A FTSE SMALL CAP Deputy Company Secretary writes...
I have a question around RNS’s and whether anyone uses a third party purely for uploading RNS’s to the LSE. I know most listed companies will have financial PR advisors who offer the RNS posting as part of that service – but are there alternatives to this and if so, who are people using (and what are the costs involved) please?
CoSec issues almost all of our announcements via an RIS.
IR issues certain announcements using a third party (PR agency) who in turn uses an RIS.
Not a third party as such, but we use Cision which we draft announcements in ourselves as an interface. It gives you the ability to schedule and to save drafts, etc. We were paying per announcement, but we’ve taken out a subscription this year which is saving us money as we have a share buy back scheme in progress and are making daily announcements. It’s user friendly – you can import Word documents, cut and paste, etc.
Typical per use costs were £31 per disclose announcement.
We release all of our RNSs ourselves, which includes a buyback RNS most days. The actual releasing isn’t particularly time consuming.
We are a smallcap and have always used our brokers or our PR communication firm. for releasing all RNS.
Our broker plus financial PR agency are authorised to release on our behalf, so they are a back-up when Co Sec time does not permit (very infrequently). Unless you were releasing way more than the average number of announcements, I don’t see this as a big job that would be worth outsourcing, from either a time or cost perspective. It’s simply a core part of a Co Sec’s responsibility in terms of stakeholder information flow.
As with other companies responding to the question, our financial PR firm are authorised to submit announcements and we use them for all announcements. I can submit RNS announcements myself, but tend not to do so as it’s easier to email the announcements to the PR firm and get them to do it
Our Nomads post all of ours.
Our financial PR advisers upload our interim and final results announcements; other routine announcements are uploaded by the CoSec team
Our financial PR people have authority to upload, and they usually co-ordinate the prelims and interims releases. For things like changes in holdings, or director declarations, or appointments, I just do it myself.
For our full year and half year results we use our external IR/ financial PR firm to send our RNS. But for all other RNSs we do them in house through our Co-Sec team