PwC Malaysia’s inaugural Building Trust Awards

Celebrating companies which are taking steps to build trust 

KUALA LUMPUR, 13 October 2015 – PwC Malaysia is organising its first ever Building Trust Awards. Inspired by PwC UK’s Building Public Trust Awards (now in its 13th year), these Awards were conceptualised to reinforce the need for trust as the currency for business in an increasingly disruptive marketplace. 

The Building Trust Awards aim to recognise Malaysian public-listed companies that inspire trust as measured through:

• Excellence in corporate reporting based on the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)’s Integrated Reporting Framework

• The companies’ public perception according to investors and customers, based on analysis run by PwC’s in-house measurement framework and diagnostics tool
  
  

The Awards ceremony will be held on 30 November 2015 in Kuala Lumpur. Awards for the companies who are making the best attempts to build trust will be given out then.

Sridharan (Sri) Nair, PwC Malaysia Managing Partner, said:
“PwC Malaysia is organising the Building Trust Awards at a time when trust in institutions and corporates globally is at an all-time low. We firmly believe that corporates should take on the mantle to rebuild trust. This ties back to our PwC purpose ‘To build trust in society and solve important problems’. We feel this is one of the ways we can play a part in helping to restore trust in the capital markets.  

“Through these Awards, we aim to recognise Malaysian companies that are making good strides to build trust. Winning these Awards may not necessarily imply that these companies are the most trustworthy or that they are better trusted than other companies in Malaysia. Instead, these are the companies we believe are making the most attempts to build trust with their key stakeholders (their investors and customers) by being transparent and authentic.”

The Awards methodology, a first of its kind, introduces a distinctive way of measuring trust, beyond the financials of the companies surveyed.

Sri Nair said:
“Our Awards demonstrate that trust, which is often perceived as an intangible concept, can be quantified and managed in a strategic manner. We hope the Building Trust Awards will help companies to view trust through a fresh perspective, as a significant asset to promote sustainable growth.

“Furthermore, we believe that our unique methodology differentiates the Building Trust Awards from other awards in the marketplace. We did not call for submissions for these awards but shortlisted companies based on excellence in corporate reporting and on the public’s perception of them, through our unique methodology developed by PwC UK, using trust profiles.”

Our methodology

How companies were selected

The methodology shown above is clustered around two central themes:

• Measuring the reporting of Bursa Malaysia’s Top 50 companies
  The companies were benchmarked against the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC)’s Integrated Reporting Framework. Ten companies were shortlisted from this benchmarking exercise.
  
  
• Trust profiles
  Trust profiles were developed for each of the shortlisted companies to demonstrate how they measure against trust drivers based on certain attributes, in the eyes of both their investors and customers. The trust profiles were built by PwC UK who developed a methodology to measure public perception based on relevant publicly available data on various platforms (including social media, investor forums, news sites, blogs) (see notes section for more details).

Ten companies were shortlisted by PwC Malaysia based on these criteria. The ten shortlisted companies will be announced at the Awards Ceremony on 30 November.

The final winners were selected by an independent judging panel via a face-to-face deliberation. The judges are:

• Sir David Tweedie (Past Chairman, International Accounting Standards Board) (the Chief Judge);

• Belinda Gibson (Former Deputy Chairman, Australian Securities and Investments Commission; non-Executive Director, Citigroup Pty Ltd);

• Goh Ching Yin (Executive Director, Strategy & Development, Securities Commission Malaysia);

• Raymond Siva (Chief Executive Officer, Edelman Indonesia; formerly Managing Director of Edelman Malaysia) 

Sir David Tweedie, Chief Judge for the Awards, said:
“I am pleased to support PwC’s inaugural Building Trust Awards as Chief Judge. It is very timely to organise these Awards amidst the current decline in public trust. Trust building isn’t a unique proposition or challenge for Malaysia alone. It is a key priority for many developed and emerging economies in the wake of recent corporate scandals. The private sector needs to take the lead in promoting a meaningful dialogue on trust in the journey towards inspiring reform among businesses. 

“The Judges Meeting was a good platform for me and my fellow Judges to discuss and debate the winners of these Awards. By looking both at what companies say about themselves in their annual reports, and what the public perceives of them through the customised trust profiles, PwC has come up with a unique and more rounded way of looking at how companies are making attempts to build trust.

“Research done by PwC highlights that being trustworthy drives performance. This is an area on which the Award winners can capitalise, if they use the trust profiles as a barometer to gauge how they are doing in the eyes of their stakeholders. There is also growing evidence that being trustworthy can be a key competitive advantage for companies, especially in times of a crisis, helping them recover more swiftly than their less trusted competitors as well as helping them overcome shareholders’ scepticism.”

END