I worked for many years in Investor Relations at one of the biggest banking groups in Africa. I remember when I started everything was very manual and very little had been automated. In all fairness, ‘automating the function’ only became sexy circa 2017.
However, even before this time, our frustrations with everyday manual processes were driving us crazy. It didn’t take long before our IR website developer had started to create a system that took away some of these pain points.
I think it more likely he was taking away his own pain points too! As we all know, big corporates want everything ‘done now’ and can be decidedly demanding. So, over the years, we shared our annoyance with the current manual processes and he continued to develop solutions for a software platform called The Vault.
He started by cleaning up our database – we all think we have an impressive database but what about all those bounce backs we receive? We now knew who truly wanted our communications, and interested parties could also subscribe to receive communications alerts via our website. Another feature is to sign up to receive alerts and communications from other companies you are interested in.
The Vault then has various automation functions, like uploading of SENS announcements straight from a stock exchange feed, instead of waiting hours for the in-house marketing or external team to load it on the site (because they have other jobs you know😉). You can upload beneficial registers, have access to fund manager details, log meeting notes and more. With the Vault’s seamless website integration, you can also easily upload documents and reports to your website within minutes.
The Vault also has an event invitation and RSVP function. I’ve seen some of the invoices from external vendors for this purpose and just… Wow… those prices! This can now easily be run by you or anyone in your team and no need for external marketing or events teams. I guess that’s part of the beauty of this software, it really is user-friendly and intuitive.
This is the SaaS for all your investor relations needs. Let’s be fair, all us ‘future-prepping’ professionals want to be in control of certain processes, if at all possible, and need help in eliminating repetitive tasks as well as improving governance and data management.
So, all in all? Good for the marketing team, the web developer and certainly good for the future-proof professional.