Materiality and stakeholder mapping

The integrated report of the GPW Group provides a comprehensive presentation about how the Group creates stakeholder value. According to the International Integrated Reporting Framework and additional documents issued by the IIRC, an integrated report should disclose information about factors that materially affect the ability of an organisation to create value over the short, medium, and long term and which could, if distorted or omitted, actually affect the assessment of the suppliers of financial capital in reference to the ability of the organisation to create value over the short, medium, and long term.

Consequently, this report presents information which, in our opinion, is important to existing and prospective investors concerning the ability of the GPW Group to create value over the short, medium, and long term, and useful to all other stakeholders who would like to evaluate our activities. This report discloses the interdependencies between our external environment, the activity of the group, the business model, the results, the opportunities and threats, and the value creation process in the context of our strategy, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility approach.

The materiality determination process, which involves: identifying relevant matters, evaluating the importance of relevant matters, prioritising the matters, and determining the information to disclose about material matters, took place as a structured internal consultation with selected employees and senior managers of the GPW Group taking into account our Perception Study. It produced a materiality matrix and a map of key factors of relevance to the stakeholders. Those include all financial and non-financial aspects affecting value creation in the GPW Group.

Stakeholder relations

The core pillars of the GPW Group’s activity include the establishment and maintenance of successful lasting relations with many groups of internal and external stakeholders. In our daily business, we stress the key importance of stakeholders in value creation. We regularly engage our stakeholders to source diverse kinds of feedback. Stakeholders play a key role by communicating their perception of our performance, helping us to grow and tailor our products and services to current needs and market trends and better serve the investor community according to a future-proof business strategy. We know that stakeholder feedback can be useful in setting new trends which will rise in prominence.

We know that sustainable governance is instrumental to business development. We are committed to combining business practice with corporate social responsibility in everything we do. Mutual interactions between companies and their environment necessitate a close understanding of stakeholders’ interests and informed maintenance of stakeholder relations. Stakeholder relations management is a fundamental pillar of GPW’s CSR Strategy and, as such, part and parcel of our business strategy. Relations between companies and their environment depend on trust which represents intangible capital of key importance to the GPW Group. Each group of the Group’s stakeholders has different, occasionally conflicting expectations, and impacts the Group’s operations in different ways. GPW pursues a policy of social responsibility addressing their needs both at Group level and in each member of the Group. All those initiatives are geared to sustainable value creation by combining shareholder value with value for other stakeholders.

Perception Study

The Warsaw Stock Exchange obtained professional anonymous feedback regarding its performance and investor relations for the first time ever in 2021 (after the publication of the 2020 annual results).

GPW sees great added value in the study and feedback regarding GPW’s business provided by local and international investors. However, we realise that investors are only one stakeholder group among many who should be covered by similar studies in the future.

Key areas of the Perception Study:

• Assessment of GPW’s performance and financial results.
• Assessment of the Company’s industry and its outlook
• Assessment of communications with capital market participants and other stakeholders using mandatory tools (periodic and current reports) and other tools (materials, meetings, responding to queries).

The study was carried out as an anonymous survey executed by a third party in order to get an objective assessment of GPW’s business areas and market communications and specific suggestions of potential improvements.

The study produced a final report which summarises the results and provides recommendations of potential modifications to communications, tabled to the GPW Management Board.

The study included phone interviews with a group of 30-35 respondents selected from GPW’s database and from among contacts of the third-party provider (fund managers, sell side analysts, individual investors, financial journalists; more than 90% of all respondents belonged to the first three categories). International investors were also interviewed as they are among GPW’s shareholders.

The above-mentioned activities allowed for the mapping of the GPW Group's stakeholders in 2020. This way, a stakeholder matrix was created, which shows which group is interested in the activities of the GPW Group and what influence it has on the GPW Group.

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GPW Group stakeholders