Staff from the Financial Accounting Standards Board engaged in more than 400 investor interactions over the year that ended June 30, 2025, and nearly all of those interactions were the result of FASB-initiated outreach aimed at soliciting a wide range of investor perspectives, the board says in its 2025 Investor Outreach Report, which was released on July 31.
“Since our first report in 2021, the FASB has engaged in more than 2,100 investor interactions,” FASB Chair Richard Jones and Technical Director Jackson Day said in the report. “Input from all stakeholders, especially investors, helped us complete or make substantial progress on technical agenda projects to come out of our 2021 agenda consultation.”
These projects resulted in final standards on topics that include digital assets and disaggregation of financial reporting information, as well as upcoming final standards on accounting for and disclosure of software costs, accounting for government grants, derivatives scope refinements, hedge accounting improvements, and interim reporting.
“Investor views will continue to help us ensure that we address the right priorities during the board’s 2025 agenda consultation,” Jones and Day added.
The FASB says it routinely talks to investors with a variety of backgrounds, including but not limited to the following:
- Buy-side portfolio managers and analysts from long-only asset managers and long/short hedge funds
- Sell-side analysts (sector specialists)
- Accounting analysts (both buy-side and sell-side)
- Credit rating agency analysts and managers
- Lenders
- Other capital providers (e.g., venture capital/private equity)
“The buy-side often outsources some analytical work to the sell-side, especially as it relates to complex accounting and tax matters. In addition, sell-side sector analysts typically follow a smaller group of companies than those on the buy-side, so they are often doing extensive analytical work on behalf of their clients and may have more detailed financial models and familiarity with the companies they cover,” the FASB says in the report. “Depending on the structure of an asset manager, the individuals making the ultimate portfolio allocation decisions may not be the same as those that read the quarterly financial statements. All types of investors participate in the capital markets in meaningful but often disparate ways, and we believe that understanding these differences is essential not only to knowing how to solicit input from different types of investors, but to add the context necessary to understand their views.”
The FASB noted that there are several practical considerations to obtaining the information it needs from investors,
including:
- Investors are focused on capital allocation decisions and related responsibilities and generally have limited time available to devote to providing feedback on accounting standard-setting issues.
- Investors do not typically follow accounting standard-setting activities closely.
- Many investment firms do not allow public attribution of a view expressed during outreach or discussions with outside organizations, and often there may not be a singular view of information utility within an investment firm. This contributes to why the traditional comment letter response feedback mechanism may not be an effective way of obtaining investor feedback and why we seek alternative ways of engagement.
- Investors are more interested in the financial reporting outcomes of accounting standards as opposed to the details of the standards themselves.
- The extensive due process built into the development of FASB standards means the average timeline of a FASB project may be longer than an investor’s typical horizon for an investment or strategy.
“To address those practical considerations, the FASB spends significant time building awareness with investors about standard-setting activities to ensure their interactions with us are efficient,” the board says in the report. “In addition, we do not publicly attribute the information they provide to us; rather, we share the results of our outreach with investors on an anonymous basis in our discussions at public meetings and in our publicly available documents.”
In short, investor input drives the FASB’s work, Jones and Day said.
“We are always looking for engaged investors,” they added.
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