Who

Aston Martin is the world’s only independent luxury car group with over 100 years of design and automotive excellence. 

Verification

Annual reporting suite/half and full-year results; Investor Presentations; Sustainability Report; Climate-related disclosures; Corporate Governance Statements

Insights

Aston Martin professionalises its reporting process, saving a significant amount of time on external audit, and increases its Disclosure Committee’s confidence in disclosures.

Filters

A very manual and time-consuming process

Before using Atticus, Aston Martin relied on manual processes when fact-checking its disclosures. A central team and internal stakeholders would email back and forth to request and supply supporting evidence for material statements. The central team would then track links between supporting evidence and the disclosure using spreadsheets and secure folders. Not only did this make it difficult to link statements to relevant data points, but it was hard to see how much work was outstanding and who was responsible. 

As the number of statements requiring verification increased, the process of using spreadsheets and emails became unmanageable. This was only made worse when several documents were produced at once, each with several version updates. 

Transforming the verification process

Aston Martin transformed its verification processes by adopting Atticus. The team is now able to share the workload more efficiently, by assigning statements to individuals and automatically requesting the right supporting evidence. As the work is delegated and completed, a dashboard shows the progress of the document, enabling the central team to provide updates to stakeholders on the amount of work remaining. Furthermore, any access to sensitive documents uploaded can be restricted to certain parties.

The Aston Martin team has also highlighted that dealing with new versions of documents has been a game-changer with Atticus. The team can now carry across historical supporting documents with ease, reducing time spent on duplicate work whilst checking the integrity of their output. According to Justin Thornton, Director of Internal Audit & Risk at Aston Martin, “the process to transfer tags from one document to the next version was fantastic, what used to take hours of manual reconciliation was done by Atticus in a matter of minutes.”

Efficiency gains for internal and external audit

Aston Martin has used Atticus across several disclosures, including the annual report, results and announcements, investor presentations, sustainability report and climate-related disclosures. The team can now verify statements quickly and accurately, and export the work into a board-ready pack which can be shared with external auditors. 

“We shared reports with our external auditors which saved huge amounts of time from having to respond to their questions on verification. Our external auditors were able to rely on our process and the automated reporting gave them sufficient assurance over the robustness of our process.”

headshot of Justin Thornton headshot of Justin Thornton
Justin Thornton
Director of Internal Risk & Audit, Aston Martin

Making fact-checking less painful

Aston Martin has noted that adopting Atticus has made verification much less painful for their staff, and has increased the level of confidence the Disclosure Committee has in their verification process. On a recent project, up to twelve individuals were working on one document, and they could all collaborate in real-time with a clear record of who was doing what.  

Justin says to those looking to adopt Atticus: “Don’t hesitate – it quickly provided significant time (and therefore cost) savings and was very easy to use. A real game-changer for my team.”

About Aston Martin 

Aston Martin Lagonda is the world’s only independent luxury car group with over 100 years of design and automotive excellence. The iconic luxury British sports car manufacturer has been trading on the LSE since its admission in 2018.