There was a surprise announcement this morning of a possible offer for Share Plc (SHRE) who run the Share Centre. That is a very popular platform with private investors because it is low cost and administratively efficient but also because it is one of the few investment platforms that makes it easy to vote your shares held in nominee accounts such as ISAs. Takeovers of investment platforms are never popular with customers because it means having to learn one’s way around a new web/IT system and charges may also change. More consolidation of platforms will also reduce competition in this sector.
The offer is from Interactive Investor but it looks like they may have some difficulty even if founder Gavin Oldham supports it. He, his family and associated trusts held 69% of the share in December 2018 but there was also 18% held by staff and customers.
Yesterday I attended a roundtable at the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) to discuss the “Future of Corporate Reporting”. It was mainly attended by experienced private investors who I won’t name individually. But there was a consensus on many of the issues discussed. I will highlight some of the interesting points that arose:
- There was widespread concern about the size of Annual Reports and the excessive “padding” and use of “boiler-plate” content. It was clear that most of the investors attending skipped large sections of most Annual Reports.
- One even went so far to say that he always went to the accounts filed by a company at Companies House which often differed from that in the Annual Report and also contained more information. This is surely an issue that should be looked at by the FRC. It is surely not acceptable that there should be any difference.
- There was a general view that commentary by the Chairman or CEO tended to be over-optimistic and that risk reporting was full of platitudes while ignoring the really big risks that a company faced. The Macando oil-well disaster at BP and the recent problems at Boeing with the 787Max were mentioned as examples.
- Other particular issues raised were the valuation of intangibles on the balance sheet, the long-standing complaint that IFRS standards were inconsistent with Company Law (but the FRC has limited input to IFRS standards), the lack of disclosure of long-term debt terms, and the failure to disclose banking covenants.
- There were also complaints about private investors being excluded from receiving some information disclosed to analysts by companies, and refusal for attendance at company presentation events. The lack of an equivalent rule to that in the USA (Regulation FD on Fair Disclosure) was a major problem.
- As regards excessive size of Annual Reports, the FRC staff suggested that splitting up the Annual Report into sections might assist although I said that did not really solve the problem of excessive size and irrelevant content.
- Reporting of ESG factors was discussed but this seemed to be a difficult area due to the lack of standards and the ability of companies to only present positive information.
- The FRC does undertake quality reviews on large company audits and perhaps a scoring system for Annual Reports could be introduced to raise standards. But it is all too easy at present for company directors to throw masses of superfluous information into the Annual Report to distract investors from the really important facts. I suggested that there be a word or page limit on sections of the Annual Report to ensure that only key information was communicated. For example, do we really need 30+ pages of Remuneration Report as we are now getting at some companies? Where companies wished to provide more detailed information, that could perhaps be given on their web site.
In summary this was a useful meeting to raise the concerns of experienced and knowledgeable investors. Let us hope that the FRC will take up some of these issues.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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