The first step is to seek out the opinion of our readers and subscribers, visitors to the website and canvas senior executives responsible for procuring services for their organisations.

All businesses nominated are initially evaluated by our research team for possible shortlisting and to determine the most appropriate award category.

Criteria for shortlisting decisions include, but are not limited to:

• Innovation
• Impact on Market
• Financial Strength
• Risk Management
• Performance and Value Creation
• ESG Standards
• Track record
• Client Service
• Communication of Risk and Transparency
• Strength of nominations (We ensure that smaller organisations are not excluded, so the number of nominations is not a deciding factor, but the source quality of the nominations is important.)

Normally, a minimum of three organisations are included in any shortlist.

Once on the shortlist, we contact the organisation for senior executive (often CEO) feedback. We arrange a conversation and give the executive the opportunity to highlight the key supporting factors they feel the judging panel should be aware of. We also accept any written documents they wish the panel to see.

At this point, we send the panel relevant publicly available information as identified by the research team, details of sources of nominations, and supporting notes from the conversation with the executive, as well as any material the shortlisted organisation decides to provide.

The panel is free to do background checks and raise additional written questions if necessary. The judges are not obliged to declare a winner from every shortlist, but whenever they do, their reasons are communicated to our editorial team which produces a short summary of factors leading to the award. (When based on notes from a conversation, the summary is sent to the winner for a factual accuracy check prior to any award announcement.)