The World Finance Awards – created in 2007 to identify industry leaders, individuals, teams and organisations that represent the benchmark of achievement and best practice in the financial and business world – are entering their third year and will reflect a wider spectrum of financial services and related industries than ever before.

The World Finance awards panel, headed up by editor Alexander Redcliffe, used a wide range of criteria, and the critical eye of a collective 230 years of financial journalism to inform its decision over the most pertinent categories to include in the 2012 awards, and to establish criteria for voters to consider, such as innovation, originality and quality of product, as well as proof of market development and excellence in client representation.

The panel has been wary to avoid the danger of bias towards criteria such as depth of practice, size of company, international links and reputation, which in so many other industry awards skews the competition 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.

This year the awards will be divided into sectors, and winners will be announced in successive issues throughout 2012.

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 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 financial 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.