I think 2010 will be the year when buyside firms really get organized about tracking their Corporate Access services from the sellside.   There are a few trends making this likely.

• Critical mass.  After a few years of Wellington and SAC being the only guys driving this bus – there are now a sizeable number of buyside firms tracking what meetings they take so their traders can better figure out who to pay.  This further drives other firms to join the trend.
• They are getting help with new and cheaper tools.  Voting tools used to be exotic – but they are getting simpler and cheaper – and powerful meeting tracker services act as vote support systems or ersatz vote systems.   These are now being marketed by many firms which is just raising the awareness on the buyside.
• Corporate Access (and direct contact with analysts) gets ever more valuable – and guesswork is no longer a basis for buyside firms to allocate payment.

CAM is doing its part too.  We are the best way for brokers to report their meetings – by a long way.  In fact the only way to get into some of these buyside systems. Just doing our bit to help our sellside clients get paid.

I am always in awe of people who can design efficient, timely, smooth processes.  I had an opportunity recently to watch one of our clients in action and the check-in process she organized was a thing of beauty!

Her check-in process was personal, professional, quick, and seemingly error free.  The corporate event had over 700 senior level attendees, most checking in between 7:30 and 8:45.

• The planner  had 7 stations set up for checking in attendees as they arrived.
• Attendees could step up to any of the 7 stations.
• At each station was a staff person, who accessed the attendee data on a lap-top computer, using a search function to quickly located the record.
• She then checked the person off and printed their badge for them on a small Canon personal printer.
• Behind the table, an assistant passed the staff person a bag with all of the conference information, who handed it to the attendee.
• The attendee was then directed to down to a separate station where they could pick up their personal schedule for the day, and request changes to the schedule.
• Once they had their schedule, a staff person waiting by the table, provided them with directions to their first session.

Watching the efficiency of this set-up, I timed a few of the people getting in line to see how long it took them to move through the process.  Most took less than 2 minutes and the longest was 7.  When the prominently displayed LED clock in the lobby indicated the time for the first session, all of the attendees had been moved through the check-in process.  It was impressive to watch.

We work mostly in the financial sector – but we specialize in webcasting live events.   We are doing live video from a 2 days sales meeting in California this week for a big software company.   What a great way to share the presentations with the rest of their firm – without having to fly the whole firm out to CA, or lose 2 days of productivity.

This is the year that Voting Systems on the buyside are really going to accelerate in usage.

A lot of the original voting systems – Thomson Extel in particular – use a top down survey approach.  Meaning, as a PM, you vote on Bank X’s research out of 10, their Corporate Access out of 10.  You do not vote on specific meetings or ideas.  But buyside firms are finding it hard to trust this kind of vote – when their PMs are filling out the survey from memory.  They need data – and they know it.   They need to be able to run a simple league table that shows the number of meetings they have taken by bank.  Ideally weighted for meeting value.

Lots of firms will be there to provide such tools this year.  We are now live with FactSet as the first and are about to go live with themarkets.com.