This is our second installment in our series about systems for Meeting Tracking and Meeting Compliance that will satisfy your regulators and impress your investors while adding significant business value. In this installment, we outline what information is most useful to track.
Meeting Types (Not just expert calls)
Over the past few years, insider trading concerns have driven the evolution of best practices governing expert network usage. From our observation, current best practices include systematic monitoring and documentation of expert meeting activity. Recently, we have seen firms begin to apply similar methods to other types of meetings, including corporate access and management meetings. As discussed in Part 1–Four Reasons to Track Analyst Meetings, the benefits of a systematic meeting tracking program (for all meeting types) extend beyond good compliance, and include improving the firm’s research process and expense controls.
Documentation Best Practices
Investment managers looking to implement a system for tracking meeting activity should consider documenting the following information, in line with what MosaicRM has seen as best practices.
- Date of meeting
- Type of meeting
- Meeting attendees
- Vendor arranging meeting
- Topic of meeting
- Related tickers
Compliance Oversight Information (where applicable)
- Pre-call approval date and reviewer
- Post-call review date and reviewer
- Meeting chaperones
- Compliance notes
Expert Information (where applicable)
- Expert Name and Bio
- Recently held board/employment records
Other Documentation Considerations
In addition to the best practices mentioned above, MosaicRM has observed investment managers beginning to collect additional information, to improve the compliance and business value of their meeting tracking program.
- Analyst meeting ratings
- Analyst compliance attestations
- Analyst flags to escalate any issues
- Analyst notes
- List of companies discussed
- Public company suppliers and customers (of meeting participants)
Don’t forget to try our Meetings Compliance Scorecard
If you are considering making changes to your firm’s policies for tracking analyst meetings, whether you use expert networks, corporate access, or other management meetings, we suggest you look at tracking these data fields, if you are not already. This suggestion is based on what we see as current best practices in the evolving fund management industry. In our next installment, we will discuss how you can capture this information using different techniques.
Recent Comments