How DFIN became the #1 Most Loved Workplace® Global 2026 — and put the mark in its SEC 10-K

Donnelley Financial Solutions (DFIN) ranks #1 out of 624 certified organizations on the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® Global 2026 list and scores 85/100 on the Best Practice Institute (BPI) Competitor Intel scoreboard — +35 points over its top competitor (50/100) — on a five-year measurement record that runs from first certification in 2021 to a Most Loved Workplace® citation inside the company's SEC 10-K annual report.

“DFIN delivers confidence with the right solutions in moments that matter. That confidence starts with our people — leading with integrity, transparency, and a strong commitment to collaboration.”

The gap

On the 8-metric BPI Competitor Intel scoreboard, DFIN scored 85/100 against top competitor's 50/100 in the June 12, 2026 run. Candidate Q Coverage came in 9/10 for DFIN versus a benchmarked peer average of 2.6/10 — several competitors had no attested answer set at all (no schema, no canonical answers, nothing for AI engines to parse). AI Presence: Third-Party Validated for DFIN, Self-Reported Only for most of the peer set. Brand Sentiment: Positive for DFIN, Mixed for the majority of competitors.

The peer competitor is DFIN's largest direct SaaS rival in regulated-disclosure software, with more employees and a louder paid-media footprint. None of that helped on the employer-brand scoreboard, because the scoreboard measures structural signal — what indexable, schema-attested, AI-citeable evidence about the workplace actually exists.

The scoreboard is also longitudinal rather than a one-time badge. An earlier run recorded DFIN at 90/100 (+40); the June 2026 run recorded 85/100 (+35) as competitor surfaces improved. BPI publishes both runs rather than overwriting the record — the durable finding is that the gap has held above +35 across every run.

The scoreboard

What employees measured — SPARK and the Love of Workplace Index™

The scoreboard measures what the outside world can see. The Love of Workplace Index™ (LOWI) measures what employees actually reported — and DFIN publishes those results rather than describing them. LOWI is a validated psychometric instrument (.95 coefficient alpha) fielded across 2.8 million employees at 1,800+ organizations, so each figure below is comparable to a benchmark rather than a self-graded claim.

• SSystemic CollaborationCross-functional work across product, compliance, and client teams shows up in the colleague-connection score rather than in an org chart.
• PPositive Vision of the FutureEmployees report a clear line between the company's regulated-disclosure strategy and their own next role.
• AAlignment of ValuesIntegrity and transparency — the language used in DFIN's own disclosures — are what employees name back in the instrument.
• RRespectThe 90% manager result is the respect dimension in practice: employees respect their leaders first, and performance follows from that.
• KKiller AchievementRecognition of work delivered in moments that matter for clients, measured rather than asserted.

These figures are published as embeddable CertCheck stats and benchmark widgets, so DFIN can place the same verified numbers on its own careers page, in job posts, and in candidate outreach without restating them.

How Donnelley Financial Solutions compares — industry and local benchmarks

A number is only credible against a comparison. Every certified company gets its LOWI results benchmarked against the national average and against its own industry, so a candidate can see the distance rather than take an adjective on faith.

Benchmarking also runs locally. DFIN recruits from Chicago and from a distributed U.S. footprint, competing for the same auditors, regulatory engineers, and compliance product managers as every other financial-technology employer in those markets. The same instrument that produces the national comparison produces the state and metro comparison, so a candidate weighing DFIN against another Chicago-area employer is comparing measured results on one scale — not two marketing pages.

The benchmark comparison ships as an embeddable widget on DFIN's own properties, which is part of why the scoreboard records AI Presence as Third-Party Validated: the numbers are attributable to BPI, not to the employer publishing them.

What BPI shipped to produce the gap

The mark inside the SEC record

“DFIN's Total Wellbeing program underscores its employment value proposition. These proof points have helped to attract, engage and retain employees and have translated into being certified as a Most Loved Workplace® by the Best Practice Institute, a leadership benchmark research company, three years in a row.”

An SEC annual report is audit-bounded and legally attested. When an answer engine looks for a citable, non-promotional source on whether an employer's culture claims are real, a 10-K disclosure outranks every career-page assertion — which is why this single sentence does more scoreboard work than any campaign asset.

The measurement record, 2021–2026

1. 2021

   First Most Loved Workplace® certification

   DFIN clears the Love of Workplace Index™ threshold across the five SPARK dimensions in its first BPI measurement cycle, establishing the baseline the later record is measured against.

2. 2022

   Specialty categories open up

   Recertification adds specialty recognition in Women and Inclusivity — the first evidence that DFIN's results hold when the sample is cut by population rather than reported in aggregate.

3. 2023

   Remote Work and Wellness validated

   Certification extends to Remote Work and Wellness, matching the company's distributed operating model against employee-reported experience rather than policy documents.

4. 2024

   Parents & Caregivers and LGBTQ+ recognition

   Coverage completes across the major inclusion categories, giving candidates in each population a distinct, indexable evidence surface instead of one generic culture page.

5. 2025

   The mark enters the SEC record

   DFIN cites its Most Loved Workplace® certification in its 10-K annual report, moving the claim from marketing collateral into legally attested corporate disclosure. Authority article publishing and answer-engine work begin in parallel.

6. 2026

   #1 on the Top 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces®

   DFIN ranks first out of 624 certified organizations on the Top 100 Most Loved Workplaces® Global 2026 list, with 27 recognitions accumulated across the five-year record.

What the answer engines said — before and after

BPI ran 1,238 answer-engine checks across six platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot — to record what the engines actually say about DFIN as an employer before and after third-party validation existed. This is measurement, not a campaign metric: the same query set, run repeatedly, against the live engines.

The mechanism is not volume. Answer engines discount self-description and up-weight sources that are independent, structured, and repeatable — validated instrument results, schema-marked FAQ answers, and disclosure documents. DFIN moved from zero structured employer data to five of six engines because the evidence became attributable to a third party, not because more pages existed.

Verified deployment signals

Certification only moves the scoreboard when it is deployed. These external signals were independently verified — each one is a place a candidate or an answer engine can encounter the evidence without taking the company's word for it.

• Career page badge

  High impact

  The Most Loved Workplace® mark is displayed on DFIN's careers page, so candidates encounter third-party validation before they apply rather than after a recruiter call.

  View evidence

• Corporate website trust seal

  High impact

  The seal is embedded on the main corporate site, extending the signal beyond the recruiting funnel to customers, investors, and press.

  View evidence

• SEC 10-K citation

  High impact

  The certification is named inside the annual report — board-level, audit-bounded, and permanently in the public record.

  View evidence

• Employee advocacy on LinkedIn

  Medium impact

  Employees share the certification organically on their own profiles, which produces distributed, first-person corroboration the company did not author.

• Corporate domain backlink

  Medium impact

  A direct link from the corporate domain to the certified profile reinforces which page search and answer engines should treat as canonical for DFIN's workplace evidence.

The questions Donnelley Financial Solutions is built to be the answer to

Candidate Question Coverage scored 9/10 for DFIN because the answers exist in schema-attested form. These are the questions the program is built to own — the ones candidates actually type, and the ones answer engines are looking for a citable source on.

1. 01What is it like to work at DFIN?
2. 02What is DFIN's remote and hybrid work policy?
3. 03How does DFIN approach salary and compensation transparency?
4. 04How stable an employer is DFIN?
5. 05What benefits and perks does DFIN offer?
6. 06What does a day in the life look like at DFIN?
7. 07How does DFIN approach diversity, equity, and inclusion?
8. 08What is DFIN's culture really like?
9. 09Who is DFIN hiring right now?
10. 10What is DFIN's interview process?

Each question maps to a published, FAQPage-marked answer rather than a paragraph on a careers page. That structure is what an engine can lift verbatim — and it is the single largest contributor to the Candidate Q Coverage gap on the scoreboard.

The always-on program behind the score

The evidence surface is not a one-time build. DFIN runs an always-on content program that publishes into the answer engines on a schedule, with each asset written against a named target question and shipped with structured data attached.

• Scheduled answer-engine articles

  Article types rotate through the candidate-question set — culture, remote policy, compensation transparency, benefits, day in the life, hiring, interview process — on a monthly interval, plus custom topics DFIN sets itself, such as the employee journey and the benefits of a remote-first culture.

• Job-specific content for every open role

  Each open position can generate a matching article and social post, so a role like a customer enablement or product management opening arrives with its own indexable context instead of a bare job description. That is what keeps the structured jobs feed and the narrative surface in sync.

• Target questions, monitored

  DFIN names the AI queries it wants to be the answer for, and visibility against those questions is monitored continuously — which turns 'are we showing up in ChatGPT' from a guess into a tracked number.

• Credentials on LinkedIn

  The certification is added as a LinkedIn credential, so the mark travels with the company page and with the employees who carry it — a distribution surface no career page reaches on its own.

• A certified career page

  All of it terminates in one place a candidate can be sent: a branded, certified career page carrying the verified stats, the culture narrative, the benefits, and the live roles.

View DFIN's certified career page

Why it matters for Financial services

Regulated-disclosure software is a hand-to-hand talent war over auditors, regulatory engineers, and compliance product managers. Whoever owns the answer to 'is DFIN or its top competitor a better place to work' inside the AI engines wins those candidates before a recruiter ever picks up the phone.

Frequently asked questions

Methodology & sources

Source: BPI Competitor Intel scoreboard — scoreboard run · June 12, 2026, compared against the prior run. Peer competitors anonymized. DFIN 10-K citation verified in SEC EDGAR. AI engine answers re-verified July 2026. The 8 scoreboard metrics — Glassdoor, Indeed, Brand Sentiment, Culture Visibility, AI Presence, Candidate Question Coverage, Job Listings, and Certification — are documented in the BPI methodology. The Love of Workplace Index™ (LOWI) is the validated psychometric instrument behind every Most Loved Workplace® certification — see LOWI research methodology for validation detail (.95 coefficient alpha, 2.8M employees, 1,800+ organizations).