What the Buy-Side Really Wants From Corporate Access in 2026

By Michael Roper, VP Sales, EMEA, Irwin, a FactSet company.
This article was originally published by The Investor Relations Society’s Informed magazine on August 10th 2026.

The operating assumption in investor relations (IR) has been straightforward: more outreach equals more opportunity. Book more meetings, run more roadshows, build a bigger pipeline. The logic made sense when it was access that was the constraint.  

But it isn't anymore, and that changes how IR teams should spend their time on corporate access.

At this year's IR Society Annual Conference in London, I sat down with three senior voices from the buy-side and governance community to test that idea: Alex Bibani, Senior Portfolio Manager at Allianz Global Investors; Matthew Cooke, Portfolio Manager, Active Equities at Legal & General; and Rob Hardy, an independent Corporate Governance and Stewardship Consultant. Between them they cover the investment decision, the screening that precedes it, and the stewardship lens that increasingly runs alongside both.

What they told me wasn't anecdote. It echoed what we'd just heard from 65 institutional investors managing $6.7 trillion in assets in our 2026 State of Corporate Access report: that the corporate access model many IR teams still run was built for a market that no longer exists.

The conversation confirmed it.

The Problem Isn't Getting In The Room

For Alex Bibani, Senior Portfolio Manager at Allianz Global Investors, getting a meeting was never the hard part. His benchmark, the MSCI ACWI, contains roughly 3,000 investable companies. His portfolio holds between 45 and 50. In a typical year, his team looks seriously at seven or eight genuinely new ideas.

"The pool in which we fish is absolutely enormous," he said. "We don't struggle for meetings. We don't have the time to take all of the meetings." The scarce resource isn't access. It's attention, and no amount of outreach manufactures more of it.

Matthew Cooke, Portfolio Manager, Active Equities at Legal & General, has turned that scarcity into a rule. He caps himself at two meetings a day. "If you do more than that, you don't give yourself time to adequately prepare for the meeting or to do any follow-up analysis off the back of it." Every slot filled with a poorly targeted conversation is one taken away from a consequential one.

Neither investor is an outlier. Our report found that 80% of buy-side respondents are now offered more meetings than they can realistically evaluate. The bottleneck has shifted from supply to signal.

Discovery Happens Before You Ever Make Contact

So how do these investors actually find the companies they want to meet?

Both Bibani and Cooke described rigorous screening that runs constantly in the background. Cooke screens for inflection: "Where is there a strategic change in the business, in capital allocation, in change of personnel?" A company quietly executing an unchanged strategy may not warrant a meeting for months.  

Bibani's team leans on quantitative screens run weekly across their entire universe. "We're very much focused on earnings revisions, factor biases and things like that," he explained. "If we think the company's getting earnings revisions, but that is yet to be reflected in the share price, that will flag for us."

Notice what's absent from both accounts: the IR email. This didn't surprise me.  

Our report found that independent research is the primary discovery channel for 67% of buy-side professionals, while proactive IR outreach accounts for just 15%. The IR teams winning the most valuable meetings aren't the ones doing the most outreach. They're the ones showing up where investors are already looking, with a story that fits the work already in front of the buy-side.

Download our report: The State of Corporate Access in 2026

AI Is Already In The Room — Whether IR Knows It Or Not

AI has already changed what investors do before, during and after they speak to a company, largely invisible to the IR teams on the other side of the table.

Bibani walked through his own workflow. Before a meeting, he uses Claude to build a comprehensive primer: operating segments, customer use cases, management bios, compensation structures, recent voting history.  

After the meeting, he uploads his notes and uses AI to stress-test his conclusions. "This is what I learned. Build me that investment thesis. Help me test it. Where am I wrong? What else do I need to know?" Only then does the idea go to the team, and eventually to a CFO or CEO conversation.

His advice to IR teams: make your story machine-readable. “Have your story and that documentation on your website," he said. "It's a bit like SEO ten years ago." The reports, disclosures and case studies you publish are no longer just read; they're ingested. If your equity story isn't structured to be found and understood by the tools investors now rely on, you're invisible at the very first stage of their process.

Rob Hardy, an independent Corporate Governance and Stewardship Consultant, has a different, but equally important outlook: AI is now being applied directly to proxy voting. He described his involvement with a startup using AI to analyse institutional voting policies — both the published versions and the internal ones — and learn from past voting patterns to automate decisions on routine resolutions.  

"You're going to see, for a variety of reasons, a much more fragmented proxy voting market," he warned. “For IR teams, that means the stewardship relationship can no longer be managed through a single channel or a single conversation.”

The Stewardship Angle Most IR Teams Miss

The stewardship relationship can no longer be managed through a single channel or a single conversation. It sits on what Hardy called a third axis, one that runs parallel to the investment thesis and can, at the extreme, override it entirely.  

A company can be performing well financially while sitting on a stewardship watchlist its own investment contacts know nothing about. Those flags, left unattended, can escalate all the way to divestment.

His advice was to build the relationship before you need it, not during a crisis.

"Get your chairs out on the road. You get a slightly more strategic, longer-term conversation about succession. Get your new board directors out on the road too. It's helpful for them to see what shareholders are thinking.”
‍— Rob Hardy

One caution, delivered with a smile: these investors have very long memories, in both directions. A director who cost them money in a former life will be remembered for it, and so will one who made them money.

What "Good" Actually Looks Like In The Room

The panel was unanimous about what makes a meeting genuinely valuable: senior management access and unscripted dialogue.

For Cooke, the one-on-one is fundamentally a trust exercise, a chance to learn what no presentation can convey.

"Do we trust the management? Do we believe in the direction of the business? That's the question the meeting exists to answer.”
- Matthew Cooke

Cooke was describing his own process, but he could have been speaking for the market. Our report found that 57% of investors rank access to senior management as the single biggest driver of meeting value.  

There's a critical nuance, though, one the panel surfaced and the data supports: investors distrust outreach that leads with CEO availability. When an unfamiliar IR team opens with "the CEO is available," it reads as a company reaching for a lever rather than making a genuine case. Several respondents in our study named exactly that as a red flag.

Your Mistakes Are Probably Operational, Not Strategic

The most common frustrations investors raised are operational, and most are fixable without leadership sign-off or new headcount.

Time on the buy-side is precious, so keep it simple. "CFOs and CEOs can go on a bit of a tangent sometimes," Bibani said. "Just keep it simple." And don't make investors dig for what should be in front of them. Cooke's list of irritations sounds trivial until you remember the context. "Having a link on your results to go to the LSE website when I'm reading it on the train is marginally frustrating. Having a dial-in where I've got to go through fifteen different phone numbers rather than a hosted webcast is mildly frustrating." On a morning when fifteen of his portfolio companies all report at once, the one whose information is clean, accessible and on its own website is the one that gets read.

None of this requires a strategic overhaul. Most of it is a Monday morning fix. And every one of these fixes points the same way: away from volume, toward relevance. That, in the end, is what the whole market is telling us. There has never been more corporate access, but that was never the problem.

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