Best Practice Awards: Best IR relating to a Corporate Transaction
Claire Lavery, Executive Director, Europe & Asia at Rivel Research Group shares her thoughts on the new award 'Best IR relating to a Corporate Transaction', what to look out for and what a simple and effective process it is to enter this year's awards.
With my Rivel Research Group hat and IR Society hat on, the IR Society’s Best Practice Awards is an obvious passion for me. Now in their 19th year, the Awards aim to recognise excellence in our industry and continually encourage best practice investor relations.
This is my 5th year involved in the IR Society’s Best Practice Awards Committee and it’s definitely been an interesting journey so far. Over time we have seen a real evolution of the Awards - we have gone from talking about the impact of digital, integrated reporting…telling your story beyond just the numbers, to the increasing importance of ESG issues and of course the impact of MiFID II, all of which undeniably call for IR to be proactive rather than reactive – as a profession we are in a fascinating position that can only raise the bar of the Awards.
My particular focus this year, along with my esteemed colleagues Chris Griffiths, Head of IR, Tesco and Simon McGough, Head of IR, Babcock International, was introducing and developing our newest category – Best IR relating to a Corporate Transaction. We kicked off with defining a “Corporate Transaction” – so an IPO, a merger, significant sale or acquisition of a business, a rights issue or a defence. Once we got into discussion about the actual criteria we were quickly in agreement that this Awards has to be about more than just materials, it has to be about the prep work beforehand, the actions during and after, it has to be about the relationships and how success is measured – to what degree did IR’s involvement add to the successful conclusion of this transaction.
This is a hugely interesting category regardless how small or large the transaction and I would urge you to review the guidelines we have developed here.
This leads me on nicely to the action of submitting an entry. As much as it was incredibly useful to have Chris and Simon involved in the development of this category given their wealth of experience, it was also hugely interesting to see their reaction to the entry process, both expressing their surprise at how easy it is. So, despite what people might think, this is not a massively time-consuming exercise, it is actually quite a simple effective process.
So, if you are corporate and have never thought about entering, perhaps this is the year to consider it and if you are service provider, do consider putting your clients forward – could there be a nicer thank you for their commitment to you! Just click here for more information.
Published 2 April, 2019