Leading firms in the institutional investor community have joined forces with Tomorrow’s Company to launch a working party which aims to improve the quality of engagement by institutional investors with UK companies. The practitioner-led group aims to identify engagement styles and practices that seem to be most effective and to share that intelligence with the aim of making engagement more rewarding for investors and companies alike. The group also intends to make a significant contribution to the 2012 revision of the Stewardship Code which the Financial Reporting Council is proposing will take effect from 1st October 2012. The group includes some of the world’s largest and most active investors – Aviva Investors, BlackRock, Governance for Owners, Railpen Investments, Ram Trust and USS.

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Although still an embryonic management practice, the authors believe that “integrated reporting” of a company’s financial and non-financial performance into a single document is about to take off, as market and regulatory forces push more companies to adopt this practice. In doing so, companies will face a number of challenges, which the authors say can be efficiently dealt with via cloud computing.