Nexia Australia offers a range of advisory, tax, audit, and personal wealth services to businesses and individuals. It’s part of the Nexia network which is a top 20 global accounting network with presence in 119 countries.
Nexia Australia’s total revenue for the year ended 30 June 2024 was $131.9 million, an 11% increase year-on-year, demonstrating strong growth. With ambitions to maintain progress with peers and competitors, and plans to offer sustainability services to their clients, they identified a need to develop a Responsible Business (RB) strategy.
Challenges
Nexia Australia wanted to synchronise efforts and energy across different offices and get their internal infrastructure in order first, before rolling out sustainability related services to their clients.
How we helped
Saffery was appointed to support with Nexia Australia’s RB ambitions. We undertook a maturity assessment and a double materiality assessment (DMA) which meant that Nexia Australia could understand their baseline position and then prioritise material sustainability issues – ensuring resources are focused where they can have the greatest impact.
Since the DMA, Nexia Australia has published external content about the work and outcomes. This will enhance their reputation as a responsible and forward-thinking firm and ensure they maintain progress with peers and competitors. Going forward, they will be able to align with evolving regulations and demonstrate proactive governance.
Our team
Ruth Evered and Yi Zheng undertook a maturity assessment for each participating firm (Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth) and the results were presented to the Nexia Australia Board as a baseline assessment.
For the DMA, the team travelled to Australia for the internal and external stakeholder engagement sessions, facilitating multiple interactive 90-minute full team
workshops and interviews. They had 324 workshop attendees, 250 impact surveys completed, and 115 people involved in interviews.
The data collected from the stakeholder engagement (surveys, workshops, and interviews) was analysed to enable the creation of a DMA matrix.
What was the outcome?
The client was included throughout the process through monthly meetings with Nexia Australia’s RB Steering Group during the 11 months of engagement. Our team prepared a deck and agenda for each meeting to update on progress.
Nexia Australia’s stakeholders and RB Steering Group validated the shortlist of material topics and sustainability definitions which were used in the workshop.
Externally, the project reaffirms Nexia Australia’s commitment and demonstrates their efforts to become a responsible business, helping to send positive messages to stakeholders.
Saffery was able to play an important role in sending out these messages by undertaking the stakeholder engagement on Nexia Australia’s behalf.
From our support in the DMA, Nexia Australia identified their top priorities for their RB strategy, and they can now focus their resources on these matters. They’ve been able to consolidate their efforts from a regional level into a national level and build a foundation for external client facing services.
Mal Di Giulio, Chair at Nexia Australia, commented:
“We knew that Saffery had gone on a journey of how sustainability and ESG applied to them internally and how they took it to market.
“What a great opportunity for us in Australia to bring out the team from Saffery to help our strategy internally because we always thought we needed to walk the walk before we talked the talk, and that’s what we did.
“The key benefit was Saffery leading us through the process and for us to leverage off how they developed their tools and how they’re taking it to the market.”
Ruth Evered, Director at Saffery, added:
“What this leads to in terms of opportunity for Nexia Australia is what they can do as a business and where they can take that as a group of people.
“Our materiality assessment has given Nexia Australia some great data and an even better starting point to provide sustainability services to their clients. Looking at it from multiple angles, externally they can now effectively analyse how they can have the biggest impact, and internally they will be better equipped to tie this in and create synergy.”
Find out more about Nexia Australia and see how we can support you and your sustainability ambitions.
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