About FinanceTalking

FinanceTalking was founded in 2000 by Miranda Lane with a view to providing the best financially orientated training to the corporate communications world. We design and teach highly relevant, practical courses for both our open access training program and for companies in-house. Our assignments range from graduate training programs through to helping large in-house media relations, investor relations and internal communications departments and IR training for new board directors. Our clients range from multinationals listed on a number of stock exchanges globally, to small caps and companies intending to list. We are headquartered in the UK, but teach regularly in the USA, Middle East and continental Europe. We also have tutors based in Australia, CIS countries and South Africa. Our course materials are designed to appeal to all learning styles. We use color-coded visuals, hands on games, quizzes and role play to ensure that learning can be transferred successfully to the work place.

Companies whose shares are traded publicly must communicate on an on-going basis with the investment community, partly to comply with regulatory obligations and partly in recognition of the fact that information is a pre-requisite for an investment decision. “Investor Relations” describes the activities that a company will undertake to build and maintain relationships with shareholders and potential shareholders, including developing relationships with intermediaries such as sell-side analysts. “Financial PR” is usually the term that refers to financial communications consultancy – advice to companies on how best to handle communication with investors, analysts and the financial media. The service varies from country to country depending on other available advisory services (for example, in the UK, financial PR tends to exclude direct investor relations, which is handled in-house with help from a company’s “corporate broker”. We will use the term “financial communications” to describe how a company engages with financial audiences, including: 

• Investor relations 

• Relations with sell-side analysts 

• Relations with ratings agencies and credit analysts 

• Financial media relations. 

This briefing paper offers and introduction to these areas, without touching on other PR activities that complement financial communications such as reputation management, corporate PR and product PR