News

Today we are excited to introduce a series of powerful enhancements to our event management platform's CRM functionality.

WeConvene is improving the way you manage which clients can see and interact with your events.

COVID-19 has brought chaos to Investor Access. See How WeConvene can help bring back stability.

Radek explains our unique approach to helping organizations in need of a better way to manage corporate access meetings.

For all the time, effort and money that is put into organizing roadshows it is interesting that something as simple as the travelling between meetings can still have such a high impact on the perceived success of a roadshow.

After launching WeConvene, one of the first big features we developed was our event Itinerary functionality, providing event organizers with the ability to manage every aspect of their events on WeConvene.

We spend a lot of time talking with Corporate Access and Investor Relations teams about how they organize and manage their events and the pain points they face, day in and day out and although this will be obvious to anyone who has experience of organizing a roadshow, sitting with Corporate Access and IR teams and watching them manage a roadshow always brings home three things for us:

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), will set a new standard for how companies use and protect EU citizens’ personal data. In-line with our ongoing commitment to data privacy and security we have spent the past couple of months analysing what GDPR means for us and defining the changes we need to make as part of our roadmap to compliance.

Putting together an event schedule is always a time consuming process. Aligning meeting participant’s availability; deciding locations; making sure meeting rooms are available; factoring in travel time and then trying to get the right investors into meetings is rarely a straightforward process. But after speaking with hundreds of event organizers across the corporate access and investor relations space, two types of events are specifically highlighted as causing a scheduling headache:

Anyone who regularly engages with the investment community will have noticed the increasing focus asset managers are placing on organizing corporate access meetings with corporates directly. The upcoming MiFID II regulations; pressure on margins and the increasing sophistication of their own internal corporate access teams are all driving this desire to break with tradition and manage corporate access meetings in a fundamentally different way. Despite this though, we are constantly hearing the same complaint from asset managers of all sizes - difficulty in finding out when corporate management are available to meet and the best way to secure those meetings.

Our goal is to consistently enhance the WeConvene platform so that it continues to help Investor Relations teams work in a fundamentally more efficient way. As part of this process we are constantly meeting with IRO’s in an attempt to get a better understanding of how they see the corporate access landscape changing and the challenges they are facing.

In June 2017, we wrote in our whitepaper Preparations for MiFID II - Are you sure this is the right way? that for the industry to move forward in terms of corporate access pricing there needed to be an open and honest conversation between the sell side and their clients around both the value and true cost of the service being provided. Our sense at the time was that the process of price discovery was still at a very early stage but just a few months on and it is clear that progress is being made and a number of firms are starting to clearly define their positions.

In much of the talk about the ramifications of MiFID II the focus has been on a likely reduction in the number of analysts employed by the sell side and a downsizing of corporate access teams. Yet, alongside the predicted restructuring on the sell side, there is an alternative employment trend that is not gaining as much attention - the rise of the buy side internal corporate access team.

One thing is becoming very clear in our discussions with large asset managers - they are increasingly focused on how they manage corporate access internally. For many years, asset managers haven’t really had to think too much about their Corporate Access process or indeed look at implementing systems that help administer it more efficiently, but this is rapidly changing.

In our previous two blog posts, we looked at both the analysts voted by investors as the best in their respective sectors and also the “rising stars” in each sector. Alongside the fact that both lists are full of analysts who provide best in class service to their clients, the other commonality is that the analysts listed are with few exceptions from a concentrated group of the largest sell side firms. In this blog post we take a slightly different approach and look at the highly ranked analysts at the more specialized firms.

In our last blog post, we wrote about how for IR teams, the number of analysts covering a company is in some respects less important than ensuring coverage from the influential analysts or to put it another way, the analysts that investors “value” enough to deem worth paying for in a post-MiFID II world. Our rationale being that the analysts most highly valued by investors are the ones that are most likely to survive the MiFID II fallout facing the industry in the next 12-18 months.

Our event creation tool was the first part of the platform we developed (over 4 years ago now) and for obvious reasons is the most used feature on WeConvene. But as it has evolved with new functionality added, the user experience has become a little more complicated than we would like. In addition to this, our rapid growth in users (although entirely positive), has brought with it the challenge of maintaining excellent system performance - nobody likes the annoying “page loading” spinning icon.

We are often asked by Investor Relations teams how they can generate the maximum amount of investor interest in the events they launch on WeConvene. It is something we have given a lot of thought to and as many of us here at WeConvene spent the formative years of our careers as Portfolio Managers and Analysts on the buy side, it is a question we are well placed to answer.

We recently had the pleasure of hosting a webinar with US and European based Investor Relations professionals. Matt Hall our COO and Ian Hirsch our US sales director ran through how we see the Investor Relations landscape changing over the next 12-18 months, the core WeConvene IR functionality and also how you can use WeConvene to connect with 150,000 global buy side investors through our integration with Bloomberg EVTS <GO>.

For the launch of WeConvene IR at the NIRI Annual conference - Orlando did not disappoint. Admittedly, the almost constant threat of rain meant we hardly stepped outside of the JW Marriott but this just kept us even more focused on enjoying the strong program of speakers.