Online people-power means an increasing number of businesses are seeing transparency as an opportunity, writes Andrew Cave.
At a recent conference on responsible business, I spoke about the emergence of the ‘see-through business’ – companies that are successfully adapting to working in an environment where there is an unprecedented amount of publicly available data on their operations.
These changes are being driven along by the people-power of the internet and social media – customer review and feedback sites, price comparison sites, campaign group reports and online databases.
At the same time, the ever rising bar of both voluntary and legal reporting standards and external assurance continues to push companies to provide more useful, credible data on their performance.
The combination of these two forces is leading us in to a new business operating environment where stakeholders have ready access on their smartphones to a rich seam of really useful data points about companies – customer satisfaction levels, employee turnover and satisfaction, country by country tax payments and so on.
I have been in the Corporate Social Responsibility field for over a decade, and I can vouch for the fact that ten years ago most corporate CSR reports and websites were fact-free zones – lots of warm narrative, happy photos and community friendly anecdotes, but very little substance. And in terms of disclosure on really difficult issues, you could forget it.
Fast forward to today and a number of companies are starting to see increased transparency as an opportunity, and are working hard to improve this area of their business.
As Chief Sustainability Officer at RBS, I am heavily involved in the work to restore trust in the company. We have a very long way to go with this after everything that the company has been through.
From immediately after the financial crisis when the company was bailed out by the UK taxpayer, we have been taking a very deliberate approach to be as open as possible about our business, including ongoing challenges as well as progress. We can’t change perceptions overnight or put right all the issues of the past, but we can aim to be a leader on transparency.
We are therefore particularly pleased to have been ranked as the top scoring UK company in Transparency International’s latest report on transparency in corporate reporting. Indeed our score is ahead of all of the 124 companies in their global index.
Transparency International work tirelessly on the anti-corruption agenda, and have been responsible for much of the progress towards open business in recent years that I mention above.
The score reflects the good work across the company on a range of issues, such as country by country tax reporting, corporate structure and holding companies and so on.
More broadly, it complements our voluntary disclosure in a range of areas – energy financing (including the difficult stuff), complaints data, calls to our whilstleblowing line and much more. We even put a summary of all of the most serious regulatory investigations and litigation issues against the company into a single table, and put this in our Sustainability Report. Being open about the issues of the past is the first step towards rebuilding trust. If you look around, you won’t find that all banks are as helpful in this respect to say the least.
This is not to say that we deserve any special credit for this, we still have our share of operational and reporting challenges. We are very realistic about how much work we have ahead of us to achieve our goal of being the most trusted bank by 2020. But we are determined to get there – milestones like this ranking give us reassurance that we are beginning to make real progress.
Andrew Cave is Chief Sustainability Officer at RBS.
A previous version of this article was originally published on the RBS blog.
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