When Mark and I founded Irwin nearly a decade ago, we had a thesis. Not a product roadmap — a thesis.
It was a simple one: the capital markets are one of the greatest systems humans have ever built, but the connection at its center — between the companies seeking capital and the people allocating it — was far more fractured than it needed to be. IROs were spending enormous amounts of time and energy trying to reach investors who were, in turn, spending their own time trying to find companies worth engaging. The intelligence existed on both sides. The willingness to connect existed on both sides. What was missing was the infrastructure to make it happen well.
That was our original mission. To seamlessly connect capital seekers with allocators.
What we didn't fully know at the time was exactly what that would look like — or what it would take to build it.
What a decade working with leading IR teams teaches you
We spent the early years focused on the corporate side of that equation. The IR team had the clearest, most immediate problem: fragmented tools, inefficient workflows, a management team spending up to 25% of its time on investor relations activity that, with the right infrastructure, shouldn't have taken nearly that long. We built for that — and we learned an enormous amount from the IR community in the process.
But we always knew that solving for the corporate side alone wasn't the whole answer.
The deeper problem was structural. Even with the best IR platform in the market, an IR team still couldn't do much about the moment on the other side of the equation: the portfolio manager sitting at their workstation, actively researching a company, building conviction — and deciding they want to reach out. That moment existed entirely outside the IR workflow. It lived in cold emails, in conference hallways, in informal networks. It was valuable when it happened, but it happened inconsistently, without context, and with no real infrastructure behind it.
That's the gap we've been working toward for a long time.
On the acquisition – and what it made possible
In 2023, we announced an official strategic partnership with FactSet, combining Irwin's IR CRM with FactSet's market data and analytics. From day one, we could see the potential for something much larger. That potential is part of why, in 2024, Irwin became a FactSet company.
I want to say something about what that meant — and what it didn't mean.
It didn't change who we are. The Irwin our clients know — the team, the approach, the commitment to the IR community — remains intact. What the acquisition gave us was something we couldn't have built independently: access to a network that sits on the other side of every conversation an IR team is trying to have. FactSet's platform is where buy-side investors — portfolio managers, research analysts at the world's leading asset managers — do their daily work. They evaluate companies, build models, form views. That network, and the trust embedded in it, is what makes the next chapter possible.
The proof is what we're announcing today.
Introducing Corporate Connect
Corporate Connect places Irwin at one of the most important moments in the investor relations cycle: the moment a buy-side investor is actively researching your company and decides they want to engage.
Here's how it works. Buy-side users on the FactSet Workstation — portfolio managers and research analysts — can now initiate a formal connection with a company's IR or management team directly from the Company Snapshot report, as well as other key areas of the research workflow. They can express interest in being kept informed about company developments, ask a question, request a meeting with IR or with management, or share feedback. When that request reaches the IR team, it arrives with rich context: the investor's profile, their publicly reported holdings, their coverage universe — everything needed to understand who is reaching out and why, before a single reply is sent.
This is the difference between a cold email and a credentialed introduction. The buy-side user gets a more formal, more effective path to engage with corporate teams. The IR team gets inbound interest from investors who are actively considering their company — with the context to respond meaningfully from the start.
It's also worth noting what Corporate Connect does for corporate access more broadly. This isn't a feature exclusively for Irwin clients. Even IR teams that don't subscribe to Irwin will receive notification when a buy-side investor reaches out, along with context about who is contacting them. It's a meaningful step toward democratizing corporate access — making the connection between investors and companies less dependent on who you know, which conference you attended, or which bank facilitated the introduction.
It's available at no additional cost — bundled into the FactSet buy-side Workstation — which matters, because the value of a network grows with participation. The easier it is for buy-side users to engage, the more signal IR teams receive. And the better IR teams respond, the more incentive investors have to use it.
The ecosystem being built
We've always described Irwin's ambition as building an ecosystem — not just software, but the connective infrastructure between the people who make capital markets work. Corporate Connect is the clearest expression yet of what that actually means in practice.
The original vision was to connect capital seekers with allocators. Corporate Connect puts that vision to work at the most valuable moment imaginable: when an investor is actively engaged with a company's story and ready to take the relationship further.
Corporate Connect is what that vision looks like when two complementary networks finally operate as one. FactSet brings decades of buy-side trust and the platform where institutional investors do their daily work. Irwin brings the IR relationships, the credibility with the corporate side, and the workflow where IR teams live. The product that emerges from that combination — a credentialed, context-rich connection between investors and IR teams — is something that required both.
This is the first step in what that connected ecosystem will become. The infrastructure is now in place — a network of corporate issuers on one side, a network of institutional investors on the other, and a trusted channel between them. Corporate Connect opens that channel. What gets built on top of it is what we're most excited about.
A note on where we are
In the letter Mark and I wrote when we announced the acquisition, we said we were committed to innovating at an accelerated pace. Corporate Connect is what that looks like in practice — a product that required the partnership to exist, delivered in just over a year of operating together as one company.
We're nearly a decade into this journey. The team is larger, the platform is deeper, and the network is now genuinely global. But what hasn't changed is the belief that started all of this — that the capital markets work better when the connection between companies and investors is clearer, faster, and more credible.
Corporate Connect is the next step toward that.
- David Whyte, Co-Founder, Irwin
