Historically, investor relations has lagged behind the use of technology within their function, but that is rapidly changing as the industry evolves. As the number of available technology solutions and providers increases, identifying the one that’s right for you can be a challenge. While a particular tool or product may help with short-term gain, the inability to scale with your needs can cause long-term pain.
That’s why our focus is on helping our clients make progress. Today, IROs are having to do more with the same amount of resources, so our goal continues to be focused on helping them to operate at the same level or better. To do this, we needed to develop a deep understanding of our customers.
By investing our time upfront in terms of market research, empathizing with the work that needs to get done, and understanding how changes in the industry directly impact investor relations, we’ve been able to deliver products that our customers truly value.
Because the investor website is typically the first point of contact for shareholders or potential investors, we made significant investments to support the growing web needs of our customers. This included a complete migration to the cloud, which has allowed us to drive more efficiency around our ability to configure and deploy websites; significantly decreasing the amount of time needed to launch.
With our Investor Relations Success Platform, we concentrated our efforts on integrating and connecting our platform ecosystem to provide a seamless experience that will ultimately help our customers deliver a much more effective IR strategy. Our strategic alliances & partnerships with other leaders in the industry, including Broadridge, BusinessWire, and now S&P Global Market Intelligence, will also help to fuel our continued innovation. The platform consists of tightly integrated products, services, partnerships, and events, which are all designed to help our clients make progress across the key jobs they need to get done.
For example, we know that IROs spend a lot of time collecting data and compiling reports for management and the board, which then need to be formatted into a PowerPoint presentation. To help shorten the amount of time it takes to deliver reports or respond to ad hoc inquiries from the C-suite, we created Report Builder. So, we’re now able to offer a very simple-to-use solution that provides a single version of the truth. But that’s not all. We managed to take the product even further to fully serve the job that needed to get done. All data and reports can be pushed into PowerPoint format, and are directly editable within PowerPoint. There’s no longer a need for the IRO to massage the data in another application, as Report Builder integrates with their workflow. And this is just one of the ways that we’re leveraging our deep understanding of the key jobs that IROs need to complete.
As we move forward into 2020, one of our core investment areas will be delivering a mobile experience that matters, as we know IROs are often traveling or on the road. So making it easy for our customers to capture information accurately while they’re on the move is essential. We’ll also be accelerating our investments in advanced analytics with respect to helping IROs make the right connections with the buy-side, enabling our clients to effectively use more of our products to complete more of their workflows.
As our client base continues to grow, we plan to grow with them; delivering innovative solutions that are tailored to meet their unique needs. We’ve got some very exciting updates and developments on the horizon, so be sure to stay tuned for upcoming product announcements. In the meantime, you can learn more about our solutions by visiting our website.
