Mark Loehr (OpenExchange CEO): What exactly are we reimagining? It’s the beginning, middle, and end of the earnings call, and the entire earnings announcement cycle:

• At the beginning of the call, we simplify the registration and check-in process, put more relevant information in front of investors, and give more real-time transparency to the management team.
• During the call, we offer more technologies to join the call, provide options to present to a global audience, and offer live transcription for the multi-taskers of the world.
• And at the end of the presentation, we provide management with a private zone of communication to better choreograph the all-important Q&A process and provide the option for analysts to join by video.

All of this results in better delivery by management, better reception by analysts and investors, and better data to inform future communications.

Emilia Tapsall (Chief Delivery Officer): OE Passport for Earnings is your company’s branded microsite. Its registration system uses preset controls to automatically customize the experience for different participants, whether they are a presenting executive, the IR team, an analyst, an institutional investor, or an individual investor.

Here are a few examples:

• Let’s say I’m Jill Doe from Citi. I can register as a sell-side coverage analyst, and OE Passport automatically allocates me to a different connection type to what the public webcast is going to. The welcome page is branded specifically to the company. One click brings me to a Zoom webinar, where I can view the presentation and participate in the live Q&A.
• Let’s now say I’m an individual investor. When I register this way, OE Passport authenticates me and sends me to a different direction: to a live stream where I can watch the presentation, see the slides, hear the speakers, and I can look through all of the other assets while watching this public webcast.

Within the OE Passport for Earnings Site, you can see many more tabs available. For example, many of our clients really like having post-earnings callbacks available on the same passport site for analysts and investors. It can enable scheduling for one-on-one meetings, or it can house those one-on-one meetings that happen two or three hours after your earnings call is completed. Other clients also like including different investor assets in this passport tab – previous earnings calls, transcriptions, annual meetings, investor days, conferences, non-deal road shows, and the like. And this site also has a speakers tab. All of these tabs are optional, and customizable to the particular preferences of the investor relations team.

There are several reasons this is a better, more efficient system for presenting the entire earnings cycle:

• It speeds up the process for the entry to the meeting by simplifying how analysts join: instead of it taking 30 seconds to get in to start watching the webcast and the webinar. It’s automatic, it flows right through.
• It removes the need for human operators to take attendance, since analysts enter their own first name, last name, firm and affiliation, and that automatically flows through to the detailed analytics, making much cleaner data.
• It makes your life as an IRO easier. You don’t have to deal with a dial-in plus the international toll-free, plus the unique code plus the webcast. You have one link for everything.

OE Passport for Earnings makes the whole experience of sorting all the participants in an earnings call into configurations that are appropriate to their role: executives are in their room, analysts are set up for Q&A, and individual investors are teed up to watch the webcast passively. Management has much more transparency. As a meeting’s getting underway, you know: Who’s on? Are they ready to go? Who’s teed up to ask a question? This leads to more reliability, fewer chances for connectivity issues, and a much higher probability of an on-time, perfectly orchestrated earnings call.

There are significant advantages to using a Zoom webinar format versus a traditional telephone conference call. It simplifies delivery for live and pre-recorded remarks. It improves the audio quality dramatically. And it offers the chance to leverage all of the new and often-overlooked features built into the platform. One of the best of these is called “Backstage”.

Backstage is a feature enabled in a Zoom webinar where management and important team members can be in a green room listening and watching the webcast, but not interfering with the live webinar presentation. For example, a couple of days ago my team and I were in the Backstage listening to Mark present in a webinar. I can toggle the audio on and off, so I can hear what he’s saying, while I also talk to my team behind the scenes, without impacting the live event. If I need to go onto the Main Stage, it’s a simple click of a button and I’m presenting to the entire audience.

Mark Loehr: Backstage is a game-changer in our view. We recognize that many companies are going to be in a conference room with the three or four main speakers, but this will also allow you to have general counsel and some of your marketing people in that call with you actively participating from remote locations, rather than having to send text messages about how things are going.

Emilia Tapsall: One of the important things that the investor relations team cares about is prioritizing the questions that come in. That’s where we have a platform called OE Podium, which is a standard feature of OE Passport for Earnings.

What you most care about is who has joined the interactive meeting, who has raised their hand to answer a question, and how to prioritize that queue. Once someone has raised their hand, their name shows up on a prioritize list, and an IRO or coordinator can move an analyst up and down in a queue. Once their question has been answered, it’s marked as “answered” and the next questioner is up.

You can push slides from this backend portal as well.

I think that the main thing that I’d like to leave everyone with is this is not a new invention. This is the same delivery platform that all three attendees that occur in these expert events are using for all of the other events across an investor cycle. Your buy-side investors, your sell-side analysts and your management team are attending events hosted on OE Passport every day. As experts, we recognize that the last holdout to adopting these modern communications technologies has been the earnings call. It is not yet standard for earnings, and why not? It should be.

Mark Loehr: We’ve been using these features with select clients over the last six months, and the response has been uniformly positive with many saying they’re not going to go back to the previous methods.

Tanya Thomas (Chief Growth Officer): But in the beginning, our clients were so locked into the status quo that I wasn’t actually sure how long it was going to take to get this conversation going in the market. It was clear that this changing earnings landscape would be a process of transformation rather than just an out of the box upgrade.

We began exactly where our clients were, and then we added features bit by bit to improve their earnings experience. The speed and feature set has really varied, so each transition has become bespoke to that particular customer. For most though, the primary step has been from telephony to web-based audio. But we’ve also had customers start by adding enhancements to their classic conference call earnings, and that’s kickstarted their interest for re-imagined calls.

We all know that IROs want to present the business optimally, of course, but they’re also nervous of change. That explains why we see companies ease their way into some of these enhancements. In general terms, they tell us they’re really glad they went forward, that they believe the company was well represented in this way. And, interestingly, that the transparency of video seems to help close the gap between management and analysts, which is creating more trust, which is obviously beneficial for both groups and the company.

We’ve also had feedback around how the style and essence of the presentation better reflected the message of the company’s forward plans and forecasts. And when you think about it, this may well be the only chance for your audience to watch your management team working together. And aside from the content that they’re busy delivering, their connectivity and chemistry will speak volumes for their effectiveness as a team. And that’s something that we’re seeing IROs really feel the benefit of.

Now, we’re seeing companies extend these tools into other aspects of their communication cycle with callbacks and conferences, NDRs and IR days, using OpenExchange as their primary technology partner. So, earnings calls is actually a very natural extension, capturing the whole earnings cycle in the same engaging, high quality and safe virtual environment.

It’s really exciting times.

Mark Loehr: So, let’s recap: what are we re-imagining?

• The beginning: proper hospitality, smartly directing the participants to their seats.
• The middle: separation of user experience simplifies the run-of-show and improves reliability.
• And the end: a Q&A module that is both familiar and enhanced.

It’s important to note that these features can be added as modules to your existing process or as a full package. And price? It turns out that some of these smart features reduce the cost of the event because there are fewer audio operators or bridging video specialists that we need. And so, many of these newer packages are coming in at a lower price than a full audio operator assisted event.