Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
UK capital markets are opening up. Secondary raises face less friction, participation is broadening, and more investors can access public markets than before. For issuers, that is good news. For investor relations, it raises the bar.
Disclosure remains essential. But in a wider, faster, more global market, disclosure alone no longer determines whether investors feel confident underwriting a business. Understanding does.
Does the market understand your business? Join us on 5 February 2026, 14:00 UK time to learn why investor understanding – not just disclosure – is becoming the defining challenge for IR teams.
Wider markets change what “good IR” looks like
As participation widens, the investor base becomes more diverse by default. Alongside long-only institutions and analysts, issuers are communicating with wealth platforms, cross-border investors, and increasingly sophisticated retail participants.
These audiences share two constraints:
- They are time-poor.
- They cannot rely on one-to-one access to management for clarification.
The implication for IR is straightforward. When fewer investors hear leadership directly, more investors interpret results without context. That is where misalignment, overreaction, and narrative drift begin.
The environment around IR is shifting too
Forward-looking statements are becoming safer to make. Under the UK’s evolving capital markets framework, companies are explicitly permitted to include protected forward-looking disclosures in prospectuses.
In practice, that reduces legal risk when discussing strategy, outlook, and long-term plans – precisely the areas investors most often lack context on, and where misunderstanding tends to take hold.
The real advantage is in narrative comprehension
In this environment, IR teams are no longer competing on the robustness of an earnings report or the productivity of a single investor meeting. They are competing on whether the market actually understands the story behind the numbers.
That means answering questions investors may not ask explicitly, but still price in:
- Why did results look the way they did?
- What matters most to management over the next period?
- How is leadership thinking about risk, trade-offs, and uncertainty?
- What has changed – and what has not?
Confidence does not come from volume. It comes from coherence over time. If investors cannot explain the strategy back to someone else, they cannot underwrite it with conviction.
Yet unfortunately, most investors today are skipping to the financials. In other words, they’re not going to spend an entire evening after work reading through 70-100 pages of a report to read all the details your team has painstakingly written down.
Where traditional IR formats are increasingly falling short
Most IR tools are built for compliance and record-keeping, not comprehension.
Filings, decks, and transcripts are dense and static. They assume a level of time and attention that many investors simply do not have. Live formats like earnings calls or roadshows provide nuance, but only to a narrow audience, at a fixed moment in time.
The result is a two-tier market for context: a small group hears leadership’s thinking directly, while the majority rely on headlines, summaries, and second-hand interpretation.
Contextual communication is a competitive advantage
This is where contextual communication becomes an advantage rather than a nice-to-have.
Contextual IR does not replace formal disclosure. It complements it. After announcements are public, leadership can explain the “why” behind the numbers, set expectations clearly, and reinforce strategic priorities in plain language.
Voice matters here. Tone conveys conviction, caution, and nuance in ways written material often cannot. For instance, short, on-demand audio updates fit how modern investors actually consume information – between meetings, across time zones, on their own schedule.
How secure audio fits into modern IR
Organisations like London Stock Exchange Group have played a key role in modernising market access and participation. As expectations evolve, so does the supporting communications infrastructure.
This is why LSEG partnered with Auddy to offer issuers Auddy Campfire – an end-to-end audio solution to complement formal disclosures with secure, access-controlled, podcast-style updates.
Campfire enables leadership to deliver consistent context at scale, track engagement, and ensure the right audiences hear the right messages, without increasing disclosure risk or operational burden.
The new bar for effective investor relations
The rules are evolving. Investor participation is widening. Expectations are rising.
In modern capital markets, the most effective IR teams are not just those who inform the market, but the ones who help investors understand and remember.
