What are your aspirations as the new NIRI president and CEO?
Matt Brusch: I’ve been associated with NIRI for many years at this point and it’s incredibly important to me: a critically important community. I’m very familiar with the history of the organization and the folks who codified what it meant to do this new profession called investor relations – excellence in financial communications.
You’re using its convening power to bring folks like this together at events, create these wonderful networking opportunities, and to create standards of practice, create the credentials we now have. The responsibility is incredible and it’s a weighty one – I don’t take it lightly.
Talking high-level vision, I like that NIRI is a sort of shining city on the hill of the IR profession. We have a thriving, diverse and growing membership. NIRI is the first organization people think of when they’re thinking of IR professional development. We have this network of folks who rely on each other and want to come together at events like this. This is the world’s largest IR professional development event.
NIRI has a seat at the regulatory table in Washington, DC, at the SEC and on Capitol Hill advocating for the profession and more broadly for public companies. We’re looked to and asked for comments on relative or relevant issues for the profession.
We’re in a great place. We have an excellent board – very strategic, very engaged – and we’re currently wrapping up our 2022-2025 strategic plan, which will be a great roadmap for the future. We’re going to focus on NIRI’s important mission of elevating and advancing the profession. As Steve Jobs said, I think the best way to predict the future is to invent it. That’s what we’re planning to do.
Which lessons learned from your 30 years in IR and capital markets will you bring to the role?
MB: The recognition that IROs need each other. It can be a relatively lonely role, so recognizing that and creating connecting opportunities in innovative ways [is important]. During the pandemic, we added 20-30 events to facilitate those connections people weren’t having.
We’ve recently created an online and on-demand investor relations program. It was a paper-based, in-person provisioning program and now it’s all online, virtual. It’s the idea that IROs need lifelong learning; we need to develop that and deliver it in different learning styles. We need to ensure we’re delivering learning across this tenure spectrum to everyone from those who are brand new to those who have been in the profession for 20 plus years.
We’ve recently created an online and on-demand investor relations program. It was a paper-based, in-person provisioning program and now it’s all online, virtual. It’s the idea that IROs need lifelong learning; we need to develop that and deliver it in different learning styles. We need to ensure we’re delivering learning across this tenure spectrum to everyone from those who are brand new to those who have been in the profession for 20 plus years.
This is an extract of an article that was published in the Fall 2022 issue of IR Magazine. Click here to read the full article.
