Shareholder Communications Symposium Where investor relations and shareholder communications professionals gather

I've been spending a lot of time lately in the area of shareholder communications, digging deep into issues related to new SEC rulings that affect everything from the way prospectuses, proxies, and other critical investor-related documents are written (new, plain language) to the way they are delivered (say goodbye to the thick stack of printed materials that no one reads!).

One of the outcomes of this activity is my growing sense that there's a lot of opportunity in them thar hills, for both the public companies and investment firms that need to respond to the regulatory changes and the solution providers ..

Delivering documents online rather than via print today is no big deal, and at this point, not even the hardest-core Luddite argues against its efficiency. But deliver does not equal receive and certainly doesn’t equate to understand, something organizations up and down the corporate spectrum are now discovering daily, and to their great dismay. In the rush to embrace electronic means of delivery, many companies have overlooked the obvious fact that the experience of reading online is vastly different than it is on paper. A few examples:

• Screens are much smaller than most pieces of paper, so they can’ ..

Recently I've been doing quite a bit of research into the potential impact of the SEC's Summary Prospectus Rule on financial firms and financial printers. While this issue is clearly top of mind for financial industry associations such as the ICI and NAVA, I was surprised to find that it was not on the radar at all for print-centric organizations such as NAPL, NPES, PRIMIR and Xplor. Then it occurred to me how concentrated the traditional offset prospectus printing business had become. A very small group of very large printers control the market, and the rest of the crowd has stopped ..