To include information on the reality of Brazilian companies, Catavento partners, Clarissa Lins and Leonardo Bastos interviewed executives of the following companies: Itaú, Light, Fibria, Natura, Braskem, BNDES, IBGC. Brazilian insights are highlighted throughout the report in green quadrants.

The study addresses how the expansion of corporate transparency positively influences companies’ decision-making processes in order to lead them to make decisions more favorable to building a sustainable future.

The concept of transparency adopted in the research is clear and consistent, “providing relevant, appropriate and timely information to market participants, in order to increase the quality of their decision-making processes.”

The corporate transparency agenda has evolved over the past two decades, as companies worldwide seek to meet the expectations of different stakeholders. In this sense, they are adopting accountability models established by pioneering initiatives such as the GRI and the IIRC. Initiatives of the financial market such as sustainability indexes ​​and other questionnaires that identify ESG issues also contribute to the increase of company transparency. Despite this progress, current transparency practices are still deficient from the point of view of their effectiveness in delivering information to stakeholders to contribute to decisions favorable to building a sustainable future.

The research objective was to capture key stakeholder perspective on how the transparency agenda is perceived internally, how it affects the decision-making capacity and what the barriers are to their advancement. The emphasis was to investigate how the efforts of companies to increase the level of disclosure of their activities can effectively affect business performance.

In addition to the panoramic view of the global agenda of transparency, in Brazil in particular, the research proposes a practical tool for assessing the level of transparency of companies, in order to assist them in understanding how they are positioned, how they can evolve and which strategies to adopt. The key elements underlying of this tool are: materiality, valuation of externalities and integration.

Download the research here.