Buy side more likely to take meetings arranged direct, finds new research

Companies are increasingly going direct when it comes to corporate access, according to new research from IR Magazine, with direct contact second only to sell-side corporate access.

That’s one of the key findings from the Corporate Access research report, published in the summer 2021 issue of IR Magazine.  

IROs say direct contact now accounts for the arrangement of more than a third of their meetings, while investors say it accounts for four in 10 of theirs.

Satisfaction levels among IR professionals around direct contact is also ‘overwhelmingly positive’, the researchers find. An impressive 84 percent of IROs give direct corporate access a high satisfaction rating of eight or above – and a third give a perfect score of 10.

‘The primary reason for this satisfaction is clear when looking at the view from the buy side,’ write the report authors. ‘Nearly three quarters of buy-side investors and analysts say they are more likely to take a meeting if arranged by direct contact with the company, while nearly half say they are much more likely to do so.’

There has been a notable increase in the number of both companies and investors reaching out to arrange meetings directly in recent years. Almost 80 percent of IROs say they have become more likely to reach out to investors over the past few years, with investors saying they have become more receptive to direct meeting requests. At the same time, investors tell IR Magazine researchers that they have also become more proactive with direct engagement: more than six in 10 are now more likely to directly reach out to companies.

Speaking to IR Magazine earlier this year for a feature looking at how corporate access had changed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, both New Zealand-headquartered Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and UK-headquartered National Grid said the majority of their meetings in the past year had been arranged directly with investors, though both use corporate access platforms to manage meeting requests: Marcus Driller, vice president of corporate at Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, uses the Nasdaq platform, while Caroline Dawson from National Grid uses ingage.  

Driller also commented at the time that he felt the company had even had more success taking this approach with new investors, rather than going through a broker, as would previously have been the case.