The IR Society Celebrates Best in Class IR

At Tuesday night’s annual Investor Relations Society Best Practice Awards dinner at the Royal Lancaster, London, the IR Society celebrated the achievements of those companies demonstrating their commitment to delivering best-in-class investor and stakeholder communications.

London, 22 November 2023

The IR Society Celebrates Best in Class IR at The Royal Lancaster, London

This flagship event in the IR calendar was hosted by the comedian, Mark Watson, and saw around 475 IR professionals gathered together.

Our Best Practice Awards are presented across five categories in the self-entry section, with the winners determined by a judging panel of experienced professionals, led by Paul Lee, Head of Stewardship & Sustainable Investment Strategy at Redington. In addition, there are four categories in the voted section, which is run in partnership with Institutional Investor and solicits the views of the buy-side and sell-side.

We awarded 16 trophies to companies across the self-entry categories for their outstanding work in investor relations, and highly commended a further 5 companies that had demonstrated significant progress in their communications.

For the voted awards, the nominations across the Small-, Mid- and Large-cap categories included 209 companies and 165 IROs, of which 11 were newcomers to the industry. The ‘Best Investor Engagement’ award included 91 buy-side company nominations.

Congratulations to all our 2023 winners. Access a full list of the winners and visit the Best Practice Awards Website for photos of the winners on each awards page here.

Laura Hayter, CEO of the IR Society, said:

“The IR Society Best Practice Awards offer a truly meaningful opportunity to showcase excellence in investor relations. The real value of this awards programme, now in its 23rd year, is that it allows the IR Society to feed back to the IR community what great looks like in terms of how companies are communicating with their stakeholders. Thank you to all those who put their work forward for an award. Those companies shortlisted for Tuesday’s awards have all demonstrated excellence in IR, and the calibre and quality of their entries was again very high across the board. Many congratulations to all of our winners, who demonstrated best in class investor relations in their respective categories.”

Paul Lee, Chair of the Judging Panel, said:

“Even though it was my fourth year as chair of the judging panel for the awards, I still found I had a great deal to learn. That was both from my smart and diligent fellow judges, who brought great insight to their roles, and also about the companies. It’s always heartening to see the diversity and energy of UK companies – and their international peers – displayed through their reporting. Again we were encouraged to see much innovation, particularly from the smaller and mid-cap companies.”

Click here for a full list of award winners.

About the Best Practice Awards
Now in their 23rd year, the self-entry awards are open to all companies listed on a recognised exchange that wish to demonstrate their commitment to leading investor communications. Entries are scored against criteria based on the IR Society’s guidelines for best practice in investor relations. We also ask companies to complete a Q&A-style entry form to support their entry. This gives companies an opportunity to share their approach to the award and to highlight what works for them and their audience. Having completed the scoring on both a quantitative and qualitative basis, with expert input from independent third parties, the shortlists are submitted to a panel of judges. This year’s judging panel of experts included participants from the investor relations profession, investment banks, asset managers, accountancy firms and other professional bodies. The judging of all categories is overseen by a Chair from the investment community. The winners were chosen from the shortlisted entries for each category.

2023 Judging Panel:

Chair of the Judging Panel: Paul Lee – Redington

Habib Anous – Independent

James Ashton – The Quoted Companies Alliance

Emma Burdett – H Advisors/Maitland

Yasmine Chahed – Independent

Hamish Clark – Fidelity

John Dawson – Coca-Cola HBC

Anna Hartropp – Anna Hartropp Ltd

Abigail Herron – Aviva Investors

Elli Irving – Lazard Asset Management

Ken Lee – London School of Economics

Sue Scholes – Independent, Former Chair of the IR Society

Sachi Suzuki - HSBC

Caroline Stockmann – Independent

Peter Swabey – The Chartered Governance Institute

Thomas Toomse-Smith – FRC

Martin Walker – Manchester Business School

Steven Young – Lancaster University Management School

For further information contact:

The Investor Relations Society

Laura Hayter, CEO Tel: 020 7379 1763
Robert Dann, Head of Operations and Marketing Tel: 020 7379 1763

Notes for editors:

The Investor Relations Society
The Investor Relations Society (IR Society) is a membership organisation that exists to promote best practice investor relations in the UK and beyond. It is run by IR professionals for IR professionals.
Established in 1980, the IR Society’s mission is to promote best practice in investor relations; to support the professional development of its members; to represent their views to regulatory bodies, the investment community and government; and to act as a forum for issuers and the investment community.

The Society has over 850 members from the UK, Europe and beyond, including representatives from most of the FTSE 100, a large number of FTSE 250 companies and a number of AIM and smaller companies as well as IR advisors and service providers. For more information visit www.irs.org.uk or connect with us on Twitter (@IRSocietyUK) or LinkedIn

Published 22 November, 2023