International bank HSBC’s 2023 annual report is so thick that British postal workers should be wary of back problems.

He annual report from the bank last year consists of no less than 454 pages and weighs about one and a half kilograms, thanks to all the current regulations surrounding organizational reporting.

HSBC stated that some shareholders had to wait longer to receive their annual reports due to regulations around postal delivery. Postal workers cannot carry too many copies at once.

HSBC has around 300,000 shareholders worldwide and sends around 35,000 printed copies of its annual report to the UK. Luckily, the paperwork is also simple download via the website, the bank said.

Makes sense?

The size of the report is significant because the bank is active in 82 countries, but this is mainly due to the International Financial Reporting Standards, which have been in effect in the European Union since 2005. For example, explaining the figures already takes up 133 pages in the report, according to CFO Douglas Flint from HSBC.

At the same time, this raises the question of whether such a large amount of information is still useful and whether shareholders can benefit from the annual report. write Financial Times.

According to a British business newspaper, there is increasing awareness among companies, investors, accountants and regulators in Europe and the US that corporate reporting has reached a crossroads and that a new direction must be taken.

Obesity

Accounting professor Marcel Pheijffer write Several years ago in his column for FD that companies were increasingly suffering from “information overload” in their annual reports, which also contained a lot of useless and outdated information.

It is feared that the new reporting requirements around the European sustainability directive CSRD will only make matters worse.