3. Retail investors are educating themselves. Tey are turning to brokerage platforms, including traditional sites such as Fidelity and Charles Schwab as well as innovative options such Public. com, Robinhood, and eToro to learn as much as they can before they make an investment decision. If retail investors are taking the time to learn about the compa- nies they support, shouldn’t IR professionals have the opportunity to learn about them as well? Mark Fasken, Co-Founder and COO of Irwin, agrees. When Irwin started about six years ago, Fasken and his co-founder would meet with small-cap companies, open up the Irwin platform and show issuers their institutional holders. Tere would be zero or five institutions appearing on screen, Fasken says. Tese issuers “had little visibility into who their holders were and were really frustrated by it,” he adds. Fasken and team set out to find a way to show issuers a more holistic look at their shareholder base by taking an overlooked source of information, the non-objecting beneficial owner (NOBO) list, and “ordering, ingesting and analyzing” the list for clients. To display those reporting their holdings via 13-F forms in the same report as those who do not file with the SEC was enlightening. Ten to do so each quarter, instead of just during proxy season, offered even more transparency. In essence, the Irwin team was not creating an entirely new set of
information, but rather approaching the shareholder identification process more strategically by leveraging data that already exists. Stakeholder Labs is following a similar approach. Goldstein
explains that earlier in his career he focused on crowdfunding and the concept of “global pools of liquidity forming and shifting and trying to understand what the secret sauce is to capturing that” liquidity. Tis led him to his current role where he believes the most important part of the Stakeholder strategy is “working directly within the system that exists today and creating technological efficiencies versus trying to create new governance, new securities, and a lot of new infrastructure that might or might not be necessary.” One way to work within the current system while at the same
time garnering retail investor interest and support is through the age-old idea of a loyalty system. Tink about that coffee card you keep in your wallet for your local coffee shop. Each time you buy a latte, a stamp is placed on your card and you work your way closer to a free drink. Can’t that same concept be applied to retail investors? Stockperks believes so and is supporting both Wallbox Chargers
and Vital Farms in their investor rewards programs. Tractenberg and his team are offering discounts on their chargers, which they sell on Amazon, to shareholders who own Wallbox stock for a certain period of time.
24 SPRING 2 0 2 3 ■ IR UPDAT E
“It’s all about delivering the right message, at the right time, on the right platform and meeting the shareholder in their world. It might mean sending a text message to remind them about an upcoming investor day; it could mean a full email with a summary; it could mean a video on TikTok; but it’s really about understanding who you are trying to reach and making sure there is a level of personalization there so that an emotional connection can form between the IRO and that potential shareholder.”
Max Goldstein, Head of Marketing and Shareholder Experience, Stakeholder Labs
“It’s not about generating new content to share with the retail
audience. Instead, it’s about tailoring the same content used for your institutional base and making it more user-friendly.”
Kimberly Esterkin, Vice President of Investor Relations, ASGN Incorporated
niri.org/ irupdate
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