It’s an interesting time for the IR community, having to adapt to critical market and regulatory changes, such as Mifid II, which are driving the need for more direct channels of communication between the IR and investment communities.
Therefore, as companies are interacting directly with investors and analysts now more than ever before, Nasdaq is rising to the challenge by enhancing its products with the latest technology to help its clients adapt to this changing environment.
Nasdaq’s global team of experts and industry software aim to provide clients across all industries and regions with strategic intelligence and long-term visibility into the capital markets. Its focus is on building solutions to enable corporates to ‘do more on their own’ and more efficiently engage with the sell side, given developing market trends, especially – again – given Mifid II and other hard-to-avoid realities.
To assist IROs, Nasdaq will roll out ConnectIR, a supplementary enhancement to its Nasdaq IR Insight platform, which allows an IR Insight user to automatically schedule meetings with institutional investors directly via the platform.
‘Companies are interacting directly with investors and analysts now more than ever before, and we are taking the lead to help corporate clients adapt to this changing environment with the latest technology,’ says Nelson Griggs, president of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.
‘Our aim with ConnectIR is to offer an efficient method of communication that eliminates any friction with scheduling meetings and other activities with the buy side and sell side, thereby freeing up more time for users to maximize the effectiveness of their strategic IR initiatives.’
This solution is designed to simplify capital markets stakeholder engagement for IR professionals, giving users more time to spend on traditional corporate access activities.
‘We are focused on fixing the burdensome process of scheduling buy-side meetings, as this has the potential to be solved by technology and is a key impediment to corporates doing more on their own,’ says Griggs.
ConnectIR uses technology from WeConvene, the investor access platform, which will help streamline engagement and scheduling for all corporate access-related events, including non-deal roadshows, investor and analyst days, industry conferences and shareholder meetings.
‘WeConvene’s investor access platform connects all capital markets constituents, so we are excited to be the enabling technology used by Nasdaq’s ConnectIR solution, which will extend connectivity between the buy side, the sell side and IR professionals,’ comments Radek Barnert, CEO of WeConvene. ‘[Our] technology makes the creation, execution, distribution and booking of investor meetings as easy as making a restaurant reservation, giving all capital markets participants more time to focus on more valuable activities.’
There is an opportunity to explore its offerings by partnering with potential technology partners to address new demands placed on corporates, notes Nasdaq.
‘Nasdaq has a long history of partnering with corporate clients through our software and consultative IR services to support their capital markets engagement and IR workflow,’ says Brian Reynolds, vice president of IR intelligence at Nasdaq.
Reynolds adds that partnership aims to assist the work of the IRO in a constantly changing world. ‘By combining Nasdaq’s technology with WeConvene, ConnectIR allows us to offer the latest solution to address the new demands and opportunities within the IR community.’
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