NIRI has named the three members of this year’s class of new fellows.
The 2018 honorees are: June Filingeri, president of Comm-Partners; Smooch Repovich Reynolds, managing director in the IRO and chief communications office practice group at ZRG Partners; and Lynn Antipas Tyson, executive director of IR at Ford.
NIRI’s fellows program celebrates members who have ‘distinguished themselves through their leadership within NIRI as well as the professional standards to which they have abided and their involvement and contributions to the IR profession throughout their careers,’ the institute says in a statement.
Repovich Reynolds joined ZRG Partners in late 2017 after more than 20 years in the industry, during which she had served as practice leader of the IR and communications practice at DHR International, led the IR practice at Caldwell Partners and successfully run her own search firm, the Repovich Reynolds Group, for 23 years.
Repovich Reynolds has been a long-standing contributor to IR Magazine and moderated its Women in IR event in San Francisco last year. ‘I think there’s a genuine interest on the part of management teams to have more women in the lead IR role,’ she told IR Magazine earlier this year. ‘But women do need to think about their careers and frame them a little differently.’ She pointed to building relationships with senior figures at the company as key to building a career.
Like Repovich Reynolds, Tyson moved to her current role in late 2017. She has decades of experience at large and mega-cap companies such as Dell, Yum! Brands and PepsiCo. Tyson also believes creating a strong relationship with senior management is key for IROs. She sees one of the IR team’s key responsibilities as being to find out what the Street is saying and let senior management know, which helps inform strategic and operational decisions.
Filingeri founded IR consultancy Comm-Partners in 1999 and has 30 years of experience in the field. Before establishing her own practice, she was a partner of Morgen-Walke Associates, and she began her career in IR with Georgeson. In the early 1990s, she and Ed Nebb, executive vice president of the Hawthorn Group, took over the introductory course in IR at New York University, teaching a class of nine to 10 students once a year. According to her NIRI profile, she continues to teach the core IR course.
In a statement, NIRI president and CEO Gary LaBranche says of the new fellows: ‘They embody the characteristics and accomplishments that define the best in the IR community. They are part of a select group of 28 individuals who have earned NIRI’s highest recognition since the fellows program’s creation in 2013.’
