The satisfaction gap
Here is a number that should trouble every IR technology vendor: 64% of investor relations teams say they are satisfied with their individual tools, but only 28% are satisfied with how those tools work together. That 36-point gap is not a minor grumble about user interfaces. It is a structural indictment of how the IR technology market has been built.
The consequences are measurable. Forty percent of IR teams report that their administrative burden has increased despite investing in more technology. Nine out of ten deal with daily manual work caused by disconnected systems. These are teams that bought software to save time and ended up spending more of it on data plumbing — copying information between platforms, reconciling conflicting records, and maintaining multiple systems that each tell a slightly different version of the truth.
The instinct when something does not work is to add another tool. A better CRM. A shareholder analytics dashboard. A compliance tracking module. Each purchase makes perfect sense in isolation and makes the underlying problem worse in aggregate.
Where the friction lives
The Irwin survey identified specific pain points, and they are remarkably consistent. Syncing contacts across systems: 37%. Integrating market data feeds: 37%. Tracking meetings and interactions: 32%. These are not feature gaps — they are infrastructure problems. No amount of product improvement within a single tool addresses the fundamental issue that data does not flow between them.
Consider what happens when an IR team runs a roadshow. The meeting schedule lives in one system. Contact details live in another. The CRM has its own record, which may or may not match the broker's records. Post-meeting notes go into a third system, or more often into an email thread that is never properly filed. Market data that would contextualise those meetings — share price movement, trading volumes, register changes — sits in yet another platform.
The IR professional doing the actual work becomes a human integration layer, manually stitching together information from four or five systems to produce the board report, the compliance record, or the follow-up plan. This is not a technology problem that technology, as the market currently sells it, can solve. Adding a sixth tool does not help when the issue is that the first five do not talk to each other.
The bolt-on fallacy
The IR technology market has grown by selling individual solutions to specific problems. A CRM for relationship management. An analytics platform for shareholder identification. A compliance tool for regulatory filings. A website CMS for investor content. Each product is optimised for its own use case, and each vendor has strong commercial incentives to remain the system of record for their particular domain.
The result is an ecosystem of best-of-breed tools that are collectively worse than the sum of their parts. Every new addition creates another data source to reconcile, another login to manage, another vendor relationship to maintain, and another potential point of failure in the information chain. The bolt-on model assumes that integration is a problem that can be solved after the fact, through APIs, middleware, or manual processes. The evidence from IR teams suggests otherwise.
APIs help, but they transfer the integration burden to the customer. Someone still has to build the connections, maintain them when either system updates, and troubleshoot when data stops flowing. For a two-person IR team at a mid-cap company, that is not a realistic expectation. They need systems that are integrated by design, not by afterthought.
Building on integrated data
Copia's approach starts from a different premise. Rather than building individual tools and hoping they connect, we build from the data layer up. Ticker, our regulatory data platform, provides structured access to RNS feeds, share price data, and financial information from a single, authoritative source. The investor platforms we build for clients are constructed on that foundation, not bolted onto it.
The practical difference is significant. When a company publishes an RNS announcement, it flows automatically to the investor website, the regulatory archive, and the compliance record. Share price data updates across every context where it appears. Financial results populate the platform without manual re-entry. The IR team does not need to copy data between systems because there is only one system, with one data layer, serving multiple interfaces.
This is not a theoretical advantage. For clients like Hansard, Apollo, and Climate Investment, the integrated platform eliminates entire categories of manual work. No syncing contacts between a CRM and a mailing list. No reconciling the website's financial data with the annual report. No chasing a vendor to update regulatory content that should have updated automatically.
What this means in practice
The 36-point satisfaction gap between individual tools and integration is a market signal. It tells us that IR teams have been well-served at the component level but poorly served at the system level. The next generation of IR technology will not win by building better individual features — it will win by eliminating the integration tax that currently consumes so much of an IR team's time.
For IR professionals evaluating their technology stack, the question to ask is not “does this tool do what I need?” but “does this tool make my other tools work better or worse?” If the answer is worse — if it creates another data silo, another manual workflow, another system to maintain — then the apparent solution is actually compounding the problem.
The companies that get this right spend less time on data plumbing and more time on the work that actually moves the share register: building relationships with investors, refining the equity story, and communicating with clarity and consistency. That is the promise of integrated IR infrastructure, and it is one the bolt-on model has consistently failed to deliver.