The objective of financial communication is generally considered to be helping reduce the capital costs of achieving adequate market valuation for issuers and to strengthen investor confidence. In addition, good investor relations departments break down the detailed reporting of company information for shareholders. Banks play by different rules, however.
portfolio institutional’s colleagues in Germany took the most recent annual reports (for 2013) from companies in the Stoxx 50 and ranked them according to number of pages. The chart above shows that compared to other companies in the index, banks produce by far the largest annual reports when it comes to number of pages. Among the big banks in the Stoxx 50 index, six of them occupy the top positions – and the top three of those published reports with near or in excess of 600 pages. Not quite War and Peace, but hefty documents nonetheless. Indeed, the average number of pages for the Stoxx 50’s 11 biggest banks is much higher (446) than the average number across all 50 companies (279).
In an industry where there is so much technical jargon and complex information to digest, there is a lot to be said for being able to break things down in a concise way for shareholders – including institutional investors who are constantly fed reams of information on asset classes and investment strategies.
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