The perception gap
There is a question that most investor relations teams have never been asked directly: how important is retail engagement to your company's equity story? When Irwin posed a version of that question in their 2026 State of IR survey, the answers from boards and IR teams diverged more sharply than on any other topic. C-suite executives were three times more likely to rank retail engagement as a top strategic priority — 33% compared with just 10% of IR professionals.
That is not a rounding error. It is the single largest perception gap the survey identified, and it points to something more fundamental than a difference of opinion. Boards are looking at the changing composition of their share registers and concluding that retail matters. IR teams are looking at their workloads and concluding that they cannot afford to think about it.
Both are right, which is precisely why the gap is so dangerous. When 67% of executives agree that IR teams spend too much time on administrative tasks, the problem is not willingness — it is capacity. IR professionals are not ignoring retail investors out of indifference. They are buried in compliance workflows, reporting cycles, and institutional relationship management. Retail engagement sits on the list of things that matter but never become urgent, until the board asks why nothing has been done.
A structural shift
The board's instinct is backed by numbers that are difficult to dismiss. There are now 13.4 million accounts across UK DIY investment platforms, holding £572 billion in assets and growing at roughly 20% year-on-year. The 35–44 age group — peak earning years, long investment horizons — has seen participation rise from 27% to 34%.
This is not a pandemic-era anomaly that is fading. It is a structural shift in how UK equities are owned. The combination of low-cost platforms, fractional shares, and a generation comfortable managing their own portfolios has created an investor base that did not exist at scale a decade ago. These investors research companies online, follow management teams on social media, and make allocation decisions based on the information they can find — or cannot find — on a company's own channels.
For listed companies, the implication is straightforward. A growing proportion of your shareholder base is making decisions based on your public-facing communications: your website, your results presentations, your regulatory announcements. If those channels are designed exclusively for institutional analysts, you are invisible to the fastest-growing segment of the market.
The resource constraint
The companies that need retail engagement most are the ones least equipped to deliver it. Among nano and micro-cap issuers, 29% report that retail investors make up more than 41% of their shareholder base. These are companies where retail is not a nice-to-have — it is a material part of the register. Yet 79% of those same companies have IR teams of just one or two people.
A two-person IR team managing compliance, institutional meetings, board reporting, and annual report production does not have the bandwidth to build a retail engagement programme from scratch. The maths does not work, regardless of how strongly the board feels about it. What these teams need is not another initiative to manage — it is infrastructure that makes retail engagement a byproduct of work they are already doing.
This is where the conversation usually stalls. The board wants retail engagement. The IR team agrees it matters but cannot resource it. The result is inertia, punctuated by occasional bursts of activity that do not compound into anything durable.
What effective retail engagement looks like
The companies doing this well share a common approach: they make the information retail investors need accessible without creating a parallel communications workstream. That means investor platforms designed for individual shareholders, not just institutional analysts. Results presentations available on-demand, not locked behind broker portals. Regulatory announcements presented in context, with the financial data that makes them meaningful.
Community engagement matters too. Organisations like ShareSoc provide structured access to engaged individual investors who are actively researching companies. Copia's work with ShareSoc and with clients like Hansard has demonstrated that retail audiences respond to the same qualities institutional investors value: clarity, consistency, and access to management. The difference is the format and the channel, not the substance.
Live-streamed investor events, accessible archive pages, and content written without assuming the reader has a Bloomberg terminal — none of this requires a larger IR team. It requires the right platform and a communications partner that understands both the regulatory requirements and the audience.
Making it operational
The board's case for retail engagement is correct. Retail investors add register diversity, reduce dependence on a small number of institutional holders, and historically demonstrate greater loyalty through periods of volatility. A broader shareholder base is a more resilient shareholder base.
But the answer is not asking IR teams to do more with the same resources. That path leads to burnout, box-ticking, and the kind of superficial retail outreach that satisfies nobody. The answer is partnering with firms that specialise in building the infrastructure — investor platforms, content systems, event programmes — that make retail engagement operational rather than aspirational.
The perception gap between boards and IR teams will not close by itself. It will close when companies invest in the systems and partnerships that allow their existing teams to reach retail investors as a natural extension of the work they already do. The retail base is there. The growth trajectory is clear. The only question is whether your company is visible to it.