How Coles’ Investor Relations team is building trust

Who

Listed ASX Company, Retail and Supermarket.

Verification

All non-audited corporate reports.

Insights

Coles have implemented Atticus as its new verification standard, streamlining processes for corporate reporting.

Filters

The verification challenge

Coles is an ASX-listed retail company employing 118,000 people across Australia in its network of 2,447 stores, including supermarket, liquor and express shopfronts.

In late 2020, with half-year reporting on the horizon, Coles’ Head of Investor Relations Lisa Zimmet and her team were looking for opportunities to improve the way the business collected and verified data.

For its most recent annual report, Coles had to verify more than 1,400 statements, involving more than 100 employees across the company. Traditionally, Coles had manually verified information. This was managed using Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and endless email chains.

Adopting Atticus

The result led Coles to adopt Atticus more broadly across its corporate reporting. Since then, Atticus has been working with Coles to help embed a new, digital information verification system across the business.

Coles is now in the process of transforming how it verifies every non-audited corporate report across the company, including annual reports, investor presentations and sustainability and ESG reports.

“We needed a solution that streamlined our processes and ensured we were meeting the strict regulatory requirements associated with verification.”