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Instinet to Launch Corporate Access Platform, Changing Sell-Side Driven Process
Instinet Incorporated is developing Meet the Street LLC, a new corporate access platform to automate the process of matching corporate management with relevant investors through an interactive Web-based service.
“We are building an online Web-based corporate access platform for public companies that will completely automate and streamline the non-deal road show process,” said Mike Dolan, co-president of Meet the Street, a new subsidiary of Instinet Incorporated, in an interview with Advanced Trading.
The move is an attempt to bring efficiencies through technology to what traditionally has been a manual process dominated by the large bulge bracket firms whose institutional equity sales forces arrange the meetings between corporate management and their institutional customers.
Traditionally, a fundamental investor, portfolio manager or analyst may feel that sitting down with the CEO or CFO is a very important part of the process to decide if they want to buy their stock, explained Dolan. “CEOs would like to meet with the portfolio managers. The bulge-bracket spends a lot of time bringing the CEOs to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities, said Dolan. Putting these two in the same room is big money on Wall Street, “ says Dolan.
Instinet, a global provider of electronic trading and agency-only brokerage services, sees an opportunity to bring efficiencies and remove conflicts of interest with an automated electronic process. “It’s a business that has been completely ignored from a technology standpoint, whereas other businesses have seen huge efficiencies,” he added.
Similar to its historical business of building liquidity pools, Instinet is creating a liquidity pool of portfolio managers who provide the watch list of listed-companies they are interested in meeting with.
With Meet the Street, a portfolio manager would go on the platform, upload a watch list of companies they have an interest in seeing, explained Dolan. When those companies are booking a road show in a particular city, such as Boston or Los Angeles, they can send an email or instant message to the investor. Then the investor confirms that with the public company and that automatically drops into their Outlook calendar, says Dolan. “In a matter of seconds, they can have that booked and logged into their Outlook calendar. It creates huge efficiencies for the marketplace,” emphasized Dolan.
Ivy is Editor-at-Large for Advanced Trading and Wall Street & Technology. Ivy is responsible for writing in-depth feature articles, daily blogs and news articles with a focus on automated trading in the capital markets. As an industry expert, Ivy has reported on a myriad ... View Full Bio