Earlier this month, Liz MacCormack, Deputy Company Secretary at Drax, and Renae Rafedile, Corporate Reporting and Projects Manager at National Grid, joined Atticus’ Patrick Skinner to discuss how they improved their annual reporting processes.

At their session at the Chartered Governance Institute UK & Ireland annual conference in London, the trio discussed the lessons learnt from the 2023 reporting cycle, the focus for next season, and challenges with adopting new technologies.

Lessons learnt from recent reporting cycle

Liz highlighted the importance of maintaining the integrity of data verified and communicated in Drax’s most recent reporting cycle. While Drax has always carried out careful verification of the information it published, in 2023 it updated its existing manual verification process by adopting Atticus’ software.

The board was able to stay up to date with the verification process from a much earlier stage, improving board alignment. Drax’s auditors also had direct access to the evidence relating to the report in Atticus, increasing confidence in the statements included. 

For National Grid, removing silos to improve collaboration was the main focus. Use of Atticus across the business has been key to allowing National Grid to maintain a consistent tone of voice over the report, ultimately creating a higher-quality output.

Next season’s focus

Having made huge time-savings through the adoption of Atticus in 2023, Drax is now focussing on reviewing and further improving the quality of the evidence being referenced.

Renae explained that her top concern is keeping on top of new regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. With a swathe of changes in this space inbound, she wants to ensure that National Grid is well prepared to adopt any new reporting requirements. 

Technology adoption: the challenges and opportunities

The group agreed that one of the biggest challenges to adopting new technologies is getting sign-off from senior stakeholders and aligning processes and budgets for the implementation. Even once this is in place, it can still take time to shift company culture to embrace that new technology. 

Renae and Liz emphasised that while technology can enhance existing processes, it is by no means a silver bullet – if there are non-performing existing internal processes in place, these must be corrected before technology is introduced.

This is likely one of the reasons the adoption of Atticus’ at Drax and National Grid has been so straightforward. Not only is Atticus intuitive and easy to use, but both companies already have well-managed processes in place that Atticus has enhanced and improved. 

The Atticus team looks forward to attending future CGI events.

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