A time to speak and time to remain silent

Transparency has become a vastly over-used word in the City but there can be no doubt that the sheer volume of information and data now available at the touch of a button has helped concentrate the minds of everyone in the financial world on just how open and helpful they can be to those who follow and comment upon them.

How open should a company be? Most good communicators would argue for maximum openness and disclosure of information. However, the rules and regulations make true openness both difficult and dangerous. In addition, there is a danger of creating an impression of naivety and of satiating the audience’s appetite for more ‘news’ about a company.

How does it fit in with other areas of public relations?

As already discussed, corporate and financial relations interlink to the extent of often being indistinguishable. A company’s corporate reputation and that of its management is the fundamental foundation upon which financial public relations is built up.

In the same way, the quality and reputation of a company’s services and products cannot be isolated from its corporate image and the way it is seen by its financial audiences. Financial public relations can, therefore, not be totally separated from the consumer and business-to-business public relations carried out by any company. The relative strength of a company’s corporate brand, and the individual brands of its operating companies and products, depends on the type and strategic approach of a company. However, it is always a dangerous signal to any corporate and financial public relations operator when a subsidiary brand’s or product’s image dominates a company’s corporate image among the key financial audiences.

Political and governmental affairs activity has also to be closely coordinated with financial public relations activity. All business and commercial industries are in some way affected by government, whether national, international or local. A company’s public affairs activities often have a major effect on a company’s financial stability and success, particularly as most governmental involvement with business involves taxation or much more rarely, subsidy.

In addition, the privatization of so many government-owned industries around the world has also created a powerful new set of pseudo-government figures known as the regulators. A regulated company’s relationship with its regulator is the subject for a book in its own right.

Financial public relations probably differs less across international boundaries than most other branches of the communications industry: financial activity is not particularly affected by cultural differences. The greatest international diversity is in the area of regulation, governmental intervention and state interference. As a result, although many companies are quoted on two or more stock exchanges around the world, every company still has a home base and a home stock market. However, each market has its own rules and regulations, and coordinating the financial public relations activity in different markets is a growing part of the job.