The Situation
This high-profile online marketplace, which today hosts the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America, has been publicly traded in the US since 2007 and recognized by the financial community for having the best tech management team—in the region and in the world. The team had consistently grown the business, innovated, and successfully delivered outsized investor returns.
However, since its IPO, the Company had substantially increased its complexity, adding new lines of business and many new features with a new set of highly competitive dynamics. Related communications challenges appeared to impede the financial community’s ability to clearly grasp Management’s vision of becoming a primarily fintech company and the Company’s true potential—many struggled to accurately value the Company. This led to their need for a Perception Study.
The senior management team, composed of former management consultants, were eager to gain a deeper understanding of the financial community’s views. The Company engaged InspIR Group to conduct an in-depth financial community Perception Study that ensured a thorough and balanced analysis by seasoned IR professionals which not only assessed the current situation and identified challenges, but which would provide actionable recommendations.
Goals: Address Communications and Valuation-Disconnects, Provide an Actionable IR Blueprint
Gleaning an understanding of the market’s perceptions of the specific drivers of valuation, growth strategy and competitive positioning, among other areas, would serve to identify and address these important disconnects, enable the Company to refine its messaging and disclosure required to demonstrate its new strategic trajectory, and could inform the Investor Relations team’s program priorities.
Delivering Powerful Feedback with Empirically Based Analysis
InspIR began with comprehensive due diligence on our client, its industry peers and the sector overall. We then worked with the Company to design a questionnaire that ensured our conversations captured potential gaps in understanding while our senior interviewers delved into the market’s views on areas of particular relevance- to fully understand key factors contributing to the shares’ discount.
Actionable Recommendations Drive Tangible Results
InspIR completed a series of high-quality, in-depth interviews—some which exceeded one hour in duration. We delivered a report that not only shared high-level assessments but provided graphically represented empirical data complemented by impactful verbatim interviews. Our findings enabled InspIR to then provide tangible recommendations based on our considerable experience and hands-on work with senior management and IR teams. The Company’s team began implementing these immediately, resulting in the decision to remap how results were presented while adding particularly relevant metrics and removing extraneous data points which today are more appropriately aligned with the Company’s evolved business. The team then recalibrated their IR program and outreach calendar to ensure they were focusing on a constituency which had an underdeveloped understanding of the Company’s investment thesis, as our Perception Study revealed.
The Company is now regarded as one of the leading fintech companies in its operational region, having effectively repositioned its business strategy.
