Over the past six years, Iberdrola – Europe’s largest electricity company – digitized the company’s compliance processes for its global footprint in 20 countries.
The platform is “a single internally developed IT system that consolidates the work carried out by the 70 professionals dedicated to the compliance function,” according to Fernando Fraile, Iberdrola’s Head of Compliance Strategy & Global Coordination.
This system acts as the “global operating model for the identification, assessment, control, and management of the relevant risks faced by the Company and the other Group companies,” the company said in its 2025 Compliance Systems Transparency Report, published in April.
Fraile explained that the unified platform manages the whistleblowing channel, the reporting of gifts and conflicts of interest, third-party due diligence, risk assessment, training activity, and more.
“Using a single system across all Iberdrola companies enables standardized processes and reliable, real-time access to information through business intelligence and data analytics tools. It also facilitates the deployment of artificial intelligence solutions that enhance the overall effectiveness and efficiency of the compliance system,” he said.
In 2025, Iberdrola also displayed excellence in compliance in other areas, including encouraging its suppliers to strengthen their own compliance programs; fostering active employee engagement with its compliance system by its workforce of 47,000 employees; and keeping its compliance personnel abreast of the latest trends in compliance through training and industry certifications.
For these reasons and more, Compliance Week chose Iberdrola as its Compliance Program of the Year for its 2026 Excellence in Compliance Awards.
Fraile explained that once Iberdrola established its global compliance platform, two of the biggest obstacles to success were maintaining a budget to support it and aligning it with practices in different countries while attempting to maintain consistency throughout the organization.
The compliance team uses the data to generate actionable insights on compliance issues across the organization’s global footprint. That ability to see risks in real time is a great selling point during budget discussions, Fraile said.
The compliance team generates daily compliance reports that can report on progress and obstacles to identified risks, Guillermo Fernández-Yárritu, compliance data engineer at Iberdrola, told Compliance Week.
“With the data, we can identify areas of improvement, and then track that improvement over time,” Fraile added.
Iberdrola’s compliance function contributes to the company’s overall strategic sustainability goals by actively encouraging suppliers to strengthen their own compliance systems and providing them with tools to support their development. In recent years, the compliance team has rolled out various communication initiatives specifically targeting suppliers and has engaged directly with more than 160 strategic suppliers to establish tailored roadmaps aimed at improving their compliance capabilities in the short- and medium-term.
“We ask our suppliers to have robust compliance programs, and we have had cases where we have moved on to another supplier” when they failed to improve their compliance programs, Fraile said.
It’s important to the company that its third parties conduct business in a way that aligns with Iberdrola’s corporate values, he said. In pursuit of this goal, Iberdrola had the compliance programs of 15 key suppliers audited in 2025, according to the transparency report.
“This help includes specific meetings to get to know key elements of their compliance system, the assessment of documentation, and the establishment of an agreed road map to improve their compliance system. The purpose of these sessions is to reinforce the supplier’s compliance system so it can be subject to an external audit in accordance with the best practices in the matter,” the report said.
This screening is in addition to ongoing, daily monitoring of suppliers by the compliance team for evidence of fraud, corruption, or other risks, according to the company’s transparency report.
“We tell our employees why compliance is good for the individual employee, not just the company,” said Olga Penzova, Compliance Culture Senior Analyst at Iberdrola.
In 2025, that messaging was extended to its suppliers through an information campaign, training sessions, and more, according to the company’s transparency report. The company targeted “thousands of suppliers, explicitly reinforcing Iberdrola’s commitment to integrity, responsible conduct, and the prevention of wrongdoing, and encouraging suppliers to internalize and apply ethical principles throughout all their operations,” the report said.
