Laurie Havelock

Investor relations is uniquely positioned to become the bridge between two of the most important value drivers for investors of the past and coming decades: AI and ESG performance.

TSX-listed supply chain software company Kinaxis has brought in Victoria Hyde-Dunn as its new vice president of investor relations.

Picture a Fortune 500 CFO 45 minutes before a quarterly earnings call. The prepared remarks are tightly rehearsed. Legal has blessed every sentence. The IR team has spent four weeks stress-testing disclosures. Then Q&A begins and all that discipline evaporates. The analyst on the first question asks whether the company is seeing ‘meaningful deterioration in enterprise demand’. The CFO pauses, then answers: ‘Yes, we are seeing some deterioration in enterprise demand, particularly as customers become more cautious in this environment.’

As Europe’s finest football teams gather in North America and Mexico for the World Cup, the continent’s finest IR teams gathered instead in London at the IR Impact Think Tank - Europe 2026 to discuss the burning issues facing the profession today and share best practices.

In October 2025, a merchant sent a screenshot to his account manager. He had searched Google for Is Unzer trustworthy?, a seemingly harmless question that is likely asked about companies thousands of times every day. The answer he received was a Google AI Overview stating: 'Whether Unzer is trustworthy cannot be answered definitively, as there are conflicting experiences.'

You may have noticed I’ve mentioned the World Cup – currently taking place in the US, Canada and Mexico – a few times in recent weeks. But it’s not my fault: academic research has shown that it’s not just me distracted by the football tournament, as the market has become demonstrably less attentive while games are on.

Few forces on the markets threaten to change the day-to-day working of IROs as much as the tokenization of securities. With some exchanges already experimenting with tracking share trades on blockchain, the technology has the potential to transform ownership practices and how shareholder engagement takes place at a fundamental level.

Between the emergence of passive investment strategies, the uptake of pass-through voting and the dwindling influence of proxy advisors, investor engagement is an increasingly complex undertaking.

We spend a lot of time championing the IR profession here at IR Impact: between interviews with top executives, open discussions with practitioners and our annual awards recognizing the top performers, we think it’s crucial to highlight the hard work done by IR folk around the world.

All listed companies' communications exist under the same constraint: say enough to be understood but not so much that you over-claim. RNS rules, disclosure obligations, prospectus rules, nominated advisors (NOMADs), all of them act as guardrails against saying more than is true, which is vital.