail of that right now. But just so you know, even though you're 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 doing making certain changes, earlier today. You can see what happened in early in June, in 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 black lines 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, 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 and audit fees. Another thing I wanted to 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 a table, this one number. All of those, they have either a green underline or the green little triangle on the left hand side. That indicates that this number is linked from a 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 its source if I want to do that. It's, what it means is that this this this number is driven 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 non financial reporting master spreadsheet, but it's linked out to 14 different destinations. And so it shows in my annual report, this the those places we're looking 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, and it will take me directly to the cell where this information is is also inputted. So what you can understand through through that is that we can link out our information that is required by multiple frameworks and it's asked for multiple submissions, and we can just link it link it to multiple destination 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'll just gonna follow the link and it will open a spreadsheet. Functionality in WDS that is very similar you can think about it as an equivalent of our Excel, but it 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 a source of that information. So now should that change? Should my total GHGM change? Let's just say that we're gonna add the employee commuting commuting number. There we go. And, of course, through formulas, this number will now 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'll notice that, but now this number automatically changed to 3 198,000. This bar is no 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 or the same data to be published to different audiences. Another topic I wanna 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 information 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 measurements you need, different metrics. All of that, prevents them from collecting standardized information and as such presenting the correct information in the reports. This is this can be seen very easily as soon as you go to any JRI 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. That Zendesk in through their spreadsheets offers 3 different ways of collecting the data and bringing data into the centralized platform. First, I wanna call out the fact that our spreadsheet here follows the structure of JAG protocol. So should you start collecting and working on the data in Wdesk, those templates and the look and feel of the templates, for at least the GFG part or the the environmental part, would already be available to to you in the, GHG product called compliant format. Now in terms of collecting that data, I quickly wanna 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 blue certain cells that I want to be edited by my, contributors. All the rest is actually locked from editing. 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 the data then be converted to certain units or certain metric, calculate may be multiplied to certain metric, we can quickly build that into that the data collection template. So then it rolls up to the purchase gasses total, and it calculates the subtotal. And then that subtotal actually goes, let's say, to your summary. And in the at the end of the day, it's part of your total GHG emissions. That is one simple way of collecting, collecting your data. I also know that there's a lot of data that already lives in different excels on your desktops and comes to you in a form of, emails and and so forth. So for those that already have those 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 to the sheet. 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 wanna quickly call out the in fact, the the w disc can automatically connect with, your source systems. So if you're using, systems of records to capture your raw data for either environment or, human human capital information or maybe both, you can also connect them directly to WDS. 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 in the case 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 into this file. We can quickly test this. I'm just gonna remove a portion of 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 will see that through doing this, I will update certain portion of tables in my spreadsheet that are driven off of off of this 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 gonna 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 we go. My data on the average, years of service appeared here. And as such, they 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 questioners and templates where I wanna present this information. I hope that those 3 ways illustrate how you can quickly collect different types of both structured and non structured data. And how you can therefore streamline your calculation and aggregation in order to produce high quality, some disclosures for your different stakeholders. The last bit, but definitely not least I wanna collab right now, is how do we manage all of this in compliance to frameworks that all of we leverage for our ES2 reporting. I will show that on an example of JRI. So at the bottom here, I created a little table that talks about my energy consumptions and outside of the organization. And I I 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 it 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, a spreadsheet 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 gonna have an ID and it's gonna have a description. Reporting requirements is led 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 was the conclusion, what is the standard, or sorry, what is the status of this particular disclosure. That way, you can give your contributors certain tasks. You can assign them to come 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 the disclosures that I have built in and I'm using for my ESG process. I can create a different, the views that will tell me which of my disclosures are or are not subject to external audit, and I can click and 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 the a production of those GRI checklist. When I open this dashboard here real quick, you'll see my breakdown of the dis 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 as a manager of the process, I wanna be on, you know, I wanna be ahead of the curve. I wanna 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 the 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, you know, finish your your work on the GRI 302. As soon as I create such task, I can add it to due date, description, and I can assign it to a person. I those people will will receive both task notification here in Wdesk, but they will also receive an email notification that there's some outstanding work that I'm, an expecting them to finish. Now when they do that, they can go. They can do their work. They can finally, you know, prepare the tables and whatnot, check the data, and they can just flip through the status and say, okay. Italian, now it's in review. As soon as they do that, what you'll see on my dashboard is that my dashboard jumps real time. Every piece of information that is updated in WDS will be automatically reflected on those dashboards. With that, you, achieve a truly dynamic way of managing your frameworks and with and and, therefore, streamlining your process ensuring both, consistency of the data that you produce and prepare and collect, but all so compliance with the framework on every stage of 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, Sarkis. I'm just conscious that we are close to our allotted time. So in terms of questions, we're gonna have to follow-up with those. I saw a number of ones coming in, so we can follow-up with those after the webinar, Pusakis or Natalia. And of course, and through anything else that you've got, you can reach out to webinars@webkeva.com, 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 work Keira team, thank you for attending today's virtual event. Risk audit and internal controls. Actually executing risk and control frameworks at the time of COVID-nineteen. We have over more than 200 participants throughout the whole EMEA region which shows the relevancy of this topic. I'm Didi Lake, who is the sales director of integrated risk services at Fortiva. 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, 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 And A engagement tools. We will try to answer these during the webcast, but if a full answer is needed or we run out of time, it will be answered later via email. Please know we do capture all questions. Our presenters today are Rosemary Amato from the Institute of Management Accountants, Brian Knowles, Vice President, Controllership of NXP Semiconductors, and your whole goals, senior manager risk consulting, at KPMG. Okay. Let's start the workshop. Rosemary has an opening question for you as a long live member of the IMA, a CMA, and a former IMA global board member. You have been involved in many forums where enterprise risk management has been discussed Can you share some perspectives on I'm always ready to share my views on E. R. M. Diedrich. 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 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 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 financials departments in the companies must contribute to the effort and possibly drive the effort. As we all recognize, finances 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 act assess 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 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 1 or more of these activities right now. Now is also the time to build resiliency for the future crisis is. And that's why I'm saying that we should not let go of fundamentals as they are always fundamental. You need good planning. A recent article in the German edition of Corporate Finance by Bernardo a director responsible for regional partner relations at the IMA in Central Europe discusses how a fully implemented functional system must include the risk of a pandemic. He describes the characteristics of 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-nineteen, 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 listeners had pandemic in their 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 Bernadan provided in his article. Many maturity models exist. I had the privilege of being part of the IMA team that provided input into the Khoso framework when it was revised in 2013. Framework. And those materials are also an excellent place to start. If you are looking at your plans at this time, Also in October 2018, KOSO published applying 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 system once it has been implemented. Another way to look at is as part of the 3 lines of defense model. Risk management is part of the 2nd line of defense, but I've seen many times where 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 examples, but remember to make it yours. My last slide is from a recent Deloitte webcast and for transparency sake. I did spend 21 years at Deloitte in Atlanta, the Netherlands and Malta. This slide describes activities that should be in your 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 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 plan that he inherited. And made several changes. 1 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 fifty flights of stairs. I had to walk down ten ones in my office in London, and that was an experience. He got so much grief from his senior leaders who wanted this to stop, but he persisted and continued the drills When 911 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 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 planning. He stuck to his fundamentals. A good 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, plans are being executed. But as McKinsey says, we should also take the time now to build resiliency for future crises. You could 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. Diedrich, I think it might be time to hear from your room. To share Okay. Well, thank you, Rosemarie. Well, welcome to everyone of you, as for attending also this, this webinar. I would first like to introduce myself who am I. My name is Jerome Bulls. I'm working at KPG 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 sixteen week old daughter, with whom I can spend quite some time now at the tone. 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 communication with each other. And also I hear from, a lot of my clients that, that difficulties now executing all their controls in a timely and equipped manner as some of the reasons may be that, processes may have changed or, system, system access, system access may have changed. And as a result, there are more segregation of duty issues. So as a matter of fact, also within the organization, some of the employees they, 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 chats or think it's still still on there. So had they may still, could they feel network issues, or, had they may be assigned to, to, to other task and therefore have other priorities. So, this all impacts, I think, the, the risk profile of, of your organization, and as a way, and we need to work with them. So therefore, at KMG, and we truly believe that we've got to watch our soft controls more closely than ever. And as a matter of fact, that the soft controls are actually the the culture and behavior of our entities within the organization. Also, I think that GRC Technology can support some of these sub control elements. The sub control model was actually she built and designed by, by KPMG here in the Netherlands, and I think it's, you know, widely used across the world. So I'll discuss each of the different elements of the subcontract 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 may be assigned to other costs or priorities and some of the control execution may be delegated to other employees. But do these employees really feel what is expected from, 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 self control model is about around role modeling. So senior management has a lot on their mind at the moment. So and they have to deal with this crisis. So they may give less priority to execute and 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 the time you know. The first element is around commitment. So we are all working from home now. And we may teach some of our children their, their school work, or some of our family or, close circle friends, and 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 4th element is around achievable So everyone is working from home, but do they still have access to the right data and information to actually give 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, to complete their work. The 5th element is around transparency. It needs to be visible that and employees need to feel that whatever they're doing and the work that they're doing, the compressor they execute or the extra step that they take to mitigate emerging risk that has visible to others to their managers who see what they're doing. So especially in this time, if this is not visible, we should really pay attention to this, to this element. The 6th element is discussability. So working from home, new ways of communication, new ways of working, emerging risks, challenges, and control execution, employees need to feel that the should be able 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 a right platform for that. Call someone through accounts. So, when working from home, we don't see each other anymore, and we do not have, yeah, 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 and provisions need to feel that they are rewarded for, and the things that are doing good and the risks that are mitigating the actual steps that they take but they also need to feel that there are consequences when things are not going well. So when they not execute their 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 sub control elements, GRC Technology, like working path 2, 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 GSE Technology in this way can really support you. Also for role modeling, senior management, it needs to be visible that they're really executing their controls. And in a geo geo fetal, This is really something that can that's shown, and and other employees can see that as well. So, and they know that also senior management think that control institution mitigating risks is something that needs to be done in a timely way. It also helps in achieve ability. So providing, by our workflow, the right instructions for control execution, provide access to the right level of information, indicates, in a timely manner when someone needs to start, when someone needs to finish their controls, assign you risks and controls to them, that's 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 the soft control elements, which are so important in order to remain in control as an organization. Also, the auto shop controls are, of course, of course, of course, important. But therefore, we need to find other ways of communicating that into each other. By, periodic status update meetings, giving someone a call, meetings, by, webinars. Etcetera. So to summarize in a few key takeaways, so control execution in COVID-nineteen is not simply business as usual. And so the processes may have changed, had employees may not feel as comfortable as, as they as they were. So we really gotta be aware of that. And we really think that soft controls are now in this time more important than ever. And wherever we have the opportunity to leverage on GOC 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 to Brian. Who will tell us a little bit more about an excuse and how they use. Thank you, Jerome. And reminder to all the listeners, if you have questions, please use the Q And A sections in the platform so we can get the questions answered by the end of the session. So it's now time to go over Brian Malls with us, of NXP Semiconductors. Over to you, Brian. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. You know, if I could just get a thumbs up from the other presenters, you can hear me okay. I'm just having some tech. Okay. Good. Just want to make sure. So everybody, welcome to my attic. Which is now a converted office. So, here we go. It's the way we work now. Just by way of introduction, you can see on the slide here, and, this is where you said you'll be I'll be getting this out, go over everything, I spent, quite a bit of time in my life in public counting 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 my with the weather, with that beautiful California weather to come here, but I'll we've had great weather here in the Netherlands for the past month, 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 to work for a company called Alterra, a semiconductor company, And there, we were introduced to, web filings, which is now our schema. So at that point in time, web filings was a a startup and we were getting calls from the, sales team every week about this great new product, and it was really, focused more on the EXPAREL services that all of us were gonna 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 fact that the relationship that I developed with the team, they are carried forward with me when I moved to Netherlands. And when I came over here, I stopped right away to bringing them in house. So a great company. I find them really, really awesome to work with, and they they listen to all our feedback. So that's something that has has come with me over here to, to the Netherlands. So, we're in the middle of our, towards the near end of our closed 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 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 Drow was talking about. There's a lot of things that, you know, we experienced as, as we went about dealing with COVID-nineteen 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 one NXP chip in it. We also evolved quite a bit in security. So, micro trips that are in passports, bank cards, cell phones, 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 US. 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 ever set our excellence in China I've part of my SOX team in Malaysia. We have our headquarters here in Idaho 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 were 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 the 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 our NextE where we became a domestic filer. So for prior to that, we're a foreign private issuer, which meant we filed 6 Ks on a quarterly basis in 20 Fs on an annual basis. We didn't have to deal with proxies and form threes and form fours. But with that 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 4 filings. We will eventually do our 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 we didn't have pieces all over the all over the world. I didn't have to worry about word documents being sent back and forth or embedded Excel spreadsheets not working. I wanted one source of truth where I brought data in that fed into these other reports, and I wanted to be able to expedite the timeline on all these filings that we had to do. So So far to date, we've had quite a bit of success with that. Then COVID-nineteen 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 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. Filings. We wanted to keep the same cadence. We thought that because of the way we were structured, we were used to working somewhat mobile, 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, 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 actually go wrong. The list was bigger at the big at the onset of this Allstate. Eventually dwindle down as we get into the actual work workflow, because we're pretty comfortable with working mobile with everybody. The other thing I wanted to do was make sure that we engaged all stakeholders. So clearly, we had more than normal controllership team and the FPNA team. Investor relations had a heavy involvement, right, as far as disclosures, what we're gonna 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 gonna happen. Senior management is always engaged, but was more engaged. And we wanna make sure that we were messaging things appropriately to the audit committee and the board of directors and ultimately to our shareholders. So I was 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 employees. Everybody is working from home. We'll work from home for a while longer. We did wanna maintain a normal cadence, which I would say is relatively aggressive. We continue to get better with that. And then we wanna provide a seamless transition to the way of working. And from that perspective, it was really a more of a reliance on technology. We obviously utilize technology, but it was how can we take this tool, Warkiva? They know the things like a 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 set snapped from, a PwC white paper, actually, that I put together the that we went through really well. So, as we looked at the overall processed. And we, 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 gas may be. So identified 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 reprioritized where we needed to. We looked at X Essex, access controls, of course. IP was a big component of this for us. And then where needed, we updated any key, controls. And I will say that, 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 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 home from an overall design structure. The gaps for me were more the fact that there was gonna be biggest stresses on our mitigating patrols, right, with people not centrally located, not having those water cooler conversations, maybe having a cup coffee or sitting in a meeting room together, it was what was not gonna come up in the not normal flow of conversation. And for me, the mid gate controls are gonna be important, where you have your analytics, your, more detailed reviews and 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? You know, and how are they gonna go about this review process without having somebody write their go to them. Also, I would say we were adjusting to people's different work schedules. Clearly, a lot of our people were at home with young kids, so not everybody was doing a 9 to 5, right, work hours had shifted. So it was how are we gonna be able to communicate effectively, make sure nothing slip through and and be able to, maintain that process that we wanted to maintain. With that, we looked took a look at our documentation standards. That's something that we always do anyway. Is. The beautiful thing, the SOX tool, for WERHIVA 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 the controlled documentation so that if 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 is went through and did their reviews, they were certainly challenging, okay. What am I used to seeing in here? If there's something that should have been caught in an approval, 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 Sarial, our people, had fought ahead. They really worked out a process, to form, formalize a way to 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 the new thing. Other things that we're worried about were the displacement of the team. That wasn't such a big deal other than the shift in, at the timing maybe. Communication. You know, we encourage everybody to overcommunicate utilizing the WDS tools that allows us to do it seamlessly within that tool, and everybody gets and actually we saw instances 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 tool directly and get them to go look at that. So, great way to catch and help other people, to deal with what I would call the biggest thing I worried 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'll have family, friends, that we wanna make sure to stay healthy. And then for those families with young kids at home, clearly their days 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 mitigate controls, we just made sure that we have more sets of eyes and normal of some of those things that were really challenged. The review is to make sure that their reviews are done appropriately and work their way work its way up the line. Cybersecurity concerns became a big deal. I'm sure many of you heard 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 financial information was gonna be safe. Clearly, that, the workiva platform path that test, with flying colors, and that's why we utilizing it. So that made things a little bit easier, for us to not have to worry about this. Our people were working from home. We knew they were on their home networks, but they were accessing, both the sucks module and the external reporting module that we used in the cloud that was very secure from our point of mind. So that brought a a lot of sense of, Tom overall from that perspective with financial information going everywhere. We encourage people to use things in the tool. It's supposed to go via email, again, because those concert 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 moved everybody to home, they were going to be all kinds of requests on the IT team. There were concerns with, you know, people having access our systems via a VPN. We do know that as they go tried to get into SAP, for example, that wasn't consistently working for them, but with the Workiva tools out in the cloud, have less of a concern here there. We didn't have to worry, bothering our IT team at all. And actually, the the work team provided great report here. We didn't have one issue at all. And now we still have to get through filing. So hopefully, I haven't jinxed my jinxed myself. That does occur next week. But so far so good, we seem to be well on there. Talking a little bit now about, you know, what what we ended up experiencing at the end of the day. So I'm, as I mentioned before, we found that our process really didn't change at all. And I think we actually got a little bit fast people really saw what was kind of the the fat in the in the process that we had. We became a little leaner. We looked at areas where it could be quicker. So, you know, the focus on efficiency became a big deal. As people were working at home, maybe they were less distracted at the beginning of the office. Or maybe it was just a new way of thinking, a new environment, but that really worked 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 round table. 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 round table, and we just use the Workiva tool, and we use Microsoft teams to broadcast it there. So it's all in one place and everybody's familiar with the layout. And that really worked well for us and no downtime with having that to one of the cloud. We relied 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 alone. 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. Answer that question. From a soft compliance, excuse me, perspective, you know, I was focused on the flexibility and the connected workflow. The fact that, you know, our SOC tools, have that workflow within it. So is we have a monitor somebody marches us control, they complete the control execution, and then it goes to the next person for the, the actual, review. That reviewer is notified institaneously. The tool sends out reminders. So we didn't have to worry about, you know, 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 SaaS compliance tool is the the mobility. We use the tool for, a quarterly Sheniere. And I think this is the first time that quite a few of the people who do that that quarterly certification, did it on either a mobile phone app, moved their mobile phone, or they did it on an iPad or some other, tablet device. So they loved the aspect that they could just they received the link in their email. They clicked on that link. They right to the portal completed the certification from done. So they love that fact that they could not have to get in front of their laptop or 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 Fox tools that we are able to make changes within the control structure as well. So we did some rationalization. And one big step we took, this year as well is that we have our prepared by client lists for our external auditors as they do their review. We're able to link that list right into the control instances that we have we didn't have people uploading things in 2 or 3 places. Just point it directly to there. We hopefully will have an API in this, in the near future that will 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 was the key for us to having success around, maintaining the timeline that we want to maintain with everybody everywhere. The SEC filings. Now this is an area where you know, I love this one source of truth concepts. So those of you that utilize a tool know that, you know, there is basically, an sell, 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'd only need to check that if a 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 communication aspect of the tool. People were apprehensive at one point in using the the review aspect of web file of the, work even to Sorry. I still call it web fonts. Just wait back for my old days. But what we did see was it marked increased in people leaving comments to each other using the at, symbol to identify either a person or 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 round table meeting, there were very few things that we needed to discuss. It was kinda done before we went in there. And to be honest, our documents have 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. I 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. I do think that we learned a on how we can 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, to take away, 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. We're the kind of the key things for us. So just a couple 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 say, guess what? You have to work from home. So that that was a big shift right there. Right? That's a mind shift, for everyone. Then right away, they addressed it, they got on board, they got the setups at home, we started, the process, and things just rolled. Change is, you know, 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 heat. The flexibility in the tooling was huge for us. The fact that it was cloud based, people get access from anywhere, It just worked perfectly for us. And to that point, I would say there you go. The smart tools allow for smart work, please. We look to expand the tool anymore. We use it right now, as I mentioned, for socks and for the external reporting aspect. And with the socks, we do the, quarterly certification, but we are looking to embed our, county policy manual within that socks. Tool. We are looking at the module, because we can see how that would link really well into the risks that we evaluate as part of our 10 K process. In our overall fax 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 our teams and then presented to me. So, we really look forward to pushing connected aspect of the, of the work even tools. And it's a great partnership with them. They've actually just asked me to be, part of their, customer development board. 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 these questions could feel free to ask and certainly feel free to reach out to me independently as well. If you if you go down your pro go down your quarterly, close processing question. So at this point, I'll hand back to Deidrick and Go from there. Thank you, Brian. And you, Arun and Rosemary, for sharing your thoughts and your great presentations. There are a few questions that came in. The first one that is for you, Brian. Did COVID 19 change your risk management practice? And if it did, how or what can we learn from this? It could also be for you, whom to answer, but whoever thinks it can answer at best. It it didn't essentially change our risk management So this is something that we've been working on developing more and more, becoming, more of an integrated part of our overall socks 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'd already identified, to be honest. So things around, you know, inventory access and obsolescence, costing. Absorb or sun absorb costs. The impairment of potential impairment of assets. Right? Those are normal risks that we were looking at on a quarterly basis anyways. 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're doing. But I wouldn't say it led to a very significant change of role. If you don't know, if you have anything to No. What I, what I think I see is a couple of my clients that, the risk manager managers, get more into the life that they never before. Everyone is wanting them to look at changes in processes, how COVID 19 impacts their organization. So there's a lot of demands, from the organization on the risk managers, at the moment. Okay. Rosemary, do you think that any company as another question included scenarios for pandemics in their planning? I would sure hope so. And if I was the, 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 Khoso 2018 report, they also mentioned that pandemics was reported as one of the top 5 risks to be addressed in a plan. But what I thought was really interesting is I found the 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. Question came in either for Brian or Arun, 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 or during COVID 19, are your clients adapting a similar approach or any as in size on how to, prevent this would 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-nineteen. Yeah. Brian, you can start. Yeah. Sure. So, kind of as I mentioned before, one of the things we did focus on were, or our key choles. A, where they have the right key controls and, b, how are we gonna 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 that things are gonna be done and to identify if they're gonna be challenges in completing any of those key controls. Right? So with anything else, if there's planning in place, generally, you can adapt it and and address it. And again, now the backstop was our mitigating rules, right, did the mitigate mitigating controls and show 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 where 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 where people learn jobs. So we thought that if we needed to, we could make a shift, or somebody from another level can step in and and take over. So we we had backup planning. Fortunately, we did not need execute on that, but that's kind of the approach that we had as we went into it. Yeah. That's also, in fact, this morning, I'll set, call with one of our clients who was facing, I think, did the same kind of, challenges. And they were also thinking, how can we increase monitoring of all the key controls because indeed, it needs to be very clear to everyone that right now, performing these controls is, is more crucial than ever and that people need to feel that, they're they're being monitored and being watched. So like I also gave him my presentation transparency is is really a key item that that people really feel that, whatever they're doing is is being monitored. Yeah. Maybe. So one thing that I didn't highlight too much when I spoke about it, because I I may get a ticket for granted, but the soft actually all the tools, I believe, in in the workkeeping platform. But the the SOX module, there is a dashboard where we can monitor the control activities. Right? So that, I have my soft demos, and I'll remind you, 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 the certification tool as well. There are the 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 is to managing the process overall. For us, again, being globally spread, right, I have controls done in China, and Texas, and Malaysia, various other parts of the world. Europe, of course, many countries, we have a big facility in in Neimegan. Headquarters here in 9 to open, texting split between 2 continents, right, for me to be able to see that on one screen and be able to picture it and then communicate it. Those who need to know where we're at is, is a big deal for me. Makes my life a lot easier. So that's kinda how we manage the overall process. Brian, elaborating it 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, of the platform throughout, before it was ready to use? Yeah. So I actually hit this question quite a bit. Because many people envision that there's We lost the sound. It was maybe 2 weeks to get up and running. Right? And that was with X Bureau tagging as well. Then the, the stock's 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, and with a lot of the, a lot of what they've seen with the 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. It was really a minimum amount of time. So once we get the button, to go, we were off and running. And, you know, there was some people internally especially for the external reporting tool who wanted to run, you know, dual process and kind of keep the old way we were doing things anyway. And I I was totally confident that we were going to adapt real quickly, and we just jumped in with both feet. And, clearly, I just take my name on that a little bit, but having my experience with them back in Silicon Valley days, I was confident, and then I worked out. Great. Thank you. Maybe also, elaborating on your answer back, Yrum. You talk about transparency being an important part of self controls, how do you ensure that your employees are executing controls in an open fashion? Yeah. Well, like I said, GSE Technology really, had made not compatible of everything, which is being done. Hey, you can, you can track when, someone is starting to, to do a control or and when he when he's doing the things in progress or what kind of evidence he's uploading to the tool and how what, what the your results is of off the control, if it's effectively, yes or no. So, I really believe that that Yeah. Or at least I advise all my clients to use some form of of GSE tooling to, to increase transparency also. I think looking at the time, we have one question that we still can answer. I have one. Maybe it's also one for Rosemary to answer. How can we improve the collaboration between the three lines of defense? Optimization of resources and adequate controls at the right place. Is there a Very, very good question there. And, I think, I'm sharing, I should everyone should be seeing the, screen again. Of the three lines of defense model. And I think it really goes through your overall strategy on how you want to address controls. And, you know, as we know, the first line of defense always starts with, the, management controls and internal control measures. And then as you build your 2nd line where risk management comes in along with the other, five 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 while we respond via email. If you have any additional questions about today's presentations, we will be happy to respond. You can submit them through the Q And A engagement tool or mail us at webinars@arkifa.com. And we will get back to you in the next few business days. Thank you again for attending. 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 participation. And we hope you're 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. At the bottom of your screen are multiple application engagement tools you can use. All the engagement tools are resizable and movable. But feel free to move them around to get the most out of your desktop space. You can expand your slide area or maximize its full screen by clicking on the arrows in the top right corner. Any questions during the webcast, you can submit them through the Q and A engagement School. We will try to answer these during the webcast, but if a fuller answer is needed or it run out of time, it will be answered later via email. Please know, we do capture all questions. Our presenters today are Isabel Bordis from Deloitte, Conner O'Kelly from Nextiva, and Nathan Newell also from Workiva. I will now pass over to Connor to kick off our presentation. Thanks very much, Rachel. Thanks so much indeed. So look, is your statute reporting putting a risk? Wow, interesting question. Let's go through this today. It's definitely about Nathan. I'm going to talk it through that. I think a couple of things in my mind, think first of all, recognizing the shifting trends and statutory and financial reporting, what they are and how they affect you and what are the different models and what are the 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 to 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 improve 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, Connor, 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 nonattached clients, and I'm currently leading the statutory reporting offering. And, as Kona mentioned, I'm going to walk you through some shifting trends, risks, and how they're affecting you. Before going any further, I wanted to clarify what we mean by statutory reporting there's no confusion. It's the mandatory submission of financial information to local regulatory authorities, including period financial statements, disclosures about mutual events and transactions, and non financial information. For global organizations, statutory reporting and risk associated with it, it's not a new topic. It has traditionally been very manual and time consuming process that provides little global and regional visibility for central teams. Within the past, we have observed that most company I'm actually looking to see how they can improve the efficiency and the process and mitigate risk. So what changed? Well, the world has changed, and it's evolving very quickly in terms of globalization, technology advancement, social transformation, and see the regulatory change days. All of that is resulting in increasing level of risk associated with statutory reporting and increasing the demand from local regulators more transparency around the information provided to them. Let's take as an example, the flow and amount of data that is continuously increasing welcoming from notable systems in order to produce local financial statements. This is adding risk to report improper information to the regulators, but this can also result in increasing past risk, tax risk since the statutory data is usually used as a basis for local sites reporting. Reboarding inaccurate or incomplete information can result in fine and penalties and as important, they can impact the reputation of an organization. When all local subsidiaries is in the press for improperly reporting regulated information, the news expressed are globally in a matter of minutes. And the public does not turn to the local influencers, listen to the parent company. We listed here are 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, PAGS, Accounting And Other Central IT, and the inconsistencies in the application of the policies and policies. Also regularly here concern that the local reporting team rely on very few skilled individuals. On the previous slide, we talked about the fact that process improvement can help better emerging risk, but organization can also generate other benefits. Reducing cost is, of course, a major focus and not only internal cost, companies want to assess how they can reduce the fees associated with the audit of local subsidiaries. This could be achieved through adding 10 utilization and centralization of activities, or using collaborative technologies, one of the key feature of the work you've applied from that Conor and Nathan will be discussing further details in 2 minutes. One of the other benefits I would like to highlight is about maximizing already existing investments in technology and centralization. Let's take as an example of the company implementing an ERP. Reporting as an important component of the implementation road map. Eventually, companies would want to rely on one 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 statutory reporting. In fact, we have admin conversations around statutory reporting with tax departments as we are with accounting markets. Because the 2 processes are so intertwined, improving the statutory reporting process can have a direct impact on improving the quality of factory funding as well. I recently had discussions with clients around maturity levels that are applied differently by statutory reporting teams and tax teams. That's usually having a 0 or lower maturity level. I'd like to clearly see around the application of maturity and lack of coordination between tax and accounting teams, can lead to rework for the statutory reporting teams and delighting the tax reporting findings. We don't get risk and potential benefits in the previous slide, but what other different paths that an organization consider to enhance the statutory reporting process, which we usually see 2 different tasks. 1 is to keep the preparation of the report in house The other one is to outsource the services. Sitting the preparation of the results 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? But on my experience, I don't think there is one trend, but that the answer really depends on other factors that put into your company and specific situation. For example, I have seen companies seeking to outsource the preparation of the report because their local tax reform process was already outsold. I've also seen companies that use outdoor services deciding to bring in back the preparation in house to benefit from newly established shared service centers. Aditi considerations include understanding the trend process in terms of effort and requirements the key points you want to remedy it and what other initiatives are undergoing in your organization? We talk about ERP implementation, for example, but they can be able to finance a tax reporting transformation initiative. In any case, hitting 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 cost COVID-nineteen world where remote work may become more and more of the norm. Prepared and reviewers of the report will need robust tools to collaborate and produce quality reports. In a minute, Connor is going to discuss the Workiva platform in more detail. Thanks very much. Isabel, great insight Conroe Kelly, I'm a Senior Director of Statutory Accounting with Workiva, a large experience and kind of background in business. I'm going to give you a bit that perspective. I guess from my, Isabelle, we're seeing 3 distinct phases, if you will, in accounting and counting models over the last kind of 10, 15 years or so. Right at the moment, clearly, we're in the middle of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. Pretty clear that there's been a sharp macroeconomic shock related to COVID-nineteen, 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 stress 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 months. We've seen 3 particular responses or phases to it. 1 is the kind of the react, the immediate kind of reaction Secondly, it's a response and now it's going to be the revival as companies here in Europe start to go back to work and the United States, of course, that's to kind of reopen, etcetera. 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 is about they were largely, focused on shareholder wealth and maximizing shareholder wealth the typical kind of entity accounting models, of course, that have been prevalent, parents of surgery, 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 rooms, 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 mandates and the regulatory practices. And by that, I mean that generally accepted theory of how you regulate a market, the doctrine of how you regulate the market. And indeed, the practice of how the regulators regulate the market and manage businesses. So the 1st wave of post crisis regulation is done firms are better capitalized now and the personal responsibilities of their 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. And secondly, that the change in consumer needs and attitudes Long term low interest rates means the search for a return is stronger just as the tolerance for lost lessons consumers are getting older and quite frankly have less saved and inherited 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 there are the 3 really 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 their organization's implementation of intercompany accounting, the results were mixed Disperate 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, there's 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 email 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, is about the appropriate taxes and taxes management merger and acquisition activity adds another layer of complexity with inherited heterogeneous ERPs, chart of 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 narrative are not connected in traditional system, the desktop systems, are 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 seldom 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 with the 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 or to or cycle that a court 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 let's have a look at them. You could suggest, I guess, that with COVID-nineteen, 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 and supporting footnotes, etcetera. 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, etcetera. 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 ever 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 are 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 lake, data consolidation and business intelligence and revenue generating front ends. ERPs, however, don't often deliver the last mile of reporting well. And so controller brought 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-nineteen impact in response. And look on the right hand side, look at all of those new reporting requirements that have emerged as a result of COVID or 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, expected credit losses. The auditor opinion change are changing and is particularly sensitive at the moment, sensitive to going 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 employees should be left unaccounted for and the board in certain parts the world has a legal responsibility of skilling care to the employee. So cloud based platforms really combine the system of record, which you see on the left hand side there, which is where our data is stored and the ERPs, with the system of work, which is where we actually 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. I could argue that it's probably not the most important. The most important is the control traceability and trust. So the trend across finance and compliance is to centralize the reporting process in and impacts required 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 personal health records. The ability to collate COVID-nineteen 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 as similes, 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 no 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 company to research 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 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, etcetera. The 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're 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 etcetera, and real estate management systems, etcetera, opening up the business and bringing people back to work. So our experience is that organizations that 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, sustain 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. Is what we're hearing from a lot of our customers. As the books close 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 and 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 on 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, Gunnar. A lot of great insights from you. Thank you for that. Yeah, I mean, I'm actually very excited to be talking about that. It's Deluxe Workiva Alliance. We've been partnering on services in the reporting space for many years. Workiva bringing the experience with leading technology of providing finance transformation services and having strong accounting and reporting knowledge. And we also both have this global network much the much is the footprint of our clients. And as importantly, we have common values. And this is why in 2019, decided to go one step further and we signed an alliance, which will allow us to collectively provide greater value to our clients. Our partnering of course depends on the scope of work for specific projects. And we take into account independent consideration if the company is a dealer ID client. So our joint value proposition is around 3 pillars. We assist with making better decisions. By bringing on the side disciplinary team 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 pool, automating the key activities and ensuring compliance of the reports with local regulations. So we are very excited to have the opportunity to partner together and we really hope that the clients we serve going to also see that the benefits of this relationship. Yeah. Excellent. Thank you, Isabelle. Thanks, Connor. Hello, everyone. Give you a quick tour here of the Kiva Global Statutory Reporting Platform. Quick note on our underlying architecture, we are in the cloud. True 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 is kind of a natural landing page you can see here we have a 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 and move these charts around. I can't each user can have their own sort of tailored experience. They can build reports and capture the data that they that they 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 UK legal entity, You can see here a lot of different data that we can capture in terms of the subject matter specialist, for example, that are responsible for certain portions 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 to perform. And really what this all the dashboard reporting that you see is is the culmination of a series of of activities and milestones, all highly configurable that kind of form the, again, the entirety of our 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 wanna send a an an email to an individual that's accountable for this particular activity. I can prompt them to to come back into the platform via a link and and give us an update. As far as accessing the statutory financial statements themselves example, in 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 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 UK 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's changing, turnover amongst individuals, amongst third parties, amongst entities. It really sort of stabilizes the degree of change that you're gonna experience in global statutory reporting. So 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 gonna take it in its current state, build it or up upload it into our our cloud environment and and 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. 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 wanna 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 Bridge 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 gonna 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 gonna take me directly to this cell. You can see now the 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 into 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 very easy to navigate and arrange these to help accelerate the the process. Starting point for the build of these statutory financial statements, of course, is gonna be the trial balance. Real quick note on this cube here, This cube is telling us that through our w data 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 system of record, any changes to our chart of accounts are automatically being reflected in in the platform, and we are now ostensibly serving as an extension of the ERP. Now we may not have a non leading ledger, a local gap compliant ledger, to manage our local adjustments to get from US GAAP, for example, to local gap. And so we do provide a mechanism inside the platform to account for any adjustments that need to be made. Right? 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 gonna create new revisions And then at the point at which I have a particularly meaningful revision, I can actually offset that, what through what we call a milestone here. So at any given time, if I want to tag a specifically meaningful version so that all 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. 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 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 like to and name that, and then filter on just those milestones, what 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, the be color coded depending on the user, and I can tell who's made the most recent changes and specifically what those changes were. 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 GAP to stat bridge. That's a particular interest to just about everyone involved, specifically auditors, reviewers, how do I get from that initial US GAAP starting point roll through the different types of adjustments that I've made and then arrive at what we call the you know, you the local gap compliant, in this case, perhaps FRS 101 or 102 in the UK 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 in 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 internal and external to our organization, to come in and own this specific data and the related narratives and the documents themselves. Right? We're we're and again, we're trying to eliminate email 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, alt, at the same time. K. So now I have my financial statements, completed and linked out to my 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 the spreadsheet. If I have a, again, meaningful revision that I want to tag as, for example, the final draft to auditors, I can actually create a milestone here. Again, it'll be visually offset here. And now I can send this for review. For example, if I wanna send it to one of those subject matter specialists or an external third party that we wanna maybe keep it arms length, I can do what's what's called a review. I can actually send the entire document, or I can send just selected sections of that document for for them to review the revenue section. I can title this review, final draft, and 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 email nudge to this individual to review. And at the point at which I send this, Jeremy, in this case, is going to get a an email, but it's gonna be a link again, it's not gonna be an attachment. We're really discouraging the use of attachments that cause risk and virgin control issues it's gonna be a link, and it's gonna 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 Warkiva, from a global statutory re reporting perspective, very important, as you might imagine, that localization aspect so I can sup we support dozens of 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. And 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. 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 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 Connor to Thanks so much. You guys clearly have been busy. It's about 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 as well. Okay. Well, thanks Connor. Yes, that's a question we hear from clients a lot. There's a lot to keep up with for sure with all the different regulation. And the answer is yes, of course, we're happy to help with that. So the way we work with our partner, Warkiva, is we help with, templates local templates and we can also help with the effects to the templates and we can also set up a regular cadence provide accounting, of that. 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. Terrific. Here's one, another one, Nick, this is for you as well. Isabelle, this is from Jeff in the United Kingdom. Thanks for joining this afternoon, Jeff. Isabella Does Deloitte provide outsourcing services? Oh, okay. Yes, that's a great question too. We actually, we do. We have a metro delivery model. And the way we we do that. We use a single point of contact for our company and we deliver locally with LEAP in Europe, APAC and Latin America. As I mentioned, we have a local network over 150 countries. So usually where, companies have distributors, we also have, like, pieces. And so we can definitely do that and re leverage from our tax and accounting data centers across the block. Yes. So with that, Thanks very much. I think we're running short of time. Lots of questions for Isabel today. Very delighted Isabelle that you've joined us. And by all means, if you need to hear more, Isabelle's contact are up there or talk us at workiva@workiva.com/newnormal. We're gonna 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 in statutory reporting. Thank you so much. Well, welcome everyone to our panel discussion here at Absa FICO. I think probably one of the hottest days of the year. So thank you so much for tuning in. I think we're just gonna 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 Ashley and Whitworth, and I work in marketing. You might have seen me in the previous session, the end to end process of your ASAP annual report with catherine, which I hope you enjoy if you you hang around for that. Before we start this session, I have the usual housekeeping. On your screen, there should be a Q and A box. Please feel free to ask any questions. At the end of the webinar, we will answer as many we can. And if you don't answer, we'll get back to you by email, 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 your 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 kind of possible, I would introduce to you that any order is important so they can introduce us themselves. We have Bill Fitzgerald. So go for it, Bill. 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 Filfitzgerald. I'm director of the Financial Reporting Lab, which is part of the Financial Reporting Council in the UK. 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 area. I'm very much looking forward to the discussion I should also say I'm I'm a board member of, of Imperial International. So also, see things from, from that point as well, but very much looking forward to, to today's panel discussion. Thank you. Hi. Yes. So I'm Andy 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 EsF solution, and associated, areas with that. I am also a member of Exper International's Best Practice Board, and a copy of their working groups, primarily on how entity specific disclosures work in EXPAREL 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. Hello, Hamish Prince, also Vuki there. I've got responsibility along with the team of bringing our, ESF solution to the European market to address this, requirement that, is going to be put upon your 2020 reports. My background has been helping a number of companies meet 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 ex HTML, the the feedback that you'll be able to get from your users on what information they actually want to on what they're hovering their mouse over, I think it's going to really inform you as to how you want to report your following reports, as you move into 21, 22. Thank you. Thank you, Hamish. So you can see you've got a, you know, a great crowd there. So sit back and relax. So okay. So we've got a couple of questions to get through, so let's get going. So Firstly, it might be prudent to have a quick reminder on the ESET requirement. So, Andy, would you fill us in on the main points of this new mandate? Yeah. Sure. I would hope that most of those listening are already at least a little bit familiar with EZF or 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 director, which is a piece of European law. Therefore, it applies to issuers on EU regulated market. So for example, in the UK, 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 UK 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 now seeing that the EEA treaty is nearing, update. So we should also be keeping an eye for issuers from, on those EEA markets to take, 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, whether underflow issue is on those markets to move to a generally more accessible ex HTML 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 issues, however, preparing IFRS consolidated financial statements, so that's not the individual statements, the consolidated group statements, that XH Gmail has to kind of move up a level of structure and become in line X URL, which is a combined format, including both the XH Gmail, and the EXPAREL in one document. It's just at the moment that tagging, that inclusion of EXPAREL 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 January 2020. The statements and the financial period we are currently in. So these will be being filed, probably for most companies early next year. Thank you, Andy. 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 Esa? Yeah. 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 and exactly how you, do that through to your regulator, specifically, by the NCA. So the format is changing. A PDF is no longer functioning for that purpose. You need to produce this X HTML 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 spend we or I spend 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, that's, 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 the most, assured we're 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 and 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 that's our opinion. And I I think the SEC backs that up. If if if things didn't work well in the SEC, companies were given a quiet reminder. They weren't put all over the, 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, you know, that that's 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, HTML, which as Andy said, is, a very close relationship with the HTML you have on your website, you are going to get a lot of feedback about how people are consuming this information. What ages 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. And I know that Hamish could talk massively on compliance. So thank you, Hamish, for that wonderful, concise answer. Because I think we all have a bit a bit more understanding now of that. So moving on to companies themselves, this one is Phil. What are we hearing from issuers at the moment about their compliance readiness? Are they prepared, excited, nervous, confused? How are they? Thank you, Jackie. And perhaps before I answer that, I just wanted to, to echo some of comments there on thinking of this as part of the overall work that companies are doing on IFRS financial statements in any case. I mean, from a, from a user perspective, the advantage of the XHTML format is it gives the user the option to access the data either electronically through, through the tags or access it as they would, as they would at the moment by reading the paper based, documents. And therefore, it really is all part of one package. And is it 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 through the traditional paper based information or through the or through the EXPRL information and the vast majority are actually accessing it through electronic means. It's just as important to get those, those tags right and put in the appropriate IFRS category taxonomy in this case. As it is for the, you know, for the, for the annual report, and a similar amount of attention needs to, therefore, be paid for because users are going to be using it, the information electronically. So I thought I'd I'd just sort of sort of add my my or echo Hamish's comments on You know, 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 the requirement, and we've, we've run a number of events to, to, to raise that awareness and, and Andy's spoken that 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'd ask the question, a lot of people would say, what's easier we're finding that actually awareness is pretty broad, but in terms of preparing, it was still, we're still seeing it fairly early stages. And I'm just looking at the UK 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 etcetera. And we would, 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 in the, in the paper based financial statements. So certainly awareness has been raised, but Readiness is still at the fairly early stages. Yeah. I mean, I think I just wanna 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 actually a reasonable difference, between how ready we see issue as 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 place, they we know that they are at least got to the stage where they know they need a solution, and they they have some idea of what 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 issue is prepared and to be honest, affecting software preparedness as well, is that the different country's local regulators who are required to implement this directive, EU director to all locally, are at different stages in their process. They're still clarifying how it fits into local governance requirements and local, companies to produce annual reports, what goes in those reports, how they're signed off, and so on and so forth. That's, I think, one of the things that's having a bit of an 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, Bill, and thank you, Andy. And I think probably the takeaway there is that the mandate is exciting as long as you prepared. So preparation is the key, and Amplify go is a great start. So, well, well done everyone for turning up. So moving on. So we're moving on now to the actual electronic document. Maybe Andy 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 user, coming up again when we look at how any reports are produced, obviously, local regulations do have quite a big impact on this, but there's also, you know, other cultural trends, especially in the areas of design, in the tendency to file either a one annual 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 reports or the annual reports are produced for multiple purposes. They they encompass different regulations. They encompass often stakeholder communication, 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 cloners 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 very common for companies to be included in design agencies and communication agencies in that process, which obviously adds both an extra layer of process as well as expertise the extra teams in fund circumstances. The results of all the questions at the end oh, yes, sorry. Go on. Sorry, Andy. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I thought you'd be fit. I just really echo that because where you've got multiple teams involved where you've got got sort of fairly detailed governance processes in, in respect of preparing at report. You've also you might also throw in you know, 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 the apologies, Andy. I'm sorry, I, sorry for interrupting. No, it's fine. It's always going to be fun trying to talk to each other in a 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 there's a lot of 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 in recent financial transformations. I don't know if that's something English you're seeing as well. Yeah. I mean, I I've been I I've been doing this for a long time, and I think, the the question that gets asked the most when people talking about annual reports is what did we do last year? So there is a lot of, you know, it worked last year. Let's roll it over and do it again. And I think that's what's exciting about you know, a new challenge to the process is, well, let's look at the process. Let's really understand what each of these sentences is is referring to, and why are we publishing it, and why do we publish it in this format, or why do we even publish it at all? You know, do we 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, you know, what are you publishing? And I think that will feed in as we go forward with the XHTML. But right now, it's in the case of, you know, are we doing things in the best way possible? You know, we 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, to make sure we've done the very best we can. And that there's a challenge between boards and the company themselves. You know, 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 that the information they us 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, you know, large gaps for, you know, potential errors to drop into. And the errors in EXPAREL can be very small, but have significant impact, around what is actually being reported in the, machine readable data. And as if, you know, and as Phil has said, if that is what your analysts are going to get hold of and run against your peers, that is going to cause, you know, an effect at some point, when it happens, doesn't really matter. This data's not going away. It's locked in a vault, and it's going to be here from 20 on your 2020 report forever now. So I don't think it's a case of we get a, 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. Yeah. And, the expiry on footprint is something we spoke about in the last webinar. So, I think as well, we got to remember as well that it's the whole report that has to be in xhtml, not just the financial statement. There seems to be a bit of confusion over that. So Thank you everyone for tips in there. So next question. There's likely some kind of audit or assurance requirement for the Etech tagging specifically. Does this affect how companies think about their implementation? So, hey, Mish, Assurant is your pet topic, so this one is for you. Yeah. I mean, one of the analogies that I've used is that your auditors don't sign off on an ex, 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 XBR tagging is something that you can lock down early. You're not you're definitely not planning to rewrite your consolidated financial statement. So therefore, the description in XBRL should be something that you can do, in Q4 or even earlier, and, 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 your with the process that you ran 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 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 avail yourself that there's if at all possible. I think one of the advantages of the ESF implementation is in the 1st year, the minimum is, is the primary financial statement. And I think that does give given opportunity without putting a huge, huge bird start looking at, you know, the the IFRS taxonomy to start experimenting with 2019 accounts. I mean, it's certainly something I'm an expert of URL, but, it's certainly something that, that we started experimenting, as we were talking, Puneet, about implementation is we looked at sort of 2019 accounts and started trying to use the tags, and it it it it starts to raise, challenges and questions. And I think, really, people can deal with those, challenges 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 might seem to be. And and I really think, you know, if in this, you know, if if there is some scope, I think it's I think well worth trying to have a play with it. Thank you. Yes, well, thanking its endless brokenness in gently with for financial statements. So 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 Esf not, you know, also aimed at them? And are there any other stakeholders to consider? Well, I think I'd go back to Hamish's comments earlier, and it's really exactly the same question as the question around the, around the annual report, you know, at the moment, the annual report to members, to to shareholders. And, and therefore, they're they are the primary users of that report, but that's not to say that other 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 to to stakeholders, you know, their customers, their suppliers, their employees, etcetera, and all that information therefore might also be be relevant for for them, and it it's no different for for the electronic, file. I think I think the one thing I think perhaps where there is a difference is, is the accessibility of that electronic information? And I think we we're going to have to see some, some tools being developed to help people access the electronic information. Investors can, with sophisticated tools that their grass can already do that. But perhaps are there other less sophisticated or or or or those without those tools or the resources to buy those tools, will find it more difficult. And therefore, I think, I think this is probably a question of, yes, the electronic file should be useful to both in as our other stakeholders, but we need we need the tools to be able to, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, that's something that companies themselves can start thinking about when they are thinking about what sort of engagement they want with their share. Shelves and stakeholders. But I think, yes, the other side is that the sophisticated investors and the analysts they have these tools already, you know, 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, it seemed an odd one. We've not yet seen a data pool created where somebody hasn't tried to make some money out of So I think you should just consider yourself as a new data pool, and, and, you know, people will come and see what they can do with it. Yes. I mean, I think you need to I was going to say, I mean, I completely agree with you with that, that Hamish. I mean, it's it's incorrect. When you start to use these tools and, the the tools that sort of read EXPAREL data, it's quite incredible how quickly you can assess and analyze data on an instant basis, even using some of the really available, you know, that it really is, it really is astonishing. When I first came to this, I used something that was to buy 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 listed in the U. S. And it's incredibly powerful to use. And as I say, Hamish, these tools will will inevitably come over, you know, to Europe as this is being implemented. But you know, it's something to start out thinking about as well. Yeah. I think the point I was going to add still stands, so I'll just add it quickly. This is going to play Mary Habit with Jackie's timing, obviously. So the, the only thing I'd add is that, obviously, one of the other groups people to think about here, we talked about the institutional investors is that, you know, there's a bit of a worry about what about my retail investors, what out my, my more, my less technological stakeholders. And I think one of the good things for there is that we already see there is the their inline viewers 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 not accessible to anybody. So not only is that structure accessible to those who have and can afford, the analysis tools, and, you know, the the price is coming down, it's also available to retail investors if if, you know, you you you can put it up with an inline viewer on the website, and in many ways, it's even better than the PDF at that point because the 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, you know, extra, I'll be happily saying it'd just be lovely to have a crystal ball, but, you know, Thank you so much anyway. So watch this space for that one. So moving on as the tide is against us. So this question moves away, from the annual report and one that I'd like to ask. What about the rest of investor and stakeholder communication? Do we see this update and reporting having any effect here? Right now, as we 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, and it's a well structured, X HTML is infinitely repurposedable. I'm not sure that's a word, but it it is now. It means that you can take it and use it elsewhere on your website. So I I know, you know, talking to companies, there is always a concern of this sort of the cut and the paste scrape from a PDF, put it into our website, we then need to check it again, you know, CSR reports, which feed both ways, is there not some sort of better process for doing that. That's what HTML gives you. It is, once it's structured correctly, people, you can, you can lend it to people as, as a bit of data. You can, 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. You know, Glife 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 X HTML 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 to 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? You know, effectively sending a mail shot to all their key investors, or would they say, No, no, we want to control this through our, in 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 want to put some sort of controls around that. Certainly want assurance around it, and and the value of the effort that you put in to make sure your annual report is correct. You should, you should, you know, 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 that's where I think digital reporting is going to really take off. Thanks, Hamish. You're right. I think, you know, the the idea of structured data is such a good opportunity. And I think, you know, just don't bear it just in your annual report. Get it out there and make you know, amazing investor relations site. So we're our 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 solo aiming for compliance and implementing with a view to the future. So, Andy, 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, someone, and so forth. If we just look at what that means from an implementation perspective, I think we end up with kind of two 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. Alright. So in this case, it's literally just the format. Effectively, it it's a bolt of just saying, right, I have my existing process. I have everything I already do. I'm too 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 is there. It's now complied with. We move on as normal. Whereas if we're implementing with abuse of the future, then whatever we're doing, in whatever implementation 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 ESF, 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 these if, let's add electronic reporting capability to 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 cheat 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 and sitting there and saying, well, obviously, it's pretty clear what the best thing to do here. It's It it's pretty clear that the best thing is to go out there and improve my process to do some transformations and financial transformation. But as we know, lots of companies are potentially finding that quite challenging at the moment. Although as we heard, great journey in the keynote, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea to abandon that transformation. I was gonna pick out one particular bit of backing out as a kind of recommendation of peace and advice for how to keep going regardless and 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 wanted to pick out was that that concept of starting small, but keeping the bigger picture in mind. So doing something additive now but doing, you know, picking up something maybe a tool or a process, something that allows not just compliance with ESF, but starts you along the journey to being able to do that wider transformation later. So you know, that might be picking up something that is is, just that a little bit more than compliance, you know, something that already say improves the, auditability of the process you used to get cents to get, 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 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 keynote that they're in real danger of losing momentum because there is actually quite a good 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? Nope. Perfect. In every way. I know I know you touched on this, though. I I don't know who want to move on. You know, we spoke about, you know, 2020 being an eventful year so far, and my goodness hasn't it. And many companies saying they don't have the property. So do you want to add any more there? No, I think that that my final point there is is probably where that main recommendation. I mean, I think the only the only other ones to bear in mind, we're all pretty nicely covered by the keynote, 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, it fails to talk about ESG requirements, environmental, social and reporting, and we're seeing and increasing, urge from investors to, for companies to provide more of that information, talking about how their company's business model is going to be sustainable into the future and will respond to environmental, social, and governance, changes And there, but the problem with that information, as many of you will know on the on the webinar is that there's a lack of consistency in the way that information is reported, which is very different to the to the IFRS financial statements, which is very well established. So so I think that that is going to be the future area for reporting is how can we create a, a structure that provides consistency and comparability and that provides investors with investment useful information And clearly, as we move it towards more consistency, the question will be, is there a way that we can make that information elect electronic, apply a taxonomy to potentially and expand the you, you know, the, the, the remit of, of the current reporting requirements around financial statements. It's something where's a the FRS are looking at in terms of what kind of frameworks are most suitable to, to capture ESG information and then A question after that will then be, will then be, okay, well, can we make this information, information digital? And I'd be very interested in see where that goes over the next couple of years because the demand is just growing astronomically, as I say, no conversation that we have you know, doesn't have ESG in it when you're talking about reporting and it's, you know, it's clearly very critical toisters as well as as well as wider stakeholders? Yeah. I've I've seen this very much at the European level as well with, comment letters back to the non financial reporting directive. You you see requests for structured data popping up in there, and also the reports that came out recently in final reports on Capital Markets Union. Again, it it talked about bringing the data together, making it accessible from the point, which is 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. Yeah. I mean, just to add to that, I think these sort of conversations now are probably going to be led by the marketplace, which aren't the regulators. You know, what is it your investors what sort of information do they want to read, what they want to compare you to another peer to. And I think, they're they're there are people talking about this and trying to move this forward, you know, and it's possible to get, that sort of information into your report even now easier to do to be, you know, 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, you know, the people who drive your share price are not your regulator, 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 what do we want, what the 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, you know, 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 ask Esa to our existing pdf before. Go for it. Okay. Well, there are issues with with that. I I feel it's quite quite important, you are going to pass this information through to your regulator, and they will be reading not just the human readable, but the XBRL, and sitting in the EXPRL is a lot about how that data is presented to the regulator, and it's not necessarily in the human readable form. It's there by, you know, so contextual information in the human readable is not necessarily there in the EXPRL. Get that relationship wrong, and you're not making a rounding error are telling somebody that you've done something in millions and you thought you've told them in thousands. That's quite significant when you talk to your regulator. He'll probably deal with that quite he or 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 I would say Be very careful about just pulling into my Spiro at the end of the process. It is public information, and you have a sort of a responsibility about how you deal with that. There are also other issues around the conversion of PDF. PDF does not support X HTML, it can create HTML, so you do have a duty of care around, did the content that was in my PDF make it to my X HTML? And, and did it make it without bringing anything with it? X HTML is, is a relatively new piece of software not everyone plays with it every day, and 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 want to ask you to do. It's how do I know that the content that left the PDF made it to the XH team out. Think about when you're going to be doing that, is that just after you've 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 team. That's why we think there should be an iterative process that runs alongside what you more manageable process. And that fit into what Phil was saying, map your process. What is this actually going to mean to you? You know, how are you going to look at it when are you going to look at it? That that's what I would, cancel you. Thank you. Thank you. Right. Just in the last this one's for Andy in the last sort of 30 seconds. What is the difference between IOTEL and ETSAC? And thankfully, that one is a nice quick one. So EVAS is the European single electronic format specifically. It may use of Ix DRL. So Ix DRL is the broader X DRL standard, and then EFS has some specific requirements on top of that that say we want you to use this standard in order to only tag the face financial statements, for example. So the IX Serial is that combination I introduced earlier, of XH HTML and Xprel in the same documents, both of those together is called by Xprel. That is totally amazing. We are finished right on 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 Fitzgerald, Andy with Famous Prince, and, most of all, thank you, everyone, for listening. So good afternoon. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon and the FICO. Thanks very much, everyone. Bye. Hello, everyone. And on behalf of the Worker team, Welcome to this Before we begin, we wanted to cover a few very basic housekeeping items to make sure you get the most of your webinar experience with us today. At the bottom of your screen are multiple application engagement tools that you can use. All the engagement tools are adjustable, so do feel free to move them around to get the most out of your desktop space. We wanna make sure that you're very comfortable, during this webinar with us. There's nothing you can break, on the webinar. So please do feel free to to move things around the the screen, as you need. You can also expand your slide area or maximize it to full screen by clicking on the arrows in the top right corner, that's going to be really useful for you when we get into the demonstration part of the webinar where we're gonna actually show you our form. So, always remember you can expand, your, your slide, as as needed. If you have any questions during the webcast, then we'd really like to make this an, a a two way, a webinar so you can submit them through the the Q and A engagement tool, and and that's the the little screen you can see expanded out on the on the slide there. We will try to answer your questions. We do have a section the end for for a little bit of a Q and A. So please do send in your questions. We'd love to hear what you 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 a fuller answer, we will come back to you via email. All your questions will be, captured once you've submitted them, and we will 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 defense, 2.0, My name is Timular Air, 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 Chowdhury, solutions architect, and Charles Kalovich, 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 colleague Manon Charlie, who will be taking you through, a demo of the, work either, the work either platform. So why are we here today? Well, as I mentioned, webinar is get ready future, three lines of defense 2.0. And for us, that's all about how technology and the work either platform can support and enhance the existing three lines of defense model. So this webinar will focus on continuous control monitoring and how continuous control monitoring can be used by both the 1st, second, and third line of defense, to, support through the three lines of defense model. From this session, we aim to give you 3 key takeaways. So firstly, We'll just walk through the existing three 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 We'll then go on to describe how technology can help enhance that three lines of defence boson. For us, that's where the the 2.0 comes in, how do we digitize that three lines of defence model? And then finally, we'll get on to a demonstration of the work either 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 gonna focus on the 1st 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 on bringing the model into the digital age with our three lines of defense, 2.0 model. So I'm sure everyone's very familiar with the freelance defence on what we've called the 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 three line defense model, what we call the 1.0 model. It's been well established and has been around for for a long time. If you were to 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 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 three lines. So what you see on the screen is the 1st line of defense, so that is functions that own and manage risk. Those are very much at the sharp end of of risk and control. You then have the 2nd line of defense, and those are functions that oversee or specialize in 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 you see that there are a range of different functions, all listed out or have some role element to play, in, the 2nd line of defense. And then you have the 3rd line of defense internal audit providing, independent assurance, across the organization. And then you have what sometimes people call the 4th line, your regulators an external audit. And each of those three lines then 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 for so long. It really helps to clarify, provide a situational awareness around each function, between those three lines, provides, enhanced communication on mismanagement, enhanced clarity regarding risk and controls, and it really does help to drive focus on ongoing success on various risk management activities. So so lots of benefits, but like any model, there come lots of lots of challenges, and most of those challenges are around the three lines can very often act in silos. With information not necessarily shared or shared as easily as we would like between each of three lines. So that can lead to inconsistent data for visibility into the process. And particularly, we see a lot of wasted time and due work. So how might we, using technology, help to address some of those challenges. And that leads us to our three 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 the 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 three lines of defense model, but underneath that, we have our work either 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 1st, 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 three lines to get real time insight into 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 three 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 is not a new concept. There have been many barriers to organisations taking advantage of its benefits, particularly around the need for expensive 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 work from within the Workiva platform, you can quickly up a continuous controls monitoring program to provide that real time control information for use by each of the three lines. So no large investment 90 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 Excellent. Thanks, Tim. So what I'm going to do is just take you through a couple of process lines, 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 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 and a plan and any other solution that you may have. That may be a structured data source or that could be a to dead source as well. And in the middle here, what we actually have is this 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 some other calculations on that information. Once you've actually finalized all 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 email this spreadsheet out across to your colleagues, and 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 desk. Excellent. So in this scenario here, what we can is where you had all of that copy and pasting from 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. Of course, we have all of the great capabilities of Wdesk, for example, all of the collaboration in there as well. So what we're actually missing here is this data arrangement step in the middle here where you have that your source system and work either. 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 XL KOLs in the center there, we have actually addressed that issue with W data 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 of that information into the Workiva platform. We can bring all of that information into W Data. Once we have all of that information within W Data, what we can then do is we can actually create some calculations on that information. We can actually bring your business logic and some queries upon that information and push that information into the Wdesk platform. So with W Data, there's a few different ways of our actually creating those integrations. First of all, if we want to just have a CSV output, we can import that into w data. That will be a very easy method of actually us acquiring that information. The 2nd method and the most popular method would be to actually create a 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 we've got a plug and play environment where you can enter your username, enter your password, and you can have all and you can start building out all of those connections and have all your information coming from your underlying systems into our platform. And thirdly, we have have the ability to actually use APIs as well. We actually publish our APIs online so that, 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 3rd party solutions as well. So if you want do some some business intelligence. Do you want to use Power BI or Tableau? That that's definitely something which we could 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 great. I've taken you through through those couple of slides, taking you through the processes and how we can actually use W Data and W GUESS to actually have a Connected Enterprise. I'm now going to pass over to Charlie. Awesome. Thanks, Imran. I appreciate that. So for this next session, we'll be diving into the 1st line 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 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 FirstNet 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 1st line defense can be. Might be driven by standings of the responsibilities they own and the risks that they mitigate. One of the things that we hear quite often from the 3rd line of defense in either of these types of organizations is that they'd really like to see process since 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 FirstNet defense during this process. And what mediums of communication between the 1st, second, and third line exist. 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 3rd line defense that these deficiencies have been resolved. Some of the gaps we see fall across the three lines of defense and can come from the siloing effect of information. So we have participants on the line spending 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 gonna 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. 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 defense stands within the organization. Unfortunately, there's no framework 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 proceed 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 1st line defense might have limited visibility to the findings of the second and third line, and that could really impact their assessment or understanding of the They may also struggle to communicate effectively with the other lines. Without a tool in place that facilitates communication and workflow, ownership of tax, 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 three lines of defense in one centralized location. In this connected environment, the first of the defense is able to easily view To set the stage for the demo that we're about to walk through, I wanted 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 Hannah and Workday platforms. This information will be pulled via a query that my colleague, Imran, has put together in our DUQ data platform. The information that we're requesting specific to a vendor invoice policy, our end process. That information will be aggregated here in W Data. Organized in a meaningful way for our tests 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 process and controls dashboard, communication across the three lines of defense, the ability to drill down a piece of information back to that source. So as we proceed, now we'll begin the demonstration with my colleague, Imran. 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 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 w data. We need to pull that information in from that source system, and we actually need to blend 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 W Data. So in W Data 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, I'm actually working with the different types of data, which we have in here. At the bottom here, you can actually see that the different tables, which I have, so I have a separate table for that information, which is coming from SAP. I have that another table here for that information coming in from Workday. I'm then merging these data sources together. I'm creating my query 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 the Chain Builder here, and let's actually have a look at some of the some of the connections which I have in here as well. So with my connections, you can see, we've got a range of range of connections which are available to you. We have cloud solutions on premise solutions, whatever solution you may you may need. Excellent. So let's have a look at the actual chain, which we're actually running within W Data. 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 dates or So I'm connecting to Workday, which has all of 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 has gone ahead and actually created invoices, and, and, goods received to 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, like, I'll have all my, employee matrix coming in through Workday as well. As well as sending out those email notifications, I'm also creating some tasks within Workiva as well. For example, if we have any duplicate invoices, we would actually be creating some tasks for the individuals to go ahead and actually update those invoices as well. So let me go So there we can see we're connecting to those 2 data sources. Are bringing that information through into Once I actually bring that information through into W Data, I'm actually running a query within WData as well. So I'm putting those 2 data sources together. I'm enriching the results I have from SAP with all of the employee information as well. And then from that, we're actually sending out those email patients to the relevant 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 my vendor, the vendor number, company code, I've got my document, 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 email addresses in there. I've got my department and then I have the manager name and email address as well. So what David Ater is doing is It's blending these 2 data sources together and from the actual results which we are getting from that SAP query within going ahead and we're sending out those notifications 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 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 on the right hand side. Let's also have a look at my email 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 W Data 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 W Data and some of the other capabilities which we can bring to you as well. So in w data, 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 result I can actually look at this by by my year, by my department. And 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 Boberton Day actually has 3, 3 incidents, which have actually come through positive. So what I can actually do from my view here is right now, I'm just looking 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 1000 actually needs to be looked into. So why can to do now is because we actually have all of that underlying data sitting within dummy data, if I actually want to query any any one of these lines, I don't have to go back my source system, I can actually do that right from right from dummy data. 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 W Data as well. So in this example here, we can go all the way down 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 Barberton that has been ordering some 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 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 W data and what's actually happening within 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 at landing within WLANator. Now the way that I actually bring this information together is using a query. So in this query here, what can actually see is on the left hand side, I actually have all of my my different data sources. So what I'm actually doing is I'm I'm bringing in information from AP, I'm actually combining that with 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 both my datasets is my user ID, and that's where you can see where I'm linking those 2 datasets 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 re refresh on that and that's going to bring in that same information. Perfect. Excellent. So with that, I might again pass over to Charlie. Awesome. Thanks, Imran. So what we can do now that Imran brought this information into WDS is kick 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 to control monitoring overview by process, the process being expenditures. As I progress through, I can see my risk environment. 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 where 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, Hannah, 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 fifteen 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 inception or is this part 2 of an invoice? Was it called clerical or admin mistake? Can it be resolved by the first or second line of defense? And then we can progress into the 3rd 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 linked 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 data dashboard. If I click go to link, it'll 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 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 tie 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 non compliance or exceptions, have them provided in a clean dash board to better understand where those exceptions exist and if you need to follow-up. All the while, be able to create comments and tasks real time to better communicate the timeline and expectations for resolving these issues. Taking that non value add time of sifting through documentation and false positives and giving people more of a chance to make a an analytical approach to their testing. So now we'll come back into our presentation and continue talking about the lines of defense. For right now, we're gonna jump into where we see the future of the 2nd 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 takeaway of defense is defined as risk management or the compliance teams. These teams often provide oversight to leadership. Individual contributors in the 2nd 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 showing 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 1st line defense in mitigating risks in their daily activities across the business. And where we really see Wdesk and W data as 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 1st line defense to the 2nd line 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 management dashboards or even personal dashboard so you constantly have eyes on what's happening and where 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, WDS solution for continuous controls monitoring, and Johnny, who's just expanded there on, how it can be applied to that, the second line, and I'm just now going to cover the 3rd line of defense and and internal audit, which, as we mentioned at the very beginning, is the independent assurance function in an organization. So it works with both the 2nd line of defense, particularly, you know, looking to place reliance on work of the 2nd line of defense, but also, looking at the 1st line of defense and how the 1st 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 audits are aware of just the, the the increasing buzz around agile auditing. And the use of data in internal audit. And that's all about moving, profession into a more a more dynamic stance, so taking us away from a very static internal audit program and approach to one which is more, more real time and, and continuous, and continuous controls monitoring is a, is a perfect fit for that. For that strategy. And we really see it playing out in 3 main ways in internal audits so that the first is around audit planning. So moving from, again, a static annual audit planning approach to 1 which is more continuous, more dynamic whether that be your audit universe, or dynamic risk assessments, the businesses is changing and we certainly know that from the recent COVID pandemic. So using continuous controls monitoring to 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 Charlene 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 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 your audit field work as well, where, rather than how into, as I'm sure, we've all been there. I have many times, having to wait, for data from your various ordities or your various department, you can now get real time access and provide comfort to both management and the audit committee, on a full population based rather than a sample basis. And the 3rd area where I think continuous control monitoring can really impact in a very positive way in terms of audit is around follow ups. So, you know, traditionally, we would schedule a follow-up audit at some point in the future to check whether management has implemented our recommendations and how the control gaps we've identified, being 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 recomation recommendations we've made address the issues, that we identified. So those are kind of 3 powerful, powerful improvements. But over and above these, the key thing for me is really building that collaborate communication. It's it's come through in what Imran has said about 1st and second line, and it equally applies to the 3rd line. Really driving enhanced communications. Sometimes I think if you were to take the 1st, second, and third line and all ask them, you know, what do they think are the key control points in an particular process or 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 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 as they've been coming in. So, I'm I'm just gonna ask my my first question to 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 that we wanna make sure, in those initial conversations, we outlined to, to best set you up for success. Thank you very much, Charlie. So, second question, which Imran, if I can if I can pass all this one off to you, what sort of systems can you connect to? Yes, sure. So, yes, with our connections, we can connect to our say pretty much any any solution out there, we do have those connectors. So we we can connect to, you know, 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 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. Imran and and Charlie, maybe this one for 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 when it be not it's not applicable for every single control in your population. That's just the nature of it. Nate standard versus non standard 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 reconciling a that you want to take that time back. Since that having users go through and sift through, you know, PDFs of bank statement, you'll be 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, we we can definitely go ahead and automate them as well. Okay. Thank you, both Imran and Charlie. My own personal favourite and the one that I've seen, and, you know, it takes me back to my internal audit base is the levers process. Where you would normally do a reconciliation between, your human resource management system, your your work day, and your IT system to make sure that people who had left have been also deactivated from the from the IT system and the ability to kind of pull that in information into Wdesk, in in real time, and, run those sorts of alerts and control, reports and, and an action just for me, provides that really great level of continuous assurance that actually people are being deactivated the systems when they leave in the right way, and that control point is is working. So so, yeah, many use cases out there, and I'm sure Charlie Nibrand we'll be, getting into more of those and particularly focusing on the second and third line, usage of control monitoring in upcoming webinars. Now I'm I'm very conscious of time. We do have, more questions. So apologies. I don't think be able to get through those on this webinar, but absolutely, we will come back to you, via email. You have, any additional questions about today's presentation, we would be more than happy to respond. You can submit them through the Q and A engagement tool, on this webinar or email at, emmy_marketing atworkever.com, and we will get back to you in the next few business days. So I think it, leaves me to just finally thank, presenters, Charlene Imran. Thank you guys for a a stellar job on the demonstration, and thank you the audience for attending, and we hope you will join us again soon. Boy? Go. Hello, everybody, and you're very welcome. It's Conroe areas Senior Director of Statue Reporting with Fortiva and I'm joined by Catherine Reynolds on this session. You're very welcome. 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 find a few engagement tools and these are all movable and resizable. So feel free to play around with them and your work space 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 Catherine would be delighted to take them. You can submit these through the Q and 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 for another time, we'll follow-up with you via email. Please note that we do capture all questions that are submitted. So let's jump straight into it. We're very pleased today to be joined by Catherine Mills, who's our senior Solutions Consultant Care, and for this session, optimizing regulatory reporting for financial services. And straight away, let's get into it and see what we've seen so far in 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-nineteen. The sharp macroeconomic shock of COVID-nineteen and oil prices are being fed 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 the stress accounting with topics at the core including things like employee welfare, gun concern, expected credit losses, operation resilience, stress, testing models, liquidity assessment, management estimates, revenue recognition, etcetera, etcetera, cash flow, expected credit losses, and government responses, and, and assistance. We're already familiar with the business as usual landscape for financial services. It's remained somewhat unchanged for many years, pre, pre financial crisis of 2008, of course, it was characterized by into the accounting and business performance, reporting typically characterized by large banks often multiple legal entities, multiple management entities are 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 they're 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 that generally accepted theory, doctrine, or practice of how markets and businesses themselves are managed and regulated, particularly within the financial services space. The 1st wave of post crisis regulation is done firms are better capitalized and the personal responsibilities of their leaders is more embedded. Ability 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, removing 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-nineteen and this 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 drives We got this, these points here from the financial reporting council, and it's very clear that once the financial reporting council we're 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 end right there plausible scenarios and the review of scenarios and risk modeling around liquidity, capital risk management. Financial Services companies, of course, are complex operating models that require cross functional coordination, continuity, control and confidence of business data 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 outputs 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 at which Catherine, 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 Wakiva brings you a system of work that connects and automate processes to deliver the highest quality information 2 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 house 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'll 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 course. For a large international bank and multinational bank, these teams will work together across many countries and time zones and create one regulatory report as is the case in CCAR or RP. Even a capital management or ICAP report will require multiple teams to coordinate and input data and narrative to complete the required templates. And so in the last year, with this in mind, where Kiva has conducted a comprehensive in-depth study of the compliance and 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 UK 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 report should have 7 or more forms and disclosure data format, inherent to us. To submit the regulatory report, there are more than 6 modes of submission, not to mention the differing curiosity and frequency of each of these reports. So we understand that all of these risk and complexity needs 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. We're keeping 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 3rd one being operational efficiency to work around manual processes hands off and distractions from value added work. The next one being reporting, which is the trade off really between people technology, dependency than 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 we need to bring that to the fore. So by using a system of work, where Kiva 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 ICAP regulatory report, Catherine is going to walk us through an example of current process with disconnect data and a future state with a connected system. So very exciting Catherine. I'm going to hand it over to you to walk us through it. Alright. So this system of work, a 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 were happened 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 analysts, business analysts, system liaison or, you know, 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 creates 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 because 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 W. We are able to offer multiple source systems, which flow into Wdesk by using WVADA, having a direct API connector will reduce the manual efforts that the team's currently used 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 master source spreadsheet for any additional manipulations or analysis. The data has been linked into the final regulatory template or documents. 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. We have full audit ability across every single thing that is happening during your reporting process. We also allow for the collaborative efforts having multiple data iterations and ease of analysis for all the reasoning and results that then have the narrative written up inside of each of these ports, we can link the data to automatically feed from that master spreadsheet and regulatory templates every single time, there's an update, again, getting rid of all of those manual changes as we saw in the previous current states. And then finally, we have the embedded governance capabilities and maybe in the easy, accessible audit views because everything is sitting inside of one platform fully audible. 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 gonna provide a demonstration of some of the Wdesk functionality 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 ICAP reporting process and how they'll benefit from a system of work that provides us connected reporting. So looking at, you know, the analytics the reporting, the oversight, and not to mention one of the biggest, the IT with access control and security information. But from an IT standpoint, what are they looking for? They're responsible for the access control and security of the M higher reporting process. We can't have this information falling into the wrong hands. It can't get released publicly, and it has to stay in a tight season. So WDS will offer a single platform for the entire Icap reporting process. All contributors will access one document and 1 master our 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 within Wdesk. This allows the Mason to be maintained in one location and no longer requires him to send email attachment of the document for review. You're not sending notes for commentary. We're eliminating the need for digging through old emails 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 this email is very easy to send it to the wrong person, so the wrong team could get the information. That is not ideal. That's not very secure. So by forcing all of your users to come to this one location, everything is tied, together, and it's nice and secure. Next up, looking at our financial analysts, 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 thresholds 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, it could be based on, again, those predetermined thresholds. We then tell the data where going to flow to you next. So what part of the ICAP 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. So we're giving them those automation through the connectors and APIs. You will also see through our functionality that'll demonstrate in just a moment. And then again, we're permissioning the information to who have access to what and when they have that information. Next step is our reporting team. So that reporting team can leverage the pre bill templates, as Connor mentioned, there's quite a few templates that the UK alone has to update themselves, and those are always changing. We always wanna make sure we're up to date with all that information. So up those prebuilt templates and style guides to help get that uniform look across the board. We can also complete the narrative very easily because that data is gonna be coming directly from your source system automatically flowing into the documents through the linking, the narrative, and then follow-up. So sometimes this 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 gonna access the same live documents and spreadsheet 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, the most recent set of data. So in a current state, if you're using that XPEL and that word, the piece thing 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 document that was saved final, final final, final for real, and 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 w desk themselves. So once everything is inside of this one platform, all 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 table, the narrative, all that information is gonna be updated in live times who make those decisions off of. You can also do your review and approval processed 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 see a lot of the customers that I've previously worked with. The sign off process is not very robust. I you have any changes to the questionnaires you are answering for the final sign off, you have to go to an IT team for that provider because they thing is hard coded. Inside of Wdesk, everything can be done ad hoc. We can also then set up templates so we can roll forward this for it every single year. It's very easy to update the teams and the users who get this information and have that full sign off and audibility have at the same time. We 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, had somebody come back and said, no, my information is not up to date. It's not correct. You then have to send an email why. And however long it takes for them to reply back, then you finally get your answer. Maybe it takes 2 or 3 emails of you saying, Hey, you know, you let me know? I need this for final sign off, still waiting. Those are really, really examples, but I'm sure everyone has seen before, of that back for us, 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. Alright. So now I'm going to take you inside of the platform of Wdesk and show you what this actually looks like. Alright. So the first thing we're looking 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 download, there are no manual updates that take place. Everything being configurable means able to send updates automatically to the platforms, there is no disruption time for the teams on the regulatory report. This also means you can see that I have my ICAP document, my master spreadsheet, and my management information presentation, all inside of the one place. So, again, we are no longer going to a shared drive or a shared point 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 document. I've got that done over here for us. We can see the document 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 the icon's a little bit smaller than some of the documents you might be working on, but you still need that collaborative effort and the full audit trail of information. So to apply that piece of 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 gonna see on the left hand side the exact same outline, and this is what allows us to break down those permissions per individual section. 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 narratives, 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 to replace the 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 they've seen permissions you will see across the spreadsheet of 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 legal or upper management to see that information, or it's another team who should not have access, we can give them no permissions, and they see nothing. The next level up is the viewer icon and then 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 email, hey, where does this number come from, get another email back, maybe sticky note because you guys are close to each other in the office. Currently, that's not the case. Thanks to COVID nineteen. We're all sitting at home, soon to hopefully be back in our offices. But we can 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 narrative were updated and the reasoning behind each event. Next level up here is my edit icon that we're getting 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 a 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 traffic 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 a owner Alice is a viewer on the document level, but I've given 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 to to click inside of here. Let's say, Matt, only if you were, the cover. So I just click the V to be an owner or, sorry, if you are, 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 gonna go ahead and scroll down to my stressed seeing analysis section of information. How can we automate this? We've talked a lot about that automation and flexibility inside of here to get those manual efforts and reducing that risk of information. So inside of my stress testing scenario, you're gonna see in the top left hand corners, I have a green triangle inside of Wdesk that lets me know it's a destination link. By going ahead and click inside this common equity value here. In the right hand side, I'm gonna open my link properties. You'll see I have one store of B5 in Vitamin Master spreadsheet, feeding 4 different destinations. So now we're starting to reduce that risk of information and anytime B5 is updated. All four 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. Sent. And the nice thing about this is is once it'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 followed this 8 85,100,000 to my source value, it's not gonna 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 wanna take it a step further. We really wanna 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 design. This in a connected state it does, So clicking inside of my 85.1, we can see this information is coming from my stress testing within my source data. And this icon right here. Let me know what's coming from W Data. 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 API connection, which I can then, again, set up to those predetermined intervals and trigger events based at certain thresholds to update this spreadsheet here. And then, again, from this spreadsheet, it will then be out into my final documentation or that management information presentation, we can see here. With all of that information, I freed up all that copying and piecing, 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. You know, if your person doing the modeling and the mapping of the data and the stress has seeing 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 W Data, which I don't have time to show you today. But we do have those drill downs capabilities to allow you to look further into the documentation themselves for all of those data points And W Data also maintains a full login 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 gonna see it's pretty clean. I've got the same headers, the same formatting of my narratives, and I'm just gonna scroll up here. The same formatting there. Scroll 1 step higher. We can see my 1.1 is now slightly different. As well as my executive summary number 1. So we can start to lock down the style of these templates to make that consistent format to match those pre belt 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 this 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 what ever that generic standard, when you open a word file, whatever format that's in, that's what they're using. It also works with a customer who like to use navy blue as his 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 guide to know that that one individual was not done editing his information that he had saved on the shared drive so that on 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 at that 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 fonts sizes, the styles, the different colors, and then the 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 wanna copy and paste it in Because I've locked this, if that front was previously, let's say, in times of enrollment, it's now gonna come in as aerial as soon as they 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 something that, you know, not every team will think of but is a huge deal to the people who are working on that consolidation of the documents 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 a half final, yellowed my in progress, blue with my not started piece of information. I'm gonna go ahead and expand this out to you and see. I'm working with 9 different labels right now. Again, just for a simple visual indicator during that reporting process, So this is something that could have helped that team for the contributor. He uses navy blue versus black. He could have marked his section as and the team would know it's not final yet. I have seen companies use nearly 20 different labels to help with the process. So it is quite a change to bring your end to end users, you know, from those data providers, the analysts, the modelers, the people who write them narrative, management who's reviewing legal who is also reviewing this information inside of this 1 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. 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's made their updates. It's ready again for round 2. Here's legal round 2 updates. Keep that system. Very simple, very easy to navigate. And again, keep that entire auto tree out 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 20 different colors. That final green, I think, is very nice. So this has been a very high level demonstrate 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 can help you process towards a more connected system inside of your regulatory process. Wow. Thanks very much, Catherine. You're welcome. Oh, let me go to this one. So we've got a couple of questions here. We've got a large large group of international people with us today. And the first question comes from David Catherine, who's working in a regulated bank in the city of London. So thanks for joining us this afternoon, David. Very welcome. Question, Catherine, 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 label 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 doc payment for review. This, again, keeps everybody inside of that one central platform so you have that full audit trail of information. And then we are also working very closely our development team 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 Catherine comes from New York City, and this is from Raj. Again, thanks for joining us this morning, Raj, and a little bit early this morning there. And Raj, again, it looks like he's in the U. S. Regulated bank. So thanks for joining us, Raj. So the question is, What does the review process inside of Workiva look like, Catherine? Yes, that is a very good question as well. Thank you. So we in each document, there's an option to send the document for review, and you can send that to a from a very specific document history that I very briefly showed today. So when you're milestone in your different histories, you can send the important ones out for review, and it's gonna provide a link to the recipient bringing a right back in the Wdesk where they can leave any commentary that they have inside of here as they're reading that information. Again, permission out to what sections 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 up 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. I can response, thanks very much. And next question, I think we've just kind of time for maybe just one more. This question comes from Marcus, and Marcus looks like he's in a regulated bank in Frankfurt and Germany could be a very heavily regulated market. Thanks for joining us this afternoon, Marcus. So his question, Catherine is When regulators change their templates, do you update these? So I guess the question is around regulatory change and how do we capture regulatory change in some of the 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 as in Workiva, our customer success manager who is your continued support throughout your entire Workiva journey. They're 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 UK alone that doesn't even touch framework, but quite a few different template changes that get updated all the time. So we do work closely with you to ensure those you are aware of what those changes are and how to make those changes yourself because once you're inside of Wdesk, those are live documents, and you don't want us to edit those because you're legal and your audit teams don't know who Catherine from Fortiva is, but we will make sure that you are control with making all those changes yourself. Pretty good. Excellent. Thanks very much, Catherine. 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 someone from Singapore as well. So we will follow-up on them offline. Unfortunately, we're out of time just for the time being, myself and Cathy would, of course, be delighted to answer any further questions. So, I'm gonna reach out to you guys where we can get 2. In the meantime, you can email your questions to webinars@workingva.com. It's been a terrific session. We've been really delighted to have you all this afternoon. We look forward to joining you again. And it just remains for me to say, come, thank you very much for taking the time out. And, thank you to Katharine. Take care and have a very good rest of the day. Thanks, everyone. Hi, everyone. On behalf of the Wakiba 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, I'm a all application engagement tools that you can use during this webinar. All the engagement tools are adjustable. So feel free to move them around and get the most of it 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. If you have any questions at all during the webcast, please submit them through the Q And A engagement tool, and we'll answer them later by email. So thank you so much for attending today's webinar on the topic of Esf. We're gonna be covering why Esf and other regulatory changes. Are challenging organizations to take order about the recorder report's transmission. I'm Francesca Vanos. I'm a senior manager of partnerships at the, Waukever across EMEA. And I will be your host for safe virtual events. I'm joined today by David and Robert from TrendTech. David is, Derek Hartner enablement, and Robert Michael but it's too stressed to you. So, Robert, perhaps you can start by just giving them a bit of background on Trintech. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you, very much for having us today. It's a pleasure to be here at 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 reports 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 35100 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. TransX has been around for over 30 years. And, it's really a pleasure to be here today. Thank you, Robin. Thought you would start with a little bit around the background of what is Esaf and who does it affect. So for those of you who might be fairly new to the Esaf 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 ESF? So ESF first of all stands for the European single electronic format. And it's a new rule mandating that issuers, on EU regulated markets, we'll have to use reporting data maps when they're preparing the annual financial reports. Rule, what it means is that EU issuers are going to be required 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 around 8000 issuers in the EU regulated market. And those with con consolidated statements, which is around 5300 of those, will need to produce their report in XH2MEL in line with the expiryEL tagging. To their main financials. So the cash flows, the balance sheet, the income, the equity statements. And those are the consolidated statements will need to publish their reports in xhtml only. So what it does is it creates, more digital, unambiguous, accurate reusable versions of the financial statements. And it's really one of the core capabilities of the outstanding. So isa, in that way, it is in the way that annual reports are not only created, but have a file they're consumed. And also how teams work together. What it means is that That can be done, requires standard reporting, and it can provide you for consistently structured data. And it means that it's been accessible across different storage mechanisms. And that's how Esma, the European security, the market authority with tasked with developing this to improve accessibility and compatibility process. All of these companies have to file their report to the next HTML rather than the format at present, which is a PDF. And this in doing so provides greater transparency. And what I mean by Turkish transparencies, it means it makes it more machine readable by, identifying barcode the data. And I guess that's an easy way to think about it when we talk about EXPAREL. And the data is embedded in the HTML document that can be opened in common web browsers and, it's then placed with a regulator in each of the local jurisdictions. But it can also be publicly available by the company's website as well. And Esma has also translated all of the main tasks into 23 European languages so that investors can compare the companies without the language being a barrier. So issuers can then extend the tags by making it narrow or wider meaning relating to themselves. And it's really creating that, broadening the understanding and making you know, much more standardized. And so it means by it's really gonna transform the way and your reporting occurs. So at present, there's quite an archaic medium, which doesn't really fit the perfect if you think about it. Your company. Most Most of them recreate, documents, professional washing environment that's designed for print, but for HTML, Another issue is often just use Excel. And this is where the ESF opportunity comes about. So the now becomes the principle under the transparency directive. And it means that the PDF is no longer the principle document. And therefore, this IXREL document, which is required by a mandate, is then the document that is subject to enforcement reviews by the National Regulators. And as such, is that you can be seen to be obviously a great positive around this, which is because it's a great opportunity to actually assess your current process. And the key risks that could be potentially be there. 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 discussed their their processes and how they're going about them and what existing tools they're using. We actually also discussed 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 it's important to look at when you're going through an adjustment of tools and, you know, looking at your processes as well. Already have a very highly stressful timeline. And then you're gonna add tagging your next X HTML conversion on top of that without then extending the timeline. Obviously, it's free to ask us how to mitigate these risks. That bring, I can ask you. With Wakenver and Trintech, I think part of that story together, when we look at these key challenges and risks, you wouldn't necessarily automatically associate EXPAREL tagging and Trintech. So but how are you seeing this new mandate impacts with customers and decisions they're making around tool sets and how they're now looking at the regulatory landscape differently? Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question, Franchesca. And, you know, what I what I love about this slide right here, these four pillars that you have on here is you know, the regulatory compliance piece or the, in this case, the ESIP filing is just a component to it. So, you know, what what we basically see is that, you know, regulatory change is constant. In this case, it's the ESF mandate that is being introduced to 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 X HTML in line XBRL or IXBRL. These may be new things to an organization type 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 to understand the mandate and the schedules that are associated with this mandate, It is manageable, to your point earlier that Warkiv has been working with SEC filers for XBRL for years, Trintech the same. You know, 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 s from the FTC to SEC filers back in the 2008, 2009 period. But 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 the SEC's most recent update to their 2020 taxonomy now introduces data quality standard rules. So even your 1st pillar on here around data consistent see. 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 gonna go into the actual report. Cause if we think about, mandates like ESIF or utilization of XBRL, What's the real purpose of them? The 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 successful data back into the investment community as they evaluate the different organizations. The other thing that's important to you, beyond just the mandate next URL and and the data is, you know, part of the ESIF, requirement is that the auditors have to provide an opinion on these filings. Well, this is this is key, especially for our customers, because what they're trying to do is mitigate a lot of audit risks that could could incur or be a part of this new process, so it's extremely area of focus for them. So we're seeing that quite a bit. So the you know, the other 2 things you have on here, the process reengineering, and then the the collaboration component. This is extremely critical because 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 how can you utilize technology, reengineer your processes, and look at your virtual teams to meet mandates like ESF, but also drive an effective reporter report cycle. Yeah. I think that's a really important piece, particularly that last piece around you're not just looking at EsaF right now, but there's the possibility to look at the full record to report process as part of this. You know, sometimes mandates encourage change, and it's 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 were 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 enablement angle as well, and working directly with the customers. So what have you experienced on the client side Interintech and what are you hearing? And, and what are the key areas of focus you're seeing at the moment? Yeah. Hi. I think there's there's 2 particular areas to focus on. Here, with the, 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, costly, annual basis. So actually just trying to manage all of those particular activities within the process can be quite time consuming, often lead to a lot of, manual spreadsheets to be able to, to track the progress of that Also, what we see are potentially multiple teams, actually engaged in the, end to end process and that can sometimes lead to some clarity on roles and responsibilities, and often leading to potential duplication of workload or clarity on actual responsibility. The secondary that is, is around probably the confidence in the numbers as we said that multiple teams potentially working on those activities. And that creates a time delay from, say, for example, a monthly are to our 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, the underlying sort of reports. That may lead to that 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? Cause again, there may be a different focus from the R to R teams, the statutory teams as to what they're all trying to produce. So again, those areas are are sort of some of the challenges that, we see organizations facing. Pass across to Robert now? Yeah. So, you know, so Francesco, what, 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 Oarkiva and a trintech would naturally come together at a time like this, to help the company's knowledge, an ESF mandate. So I think it may be helpful just to to say, look, what what are we trying to achieve? Because you if you're if you're part of a reporting part of the organization responsible for external reporting, meeting the ESF 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 siloed approach, a little bit to what David was talking about within the organization. If there's things happening upside, but the 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 ESIP mandate. It could be a different type of regulatory reports are trying to make. But as, 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 four 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 and process? While simultaneously reducing costs and risk. I can recall early days when when people would say, hey. I knew how 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 clothes. 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 report or filings or such. So the real key to these four 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 what we thought we would do is maybe just for the benefit of the group that may not know the entire stream 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 ESF mandate? Why is there different SEC reporting requirements, it's to generate our report, right? So we have to do this. It could be a board It could be, it could be something like that to just your different stakeholders. But this reporting component is obviously where the Warkiva 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 system of some record within your organization. So for most organizations, these are your ERPs, okay? There could be tax systems and supplements 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, that source of truth or that system of record. So you want to make sure that remains as your 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 two 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 the verified actuals and the actual, actually, all the tasks associated with that financial close are 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, while also within the timeline. So what what it's very easy if you start to look at the components there. This diagram gets very confusing very quickly, but from a linear perspective, you, it's very easy for companies to say, well, I would do reconciliations. Then I would do journal entries. I would do 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, they're trying to adhere to reporting requirements, typically, they're usually waiting on those financials or 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, if you're on the reporting side and you don't actually have ability 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's the connectivity The connectivity between the officer 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 Warkiva 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 one 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, but 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 that everybody shares that in common. What I believe makes them all unique is the compliance framework to which each 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 your actual report or what you're going to report in ESAF or in marketing to the market. So this is what way we 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 the client side can give even more perspective into what I was just describing. Yes, great. Thanks. Thanks, Robert. So as Robert has mentioned here, we've got organizations now really trying to to drive to reduce costs, and risk, whilst also trying to demand that data to be first time right, is 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 it around now. We can turn the organization to only spend 20 percent of the time pulling the data together and allowing 80 percent of the time then to actually review it, help the finance the commercial areas made the decisions that they need on that. So the automation, really does start now, Atti, there's an enabler to do this. And in particular, the experience is showing that the core ERP systems do not always provide the depth of functionality that's indeed 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 this a lot quicker, and that's where automation. So where intake helps to do that, it helps ensure that the after hour 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 underneath Arturoa. Tend to be the same. High volume matchy, intercompany, significant pain points around intercompany transactions. We all need to validate our balance sheets. We all need to make sure those figures are valid within the, the balances that we're carrying. Highlight those high risk, values that might be sitting in there. General entry, a core area, to actually control the posting of that, again, a lot of the ERP system, most postes 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 sign or actually looking at the, 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 infrared and also provides a full audit trail on all of those activities and, therefore, to come to the reporting piece it allows, for the comfort and the acknowledgement that those figures are correct. And what we see now is then 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 went through. One of the other areas that we just mentioned earlier, one of the challenges around the regulatory reporting piece was the multiple handoff between fees within the finance organization, where we said that usually the monthly are to our reporting is carried out by one team and the monthly quarterly statutory reporting is then completed by different teams. And often resulting in the time lapse with the, 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, be sure it's through the process for, for the regulatory reporting. So with Francesca, how how does this new partnership facilitate the actual ESAP requirements? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it sort of relates 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 know, we can work together on this ESF, process, but also transforming global financial close statutory reporting, regulatory reporting in addition to ESAP. 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 to work together, we can actually see Trintech and Macquiva working together for lots of different areas of business, which, which I find particularly interesting. And I think For me, the 2 platforms working together provide that comprehensive solution. You know, often customers are looking for this unicorn tool. That can solve everything. And I think the way to look at it as look at tools that harmoniously talk to each other and work with each other such as the Trintech Wachiever relationship. And I think when you start to think of it like that, you start to see the efficiencies you can gain from having 2 best in class tools. Think it starts to become very interesting, around all the sorts of things that you could start looking around your business to start solving. And I think a particular interest as well is around transforming the sort of execution of that global, financial close process. And in doing so, gaining no matter what the use case, gaining, greater transparency, accuracy, control, across the full recorder thought process, which you were you're both just talking about. And I think, like, I mean, ESAC is one of those processes where, like I mentioned at the beginning, the timelines are already tight to do with annual reporting. And then adding in the complexity of tagging, plus also reviewing that tagging, and producing the XML conversion, it just tightens that time frame even even more. So, I think with that, you want to make sure that the process has as much transparency as possible, as 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. By being 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 also populate. And I think that you spoke the facts around not having to utilize various points 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 their customers is the current need to have those documents split up and processed or fragmented approach across their drive because there isn't a necessarily better way in which they get a process done quickly. But by having a single platform where you can bring everyone to the woman said, we're 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 fit 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 ESF process as well is the style and the look and feel, and we're not saying EXPAREL comes in and style goes out the window. Styles obviously is still very, very important. Instead, the style guides can be created within Wakeven. We work with design agencies and the designs, all links with the ICL as well. And it flows back into a key for. So you then are tagging your financials within the same system. Your 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 EXPAREL tags don't need to be retagged, because that's the that's the great benefit how the integrated EXPAREL well. So audit can therefore take place at any time across your process. The boards can come in and, you know, they can review the content the document can be in multiple different languages as kind of tags because we support the the difference between 3 different languages And then at the end of that process, it's then exported to XHML, I expriel, and PDF simultaneously. So you're not having to wait on one to be able to get the other. And then in that time, worry about any changes happening or anything. So transition into starting a new process for recess. It's your new folder. If you've done it before with, SDC, as a foreign pilot such as Robert was leading to at the beginning. Then this is necessarily a new process, but it is definitely a new mandate and a new way of working. And obviously have the added complexity of the design piece. So trintech plus bookkeeper just really makes that transition a lot easier by having that you know, the true cadence of that information flowing through. And I think it means that if then you don't have to make any compromises, not compromising on your data. You're not compromising on the narratives. You're not compromising on the XPR. So in and in doing so, because it's a cloud software, cloud platforms across the tools. We can both teams can provide you with, the handles support that you need to feel confident in that transition and also throughout the process. So whether it's your first transition into cloud or whether it's your transition to a new tool now, or whether you're an existing customer or a trend tech or whichever, and you're adding access to your to your toolkit, of existing process. And I think it's definitely an interesting, concept to evaluate and look at a few tools in tandem with each other. And I think the final people around, the workflow here is around document management. So it's integrated in the Xpro as we mentioned. So that means that you have a single up to date document that also updates 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 EXPAREL updating in real time with the dot you then don't need to worry about that additional time that people are trying to find to, to sort of compensate or to accommodate this new, mandate as well. So I think Chinook and Macuba in terms of ESF, we've covered a few pieces now around that. And I think you probably can bucket it into the 4 main pieces, and I'd I'd love to hand over and David as well. And I think leading into that, part of the TRIN 2nd week user integration is focused on this full record to report process, which ensures the visibility by a real time dashboard, to up stream activities such as the reconciliation that you guys have mentioned, the journal entries, the closed task management and controls monitoring as well as the downstream activities, the disclosure that's actually reporting. And coming into the ESAP process as well. And so it's for me, and, you know, what we're keeping excited about the partnership is the real time visibility into both solutions. So that the organizations can have confidence the numbers are disposing. And that's particularly important for you to that because that annual report drives the shareholders take all the, you know, discussion, it's a kind of the 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 what do you think is the biggest game for the company if you're looking to evaluate a tool in order to stream an processes and what's the biggest pain from how trying to make use of console was trying to solve the ease of the issue. Yeah. Certainly, that collaboration there, as we said, between various teams, that ability for them to be able to be comfortable and confident of those numbers, and to be able to, to, to, obviously, as you said mentioned, especially today, to be able to work remotely, having to check the balances within those figures because I've got one source of truth as it were, that I know that when those figures move, that's gonna follow through fall through to the to the end result. I don't have to. I don't have to worry about going back in, to download the data onto a spreadsheet, make or kind of work out what's changed, what's going to be the impact of, if I change that figure on page x I've got to change another figure or page y and making sure it all balances through. So I think that whole, that whole element, we've also starting now as well to see with the increase of automation, that ability to speed the process up as well, the bidirectional impact 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. My system's all need to balance, as it were. That's, That's obviously quite important. And I think having tools that are easy to use, there's a demand now, from the work force to actually have tools that are, are easy for our teams to use, and also that we, we have to be more agile in our approach of 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 in ploy it, it we should be able to get those in now, test them, and update the processes very, very quickly which working in the cloud, and working with those, with these types of tools really helps us to, to, 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. Yeah. And and Francesca, just just to add on some of the things that David said and and you as well. I mean, I think I I think here here's the exciting part, alright, 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, ESEP is is a it's a hot item right now because it's a mandate. And will 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 that's what's exciting to me is it 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 side, 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 if we 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, forty years old. So if you think about that, if today you're trying to manage a close with forty 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, you know, it goes along the lines of what we're seeing too. The the need to automate is key, but auto 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, Warkiva teams together, you know, to what David was just saying, look, there, 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 they can report back upstream to the team that actually facilitated the financial close, And then because of that financial close, we can reconcile those back to the systems of record. You know, that didn't exist. That capability didn't exist for. 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 could have jeopardized, an actual, you know, quality of the standard that went in, just in case it wasn't verified, you know, but the the which brings me to the the audit risk piece. I think the audit risk piece is such a key component. I think there was a 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 e there has to be an opinion on these filings. And these are annual filings. So, you know, it's 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 e not only meet what I'm trying to do today, but what I know I'm going to have to handle in the years in the in the future. And I think that's that's exciting part for us from a technology perspective and working with Fortiva 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 ballpark. I'll go back to 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 manually to ESF. I think I think that's really interesting. And I'm excited to see or a curious to see as well where this all goes and then the decisions that companies make and and also what's to come next. It's easier now, but, and just to see what happens with this. And I think particularly, like you said, looking at it all holistically is a great approach to, you know, in terms of what 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 then, you know, what we're 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. So In terms of, I guess, short term, when do people need to start thinking about it and what's happening? Asthma has released economy that will be used in 2021, and this is now ready in the Wikiva platform. So Wakiva, for those that, you know, might be quite new to the company, McKeeper has been doing EXPAREL for since the last 10 years. Robert talked about the beginning around SCC, and we're keen as a global leader in EXPAREL filings globally. And so Esaf is something that, you know, it's a new taxonomy, but it's certainly something we've been used to doing for the last 10 years. And so as as it introduces new taxonomy updates or the more updates, the mandates, because they are expected. Are subject matter experts are ready to inform clients of those changes and, of course, incorporate them into the system. And more changes are likely to be investigated as we come up against come up with, the first filers after the 1st January. And audit, you mentioned, before they've also recently seen a change 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 WF that has multiple output solutions, because they then only require 1 audit, whereas a dual process workflow, for example, having compliant IxRail documenting one tool and maybe a design PDF and 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 the decision process. I think we talked a lot today around control, And I think that's particularly important, and I think that's, you know, also what this transparency directive is is aiming to do is obviously the transparency of standardization and providing that control as well. And I think what's, you know, looking at systems like these, is it allows you as, the customer to stay in control as the content never leaves to go to 3rd party. And so that data flows right through and then it's then tagged and so that, you know, that timeline remains the same, but it's all captured in a single system. It's not being outsourced. And then also the design for design of flows into the platform allowing for the PDF and the X HTMLs all at the same. And what happens then is that the connector data from the public scrutiny and the analysis that Esseff 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 3rd final piece of that is that Wakever will sort of help sort out these stuff in terms of the regards to its mandate and the XH2ML with real design. And in doing so, the XML 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 transplant, it doesn't have to be such a frightening process. So from data through to EXPAREL 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 Esaf, 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 CSF, but also looking at how does that reflect in terms of the full report to report process? How can I look at also evaluating that as part of my regulatory reporting, look to the processes I have, the tools I use, and how I can also future proof the future mandates and controls that might come along as well? So please do get in touch with you. We'd love to discuss your Easter 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 webinars at breakeven.com so we can both are in 2nd weekiva can get back to you and answer those questions as well. And I'd like to, round up my thanking, Robert and David very much for your time today. It's been a really great discussion, and I'm looking forward to, you know, trend 2nd with Cuba working together, more going forward. And, that was very insightful. For me as well. So thank you very much for today. You too. 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 gonna take a couple of moments just to wait for some people to join this session following the previous breakout session. So we'll we'll start in there in a moment or 2. 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 on 24 platform. And how to change the size of the widgets and adjuster 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 and 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 if anything that we don't get time to during this session will be sure to follow-up with you, directly via email afterwards. So my name is Rebecca Wallace. I am the director of customer success here at Waikiva, 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, Yana, if we could ask you to please introduce yourself back to the audience. Your meet, Diana. And you're always going to do that? Hi. My name is Anna Middleton. I work for Anglo American. I've been there for now 7 years, and we have been implementing w desk since 2018, so it's now 3rd year via, on our journey to w disc implementation. Great. Thank you, Yanna, for joining us today. And over to you, John. Hi, Jonathan. I work at Lewis Banking Group been there for 12 years. I lead a team of about a 100 finance professionals to produce a range of internal and external financial reporting for the insurance businesses at Lloyds. And, we've just implemented, workkeeper at the end of last year for for 3 of our most English intensities. Excellent. Thank you for joining us today, John. And last but not least, Megan. Hi, hi, everyone. My name is Melius Daniel. I work at Tom Tom and have been for the last 3 years in the capacity of external reporting manager. So I work mostly with our external press releases and annual report. 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 EZF United Bureau product in the next 2 months as well. Excellent. Thank you, Megan. Thank you for joining us as well today. So let's kick off this discussion. So 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 is actually, the remote close that you did with where Keith was the first, the remote remote close during time. So we'd love to hear about your experiences and how your team managed that. Yeah. Sure. So team is actually, luckily 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 or so to communicate effectively. So I think after we got over the initial realizations that we wouldn't actually be able to teach 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 that, 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, of numbers that refer throughout all of our documents stored in the platform and actually made that collaboration really easy, really effective and made our clothes possible on our long timeline, with no no problems at all. Excellent. That's great to hear. Thanks, Megan, for sharing that. And, John and Yanna, I understand that, by the time you've made that shift to work remotely, I think you'd already, published or finalized your, your year end close. But same question, to you. Perhaps we can start, next with John, how How has your team handled that shift to working remotely? Yes, 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, and also people adopting slightly different working patterns and working So, it's it's been quite positive from that point of view. Obviously, we're very conscious that, has been quite a stressful time for colleagues and We try to give people as much flexibility and and recognize some of this personal strain 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 sort of shorter sharper sharper updates when we're, when we up, but that seems to be going well. Thanks, John. And, and Yanna, how about you and your teams? Yes, I think similar situation. I think, technology took it a while to set up initially to make sure everybody had the right workstations, but we all it really quickly, talking to each other on on these various video calls. In terms of, Wdesk, I think So we have a, w desk, year end project manager who is normally based in Scotland and what happens 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 diabetes really, really help. 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 comfort 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 achieve the interim results, quite well. So I think it's given everybody comfort. So let's move on to the 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 brand use of the platform in the near term, Yana, perhaps we can start for you on this question. I know that Anglo American are starting projects to ESAP, you mentioned already as well, which is exciting. Yes. So, we started we looked at Wdesk in 20 17 and we bought it in 2018. And that was primary for the, XBR requirement in South Africa for the SIPC requirement. So we implemented it in our business units in South Africa initially. What we then did, we already We're thinking about the same requirement coming in the UK, coming to the UK, so the EFS reporting. So what we did in 2019, we implemented the put our back half to the financial sections of financial statements of our annual report into the predisc already, which achieved a lot of process improvements. So we So we already have all of our financials in WDAS, everybody's working on it, and that has been gradually due to 29 year end in that. Where we are going now is we are now incorporated to the front half into W list, and I gonna going to use the interface with in designs, which specific our design house colleagues, and they are going to, so so we are going to work, put the content all into the running through in design, bringing it back into W. That's gonna have the complete, report in there, and you can then, submit in the HTML format and have it XBRL tag. 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 WDS for their, for their integrating annual reports too. So they're also producing their report in WDusk push it and Kumba pushes it into in design and, publish it elsewhere. Great. Thank you, Yana. And no need oh, sorry. Did you have another point there? I didn't mean to interrupt you. Yeah. It's it's, in in the future, just gonna I was going to add the next steps. We've just purchased the policies and procedures solution. That's the next one we are planning to implement and also the internal control SOX platforms. 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, Anna. And the same question over to you, Megan. Yes. So actually just listening to Yana's story, ours is very similar. We also had a look at WDS in a year later 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 1st 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 updateable and just giving a lot of comfort on that edge. We also used the interfacing with indesign. So we exported the indesign readable file and also collaboration with our designers to basically produce the final product. And in the next two months, we're going to expand and also implement the EAFIF, EXPLYAL tagging in our WDSCA 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, on a normal, quarterly basis. But then also with a view on the fact that we were going to, because of the asthma mandate, we needed the eye to be all tagging. And that was also a big motivator for Africa, WDS at that time. But, I've, definitely seen a lot of process improvements just having everything in one case, and it's been great for us. Excellent. That's great to hear. Thank you, Megan. And 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 of work either? Yeah, you're right. So, we've reviewed quite a lot of manual exit control. Some are from our processes. And, we've also noticed the nature of this overview queries on documents has changed quite significantly where Historically, it was sort of sort of basic hygiene checks on the document where we're getting picked up in the review, particularly sort of by the senior executives and and auditors But, when we reflected on our, recent year end, that the nature of the query is a much more of a technical nature. So Building on that, we've now decided to, move beyond just doing the 3 legal entities that we've come there 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 the potential for a slightly different use case to produce some regulatory documentation, which is quite complex documents with lots of different teams needing to contribute to them, and, obviously lots of data that they need to be input. So we we see the platform as being quite well suited to that. I'm also aware that, across the the wider group, some of, some of my counterparts that they look after, they're reporting some of our banking entities are also doing their own implementations and they've been observing us quite closely along the way. Moving on to our next question here. Thinking about what advice would you give to other customers to showcase the value of their keeper platform to perhaps other parts of the organization. Yana, 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 what happened since we have had a redisc, they've been huge savings, hours shaped of a review process. And so users love the solution. So practically what we do, we share those succeeds across the business. We also set up a, knowledge sharing session. So we demo that we just throw other parts of the business And, of course, when we heard of, project like when we were looking at, internal control solutions, we just make sure that if that's, look, don't don't forget have a look at that as well. So being involved with I'm and with other part of our business to, be involved in various, a solution evaluation that's also important. We actually managed to because Wdesk is such a different pool to everything else in terms of document authoring. He managed to get diabetes on our preferred, preferred list So a way to work for document offering specifically on on outlets for preferred tools across Anglo. So if anybody across Anglo American, needs to use something similar. It's already approved, and they can ask for it. So that's that's another one that might make it easier. But it's just mainly, I think, who's the just love the tool and then tell each other about it. We also if if somebody is interested in using it for for that purpose. We allow them to try to create some of the documents, on on manual testing platforms or workspaces. They can actually test it out, try it out and see how it would work for them. It's only just to try them before we go and buy part of a social we need, but we actually like to do this to try and see whether it works for them. And I think that's also a very good swing point. Great. Thanks for that advice, Diana. Excellent. And same question to the others. Perhaps John, we can come back over to you. Yeah. We went on a slightly longer journey from sort of, starting. We needed something, in this space So there's quite a long process internally within the group to assess all the different solutions before we landed on WNS. So there was a collective view, 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 way of some, maintaining the relationship, is we're keeping on an ongoing basis and how we optimize the implementation across the group. Great. Thanks, John. And Megan, how about you? Yeah, I must say I don't have, too much to add on the other pen 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 workkeeper, and we also have a great in finance program, which promotes using the best technology tools, purpose for technology tools for, purpose projects and procedures. And, WDC has landed on that platform, and we're also starting to try to, the knowledge cost 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? Yeah, I think a big thing for me is trying to get the the people that, by doing the work on a day to day basis, helping to identify the opportunities and to drive the change. And, certainly, in terms of our implementation of Wdesk, that stems from ideas that within the team, and there's a small group of people that's really owned that and implemented. I think that was key to, some of the success there. Something else I would recommend is just thinking about getting your data organized and structured, up front, we do get a bit of feedback that we've benefited quite a lot, relative to some 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, for the platform to, to read it from. So, yeah, capturing that in, in the right way as early as possible in the process. And I, and I think, more generally, just in terms of, trying to strive for as much improvement as you can and, and challenge that I tend find working with lots of finance professionals that can be a little bit cynical at times in terms of really sort of adopting new technologies and seeing the opportunities, but trying to kind of create the vision for everyone to gather around and and strive for and just sort of relentlessly, pushing for that is is is quite important and as leaders, I think that's that's our job to kind of get people aligned behind that. Excellent. Thank you, John. Yeah. Absolutely. The the piece you mentioned there on the data structure in a certain year. Common piece of advice, so I'm I'm hearing from other customers who we've been speaking to as well. So oversee others, how how would you respond to this one? I can, 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've only been there for 3 years. It was really trying to understand the process and how all the bits and pieces put 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 a different part 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 did it change and where did the change come from? So I really tried to understand the process And then at that point, trying 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 the short space of time. It was really trying to thought I was trying to organize the data even before we got to WDS. And once I've got to that point, we decided to, purchase W desk. 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 seeing what can you improve and really trying to 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. Yanna, there are 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 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 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 to for people to change their mind because they are used to doing things one way and it it is a different way if you if you change it completely, but it definitely paid off. So I think that's probably the biggest, the biggest piece. The other thing that I would say is for, and I'm not sure how much we about getting data into the tool. There's obviously, there are 2 ways of doing it. There is the, excel adding and then there 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, adding first, it gave us time to think about what date have you gone, what the data should look like, and it really get our heads around. So now I think the transition into the direct should much be much, much faster, and it allowed us to kick off with the tools sooner. We already, and also I learned a business unit of ours, they even just getting the report into Wdesk and get benefit from the LinkedIn, that's already, that's already massive improvement. Don't get up down on how you're going to get the data in. There is a way. And I think our next episode, we are going to now move to down integration to improve our data integrity and make sure there's no manipulation. But, just kind of get it quick, Weekly in because you'll start realizing benefits very early on if you do. That's some great points as well. Thank you, Yana. And our final question before we move over to 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. Yana, perhaps we can come back to you again on on this one, to give a perspective read from the the border systems? Yes. So, our finance team are on a janitor transformation. We are trying to digitize 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 not having to look out a past, financial reporting, but look forward onto planning, forecasting, and so on. So, yes, we have started. We have got various projects going on, but I think we've w this in in in particular. It's really because we are seeing benefits and it's very quickly to implement. I think we are we are trying to see where else we can utilize WDS or systems like WDS. They they are very user friendly. And I think that's another big selling point of the readers is that, yes, the training is available by where we do use that, but it's also very easy to show users how to use diabetes 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 they we can we can start using them. It doesn't take 2, 3 years to implement something. Great. Thank you, Anna. And 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. Yeah, having multiple sources of data, and they're all structured differently, really makes analyzing the data, and working it with it, so much more difficult. And 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 technology collaboration I also see our teams are 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, you know, Wdesk within the cloud. So it was really simple to just have internet connection and home to start working. And, one of the things that we also, really trying to do in our finance, function is to find purposeful tools that are based in class. WDS was an example of that for me, and in my function, and then trying to spread that, basically, that message across across finance functions. You're also trying to July finance, and also to automate in your ability to transfer, we can. So we're also looking a lot into robotics space, and, trying to improve even some manual processing tasks, that may be not directly related finance, but maybe things invoice processing, and these kinds of things. And finally, John, how about you from your perspective on this one? A lot of the problems in my process is stemmed from wrong, either it taking too long to get data available or, it's not always, available in its most granular form. So to then go interrogate why why the numbers are what they are is quite a difficult task. So what we're trying to do is sort of develop one version of the truth, that's easily and rapidly accessible, which, there's 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, on the back end and the tools to enable people collaborator 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 insights trying to understand the numbers and what they tell us and get copilot in the business rather than me spending significant chunks of our time doing manual processes and updating documents, and that's what I think. So and yeah. And I think I think that makes it a bit more inspiring for colleagues when they're coming to work early, if that's what they're they're working towards. Absolutely. Great. Thank you, John. So at this stage, we will hand over to take questions from out audience. I do see that there are a few coming in here. We have the first one asking out panelists if you have any examples of accelerating or how you've accelerated the close process that you could share for the audience. John, perhaps we can come back over to you. This one? Is there anything that comes to mind in terms of examples of accelerating the closed process? The, I suppose, Aside from the nature of all these sort of review queries, and generally, there being a bit more confidence in, in the outputs as a consequence of implementing work either that it was quite noticeable that when we had to what 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, like, audit points to get raised. And, the speed at which those updates was getting made, once we implemented the system, was a lot lot faster, Hannah, it was quite noticeable that, the word trust kept getting used within the team where they 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, yeah, they didn't. They need to go and sort of take back the numbers or that there wasn't any concern that, that that avoided 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, 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. Yeah. For me, I was just going to agree wholeheartedly with what just, what was just said. The most simple thing that accelerated the crows was being able to have, one source of truth so just one document that linked one place where the numbers are stored and then linking and being able to process changes I can't, 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 that accelerated poses 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 that they needed to leave comments or anything like that. They just actually left it directly on the documents that I was working with, and I didn't have go and find a PDF file, compare whether it may be left, a comment, and it was maybe changed in, in, in our version by the I'm trying to understand what they said. That process was really improved for me. And yeah, there was also another measurable way that we improved our closed times for sure on the annual report. That's a great tip. Excellent way to help accelerate the communication type and actually keep everything in, in one place. So it's more secure as well. Thank you, Megan. Yanna, was there any anything else that you'd want to add, to that point in terms of acceleration? Yes. For us, the process prior to WDS cost per manual, and that wasn't the close 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. Might either manually provide email and it would be Excel spreadsheet and it would be web documents, and then they had to put it in. And then you had to come back back to our business and we had to check and double check and triple check all of that output. So what we have done now is we have the design house now have access to Wdesk. So what what has happened, that it would be something like 6 hour time lag between the time you would finish our numbers in the Excel and and where documents and pass it on to them before they put put it in and before it would go then for review to management, what happens now is from the moment when it's closed, when we log w disc from anybody and that it's passed on to our design house, that time is much shortened. And we we have saved something like 4, 5 hours in that, in that, just a piece of the process. So that was a big, big process change. So effectively, because we feed the data in from our Solsys team, 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, biggest, as you've made, really. Great. Thank you, Anna. 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 Waikiva platform. Perhaps Megan, we can come to you first on on this one. I'm trying to mix up who I'm going to first. So what would you say is the biggest change your benefit gained? For me, the biggest benefit I would say was just having confidence in the numbers. When it starts getting crunch time. So when it's a couple of hours before you want to go out and somebody wants to make a small change, I really had a lot more confidence, and could almost go out with a lot more of a relaxed month into actually making changes because I trusted the tool. They would be able to change it everywhere, it needed to be changed. So that got a lot of got rid of a lot of risk for me, and, that was a benefit. And also even just pushing the it's 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, the biggest benefit or something that you've gained from adopting the platform, you or your teams? I suppose something that we're we're still, sort of working on that backings quite a key feature. We we report on, lots of different legal entities within, within the group. And, the, the platform effectively gives the opportunity to create almost like a master template of, all the key disclosures. And Historically, again, through through the review of, the statements for the different legal entities, there's been a a lot of those being dominated by efficiencies between the different sets of accounts. And, so far, we've obviously only done 3 entities, but we're we're already seeing that there's there's a lot of scope for us too. Channel app 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 the other thing I'd answer 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, are starting to come up with lots of new ideas about much broader use cases that the kind of collaboration features could be useful for. And even if, whether we pursue those or not, I think, like, developing that mentality of a bit more of a candid, we can change our process as better ways of doing things is really positive. And, Yana, over to you, if you have to say, like, the main benefit gained or value added, well, what would that be? I think the biggest one really for us was people didn't have to work that long. Our finance colleagues 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 make a 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, the head of financial reporting, he loved the fact that he could review the, the reports on his mobile on the way to work on the train and pass the comments. We could be messaging from his mobile, commencing on on the press release of the annual report and getting feedback straight back from the users. Oh, that was the other. Another question we have here from the, 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 onto Wdesk if they haven't used it or aren't familiar, or have they used the system before? 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 we can come to you on that one. Sure. So basically what we did is we just engaged with the orators actually quite early on in the process and said that we will be using a new tool. I also, try to exhibit the benefits of the tool because it does eliminate quite a lot of risk 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 engage with them quite early on, so we'll be using the tool, and I also demonstrated them how they could actually get onto the tool and review a PDF. And the tool is actually really easy to implement and 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 a specific word PDF document and leave comments. They can also then see comments, in later reviews their previous comments on on new versions of the document, they can see how we've answered their comments. And I could also always generate black line for them as an additional review so that it 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 this Keep learning curve with using WDS because my opinion, it's very much like other word processing software that, lots of people use, and, it's quite intuitive. So they were they were all for joining us on the June. Thanks, Megan. And Yanna, how does that compare with you experience at Anglo American and working with the auditors. We have actually held back on audit in the ship, so that's very it was only a few months ago that 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 Alright. Thanks, Yana. And, John, is there anything for you to add home from Lloyd's perspective on that one? Not much. Likewise, we've, we haven't taken the power of the platform to full extent yet just because the timelines of our implementations was the first cycle we've been through, so we're still experimenting. But the your the auditors didn't recognize an improvement in the quality of of the initial outputs they that they received from us, and then they recognized the the potential for quite significant benefit, particularly the more we scale it to cover, all of the things that we do, I I think you'll get to a tipping point where, if they really do get quite a lot value from 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. Yeah. 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 the the data quality controls as far as upstream as possible to catch the the problems at the earliest point and avoid the fallout of, you know, multiple sets of people trying to fix the issues in different places where where issues materialize downstream. A key point is, is ownership, I think, which is quite difficult to, to get right, and, and, again, push the ownership for preventing, and, testing issues, back to the people that, should should be capturing these things at source. We, we're at the moment trying to sort of make make issues much more visible by, putting in place, data quality dashboards and, it is part of our monthly reporting when issues occur and make sure that there's an awareness of them. So, yeah, that's probably the advice I give. Thank you, John. And Jan, is there anything else that you would add in terms of, tackling the issue of poor data quality in your process? In a way that we have got, when it comes into the scratches in WDS, it comes to source data from HFM, then we have got adjustment columns, and we protect that data that comes from source. So the users can't can't change that. And then we have adjustments column, 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 updated in that and 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's that should be by exception. And it's also it's very clearly visible as to go has been adjusted. And also if the adjustments are done in diabetes, everything is tracked. Everything has got audit trail. So you know who has changed the numbers. So we have now, from our group, process, we have removed any money collection in tools like Excel that can't be audited. So that's that's one thing for that, kind of better that has happened And the other thing that became very apparent with Wdesk is because you can now to different users, the ownership of those sections became, much easy accepted because if it's just one user that can access 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 with the spreadsheets. We did the document. 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, Anna. I only have a couple of minutes left. I Megan, I just wanted to ask if you had anything else that you wanted to add on on that point in terms of. Okay. Alright. 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 email. 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 navigating through these, these new normals. And so we've learned from other organizations who have shared their best practice 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, BDC from other teams and departments. And finally, we've also found a 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 the session, for today, that will be, that's our panel discussion, and I'll amplify go to events. So thank you very much, especially John Yana and Meghan for coming and also for sharing your experiences. It's been really interesting and exciting, insightful. So thank you very much for that. And also, thank you, to everybody who's attended today's events. We really hope that you've enjoyed it as much as we did. If you would like to follow-up on with Vokela 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 our keeper, you can also reach out to us via webinars@workkeeper.com. And a member of our team will be in touch with you.