Charlotte Lombardi and Frédérique Leblanc, HEC Montréal students, at the IFD-FM Awards 2019
The FM-FSI Awards aims to promote excellence in sustainable development reporting among Canadian companies. It is conducted in collaboration with university students who constitute a jury. For this 6th edition, and like last year, a team of HEC Montréal students participated in the competition and was supervised by Samuel Sponem, Associate Professor and Holder of the CPA International Research Chair in Management Control.
The Chair had the pleasure of meeting with the HEC Montréal team, namely Frédérique Leblanc, and committee members of Social Innovation Club which includes Rey Chua, Charlotte Lombardi, Yogesh-Ranjan Koli and Rohan Mahajan. As part of the MBA Student Association, the mission of Social Innovation Club is to nurture future business leaders to develop socially responsible mindsets and to encourage the pursuit of innovation with social impact. And thus, the team’s commitment to consider entrepreneurial aspects beyond the numbers is the source of their motivation to participate in the IFD-FM Awards. How do businesses behave with regard to sustainable finance? This is a crucial question that they have addressed among many others when evaluating companies based on the assessment grid criteria used by the jury.
The students agree that this early exposure of connecting theory and practice in an industrial context with a wide variety of companies allowed them to comprehend the issues related to sustainability from a more structured point of view, and develop a more critical understanding of the actions taken by companies in this area. According to them, those issues are increasingly being mainstreamed in annual reports and corporate websites. Thus, it is important to value the companies that are consistent in their communication and the strategies they adopt, particularly through the IFD-FM contest. The winner then becomes the new reference in the industry, for the public and investors, which in turn enables the promotion of responsible investment.
Participating in the competition and doing an MBA simultaneously is a challenge. But the team wants more students to be involved to increase accuracy in the scoring system and raise awareness by allowing all students wishing to participate to do so.