The current focus to improve corporate accountability is disclosure, frameworks, and legal duties. These are important, but too little attention is placed on who has the capacity and expertise to conduct in-depth analysis.
This analysis comes from many actors – audit, investors, journalists, non-profits, and many more – who together form the corporate scrutiny ecosystem. This ecosystem is central to corporate accountability, as addressing any form of market failure requires awareness and then analysis that builds towards consensus and action by decision makers. This analysis ranges from assessing a specific company’s financial prudence to systemic issues such as climate change.
The problem is there is a critical lack of capacity for in-depth company analysis, which must be addressed to bridge diverging views on financial materiality and help investors, companies, and governments tackle market failures.
Scrutiny Hub will produce research that analyses the corporate scrutiny ecosystem and then builds tools to help address any problems identified. Scrutiny Hub aims to fill a gap by focusing on who has the time and expertise for in-depth analysis and how information flows around the ecosystem.
Scrutiny Hub was created by Laurie Fitzjohn-Sykes who has 20 years of research experience across sustainability and financial markets. Laurie recently co-led the ESG research team at BNP Paribas in equity research. Prior roles include Head of Governance Research at HSBC and Director of Research at Tomorrow’s Company, a non-profit responsible business think tank. He started his career as a financial analyst in equity research and private equity. He was previously a member of the UK Financial Reporting Council’s Investor Advisory Group and the ICAEW’s Technical Strategy Board. He has written a book on company short-termism and has a first in Economics from Cambridge University.
