The Compliance of the Integrated Reports Issued by European Financial Companies with the International Integrated Reporting Framework

Integrated reporting (IR) is an emerging practice increasingly capturing the attention of companies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the integrated reports issued by companies from the financial sector in Europe are following the guidance of the International Integrated Reporting Framework (IIRF). To achieve this objective, we analyzed the way in which the integrated reports of eight companies are following the guidance provided by the IIRF. As a result, we noticed that the annual report of Generali scored the highest compliance level with the guidance of the IIRF, but each one of the companies stood out with respect to at least one of the guiding principles or fundamental concepts mentioned in the IIRF. Although the companies included in the sample are in different stages of IR adoption, our results contribute to understanding the practice of IR. The conclusions support the use of a tool to measure the compliance of an integrated report to the existing requirements in the context of an industry linked to many other domains.