Garnet Roach
Garnet Roach, an Aviva Investors Sustainability Media Awards winner, joined IR Impact in 2012. A City University journalism graduate, she previously freelanced across technology, politics, and finance, including reporting in Sana’a, Yemen. She has written for GlobalPost.com, PC Advisor, and The Big Issue.
Authored articles
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‘People aren’t robots’: How can companies support mothers in their IR teams?
How do you keep a mother in investor relations? How do you support her in a way that keeps diversity of knowledge and experience climbing the corporate ladder? This is a very difficult act to balance, with our recent article on the topic hearing from high-functioning, street facing women who hold senior positions while also raising children. And as Debbie Nathan of Debbie Nathan Associates explained, the issue of childcare is not one that men ever raise in the recruitment process: this is predominantly a female issue. So what should companies be doing to make sure that women feel they…
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IR time management: the holy grail for today’s investor relations professionals
It’s no secret that the IR workload has been expanding – even as resources fail to match pace. At the same time, market uncertainty has made the day-to-day less predictable. The result is that the modern IRO is busier than ever. This was something Erik Carlson, chief operating officer at Notified pointed to early in a recent webinar titled: Strategic time management for today’s IRO. ’If look at the challenges in the market, the rise in distrust of the media, the proliferation of content – it’s becoming harder and harder to cut through the noise, to synthesize information and do…
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The sustainability Taliban, the eco right and why we need a new language for ESG: down the rabbit hole with Robert Eccles
When Robert Eccles wrote a piece called Grift capitalism: The GOP’s brilliant strategy for ripping off ordinary Americans, it received the usual dose of online hate mail. It also led to a challenge: if you can find a conservative that thinks sustainability is good for capital markets, will you stop ‘writing nasty stuff’ about Republicans? That led him to the position he speaks from today: a liberal ex-hippy who has found common ground with the so-called ‘eco right’. Eccles, a well-known author and lecturer who has been writing about non-financial metrics since the early 1970s, had already become frustrated with…
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Mothers of IR: From babies at conferences to the metaphorical ‘sticky floors’ beneath the glass ceiling
If you were at an investor event in May 2022 alongside alternative defense firm Axon, you might have spotted a rather unusual attendee: the softest of blonde hair, pacifier in place and no socks on their feet. This was Andrea James’ third child getting a fast-track induction to IR so that James could continue breastfeeding as she worked a high-profile, Street-facing job. Today, James is finance lead at Oncocyte. But she isn’t just a CFO, nor just an IR Impact Award-winning former head of IR either. On her CV she proudly lists the position of ‘co-founder at Family Inc’. Check…
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The CFO: ‘My best advice comes from a former marine – embrace the suck,’ says Andrea James of Oncocyte
Earlier this year, Andrea James – the IR Impact Award-winning former investor relations lead at Axon – talked to us about taking a sabbatical from investor relations as she sought a new role. Having taken time to herself, then taken time think about what her next move might look like, she manifested a CFO position at a small cap. That small cap is Nasdaq-listed precision diagnostics firm Oncocyte. Here James talks to IR Impact about the skills you need to make the move from IR to CFO, what she looks for from her advisers and why stock-picking and finance appealed…
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Talking DEI under Trump 2.0: how anti-woke investors are hijacking pro-ESG proposals
What does DEI mean to you? Here at IR Impact, we’ve stopped spelling out diversity, equity and inclusion, working under the assumption that this most tricky of news items is known to all. But it seems that other interpretations exist – on the White House official X account for example, where a post was recently put out stating ‘the only DEI we support is Deport Every Illegal’. That very much sums up the kind of narrative companies are up against with today’s very public broadly anti-ESG and specifically anti-DEI rhetoric.
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Struggling for survival amid the noise: biotech webinar offers wider lessons for the IR community
While not everyone in the IR profession will be working in the environment that biotech IROs find themselves in today, everyone seemingly everywhere is battling the noise and uncertainty generated by tariff talks, geopolitical tensions and other macro headwinds. IR Impact recently sat down with Angela Bitting, senior vice president, corporate affairs at Twist Bioscience, Aron Feingold, vice president IR and corporate communications at Geron Corporation and Lynn Pieper Lewis, founder and CEO of webinar sponsor Gilmartin Group, to talk about the challenges the sector is facing. The fascinating discussion that followed is as useful to those in the broader…
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ESG: Over or in it for the long haul? IR Impact Forum takes debate to Canada
Whether ESG is over or increasingly relevant, in need of reform or greater standardization is the great debate. Has the term become too ‘woke’? Is it too much of a political hot potato? Does good ESG equate to better share price performance, or has it been hijacked under the pretense of improving returns? Prabh Banga of Aecon Group (left) and Jack Mintz from the University of Calgary (middle) debate ESG with IR Impact’s Steve Wade These were the topics up for debate when Prabh Banga, vice president of sustainability at Aecon Group and Jack Mintz, president’s fellow of the school…
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Huntington Bank names Eric Wasserstrom as IR lead and a flurry of posts open up across the profession
New names at Huntington Bank. Atos Group and Konecranes, while a flurry of posts open up across the profession. Eric Wasserstrom has been named as the new vice president, head of investor relations at Huntington National Bank, a $210 bn asset regional bank operating across 13 US states.
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Small (and a mid) caps hit big: Aecon, Calian and TransAlta take three apiece at the IR Impact Awards – Canada 2025
In an event packed with the highest achieving IR teams in Canada, it was two small-cap companies and a mid-cap firm that punched hardest, with Aecon Group, Calian Group and TransAlta Corporation each taking home three IR Impact Awards at the black-tie ceremony in Toronto last night. TransAlta took the trophy for best overall investor relations and best investor relations officer for Tamara Cook – both in the mid-cap category – as well as winning its sector award in utilities. The two small-cap companies also won some of the most prestigious awards of the night, with Aecon claiming best overall…
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Taking management on tour: What’s the sweet spot for investor meeting attendance?
‘We’re spending more time with investors without our management team,’ Naji Baydoun, director of IR at Innergex, told IR Impact editor Laurie Havelock in the Global Roadshow Report 2025. ‘Maybe at the beginning of the [2024] we were spending 10 percent of our investor engagements without management and now we’re up to about 25 percent with just the IR team,’ explained Baydoun. ‘That’s because we’ve built relationships and trust with those investors, so I’m happy about that.’ According to IR Impact’s 15th annual research report into the who, where, how and why of corporate roadshow activity, there has been a…
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How to talk tariffs: IR in the new era of uncertainty
The US economy is in ‘a period of transition,’ US President Donald Trump told Fox News on Sunday. By close of trading on Monday, the US S&P 500 had dropped almost 3 percent, with tech stocks taking a particularly heavy hit. Weeks of back and forth as Trump threatened tariffs, paused tariffs, reintroduced tariffs – and saw retaliatory levies by affected markets – finally came to a head.
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‘Without my Bloomberg screen, I have to be creative’: Five things we learned from IROs who switched from the sell side
It’s news to no one that investor relations is increasingly appealing to former sell siders. Events from the financial crisis to the introduction of Mifid II in Europe have combined with trends around the increase of passive investing and a squeeze on the sell side to drive some to look elsewhere – with many landing on IR
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‘I under-appreciated the work that went into IR’: What it’s really like to move from the sell side to investor relations
When asked for an example of a time she really leaned into her skills honed on the sell side, Bonita To, director of investor relations at First Quantum Minerals, points to a unique situation: the shutting down of one of the firm’s mines by the Panamanian government in November 2023. ‘The balance sheet became quite distressed and it was very apparent that we would need to take some action in terms of addressing our liquidity constraints – including going to the capital markets,’ she recalls.
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The CFO: The best IROs bring in ideas from all over, says Ciena’s finance chief
Gregg Lampf, head of IR at Ciena, is a familiar face at IR Impact events. He’s also a big advocate for AI for investor relations – a topic he talks about, writes about and puts to work in his day job.
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‘What we don’t need is more masculine energy’: Where ESG fits in the corporate scandal warning system
What links Wells Fargo, the largest retail bank in the US with Boeing or failed blood-analysis startup Theranos? They all offer up examples of corporate scandal that feature in Guido Palazzo’s book The Dark Pattern: The hidden dynamics of corporate scandal, co-authored with Ulrich Hoffrage. In it, Palazzo, a professor of business ethics and TEDx Talk speaker, and Hoffrage, a professor of decision theory, seek to uncover what lands huge multinational firms with multi-million-dollar fines for fraud, their senior executives at best fired or at worst jailed.
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Rather be canoeing the Mekong River than riding the corporate commute? Perhaps it’s time for an IR sabbatical
This time last year Andrea James was spending time with her young family, going to yoga twice a week and generally taking the slow approach to life. Today, she is CFO at Nasdaq-listed Oncocyte, a molecular diagnostics technology company. James explains that when she first decided to take a career break – at the time she was chief communications officer and IR head at alternative defense firm Axon – she didn’t know what she wanted to do next. ‘I needed to get out of the day-to-day of being at a rapid-growth company, in a highly visible role, to find that…
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‘I’ve seen the good and the bad from the sell side – it’s framed how I approach IR’: Inside IR at Alamos Gold
What does it take to become an award-winning IRO? Scott Parsons, a former sell-side analyst who joined the IR team at Alamos Gold in 2013, working his way up to lead the program, knows that a lot of it is hard work. But successful IR is also about honing your organizational skills, your people skills and your ability to package up the company story in a way that makes it work for investors and analysts. Here, we dive into the IR program at Alamos Gold to hear about everything from the sell-side to IR learning curve, the way ESG conversations…
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The CFO: Heads of IR should understand their company better than management, says Alamos Gold finance chief
To mark the first of the year’s CFO interviews, we headed to Toronto to talk IR with Greg Fisher, finance chief at Alamos Gold – a company that has been repeatedly recognized for its efforts in investor relations
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Personality and pandemics: What we learned from a year of talking IR with CFOs
As the year draws to a close, we look back on 12 months of The CFO column. What started with Kurt Barton of Tractor Supply Company expanded to conversations about all things IR with finance chiefs from Brazil’s NuBank to Hong Kong’s Sa Sa International, Canada’s Cineplex to Campbell’s Soup Company in the US – and many more. We discussed the benefits that good IR can deliver, about what they look for in their heads of IR, about what works in corporate access and what they liked most – and least – about their involvement in the IR program.
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The CFO: ‘Our ultimate mission is the protection of lives’, says finance chief of Japan’s Weathernews Inc
Masanori Yoshitake talks weather, climate and society, ramping up IR and taking investors from a financial return to an emotional one
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Why Brian Thompson’s killing has prompted companies to think about executive safety and corporate purpose
‘Executive security used to be something of a hard sell,’ says Iylia Lavatelli, a former close-protection security provider, now working at operational resilience firm Restrata, talking about budget as well as executive willingness playing their parts in what any security manager can achieve. That, of course, changed with the shooting of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare CEO, in New York last week. The news today is of companies scrambling to organize their security and senior profiles being removed from corporate websites – health insurance firms in particular
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Best sneaker forward: Xtep International wins big at the IR Magazine Awards – Greater China 2024
Sportswear firm took home five awards at the gala event in Hong Kong Xtep International won five trophies at the IR Magazine Awards – Greater China 2024, in a day that culminated in a diverse group of companies taking home coveted IR Magazine trophies for excellence in everything from international IR to social media, investor […]
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The CFO: Ultimate Products’ finance chief on what he’ll look for when it’s time to hire an IRO
What did you use to keen an eye on that lockdown weight gain? In many markets, the chances are it was a trusted pair of Salter bathroom scales. That’s what Chris Dent has in his home – and what sits in the homes of around 70 percent of Brits. They are just one of the 3,000 or so products designed, manufactured and distributed b London-listed Ultimate Products. In the latest installment to The CFO series, Dent talks about how an education in history helps him tell a good company story, the benefits of being able to bring out company experts…
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Would you ever put an AI-generated version of your CEO in front of investors?
Swedish tech firm Klarna has trialed doing exactly that in its latest quarterly update Do you have a hard time convincing your senior management to spend time recording remarks for your quarterly updates? I know several IROs who say they struggle to convince their CEOs, CFOs and other C-suite members to spend more than […]
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Big boost to CFO reporting lines as senior management increase IR focus
IR teams also enjoying more buy-in from other department heads, figures from IR Magazine’s Global Investor Relations Practice Report 2024 show CFOs are taking on increasing responsibility for the investor relations program, with new research showing that 75 percent of IR teams now report to the chief financial officer globally – a figure that is […]
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Thailand’s PTT Exploration and Production leads short list for IR Magazine Forum & Awards – South East Asia
Firm is up for seven awards, with winners revealed in Singapore on November 29 With nominations in seven different categories – including the much-coveted best overall investor relations and best investor relations officer segments – PTT Exploration and Production leads the pack as the short lists are revealed for the IR Magazine Forum & Awards […]
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The CFO: Gord Nelson of Cineplex on how strategy, growth and transparency can get you into the C-suite
Speaking to Gord Nelson, CFO of Cineplex, you get a real feel for why he’s so good at what he does. For him, a successful finance chief needs much more than technical skills – they need those personal qualities that really connect with investors and bring the company story to life. As we chat, Ellis Jacob, the firm’s CEO, pops in to ask Nelson a question. This is indicative of the close-knit relationship enjoyed by the company’s senior management has – perhaps because they’ve been through ups and downs, listings and market growth, near-buyouts and pandemics together
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