Since 2007, the World Finance Awards have been celebrating achievement, innovation and brilliance in their annual awards. Anybody can make that claim, but World Finance really is different. Whilst we boast legitimately independent, expert thought on our judging panel, who can draw on 230 years of financial journalism experience, more importantly, our award winners – and even our award nominees – are chosen by you, our readership. Every year, we seek your assistance in recognising industry leaders, eminent individuals, exemplary teams and distinguished organisations, which we believe represent the benchmark of achievement and best practice in a variety of fields – and every year, we turn to our readers to help as we strive to recognise an ever-widening spectrum of services, markets, industries and organisations. We believe that by consulting our readers we can better identify the groups that are confronting the issues which face us at this complex juncture, and our awards will rise above the status of participation certificate and actually be an endorsement of their work.

At World Finance, we relish hearing about new experts and burgeoning markets. Our awards are the only industry honours given on the basis of voter participation, and we actively welcome, and consider, any and all submissions to our nomination process.

Whether it’s businesses large or small, individuals in niche sectors or a category you think we might be overlooking, we’d love to hear from you.

And now the small print…
The panel has been wary to avoid the danger of bias towards criteria such as depth of practice and size of company, which skew so many other industry awards in favour of the larger firms with global networks, leaving the excellent work of smaller, nationally-based firms and those operating in niche areas, unrecognised. The awards are designed to redress this balance, not to favour the smaller firms, but to publicly recognise that the services they provide are every bit as valuable to their clients as those of their larger counterparts.

For its 2012 awards World Finance has taken the decision not to list nominations for the awards as this naturally means that only those companies already recognised by the panel would be eligible to win. The panel believes strongly that the awards are at their fairest and most transparent when readers are able to vote for any company or individual that they believe deserves the accolade, rather than handing them out to the same old blue chips every year – a criticism that has rightly been levelled at other high profile awards, where the same handful of teams seems to scoop the award every year.

To promote fairness within this polling structure, voting patterns are carefully scrutinised for signs of tactical voting.

PLEASE NOTE: Votes cannot be limited to one per IP address as this would prevent large numbers of individuals submitting votes from their workplace at large organisations, but the panel carefully exercises its expertise in ensuring that suspicious or inappropriate companies receiving large numbers of votes are properly probed. As part of any such investigation our web team will be able to check if statistically significant numbers of votes for a suspicious company originated from the same individual or group of IP addresses, and whether the details of these voters match the identifying IP address. Any data accessed for such purposes will be treated as confidential.

Voters are being encouraged to suggest additional categories if they feel that the existing categories don’t cover all the aspects they feel deserve recognition in a given sector. Any additional awards the panel deem to be appropriate will be added to the nomination form for other users to vote on.