We are pleased to announce that MeetMax now includes event website templates designed by San Francisco-based designer, John Shern, Duotone Online (www.duotoneonline.com).  These new templates present a polished, professional image for your events.  Unlike competitive products that allow you to build only a limited event website, with MeetMax you can have up to 10 pages on your site, and with our easy content management tools you don’t need additional resources to keep your site up to date.  Click on the images below to take a peak the new layouts.

Next month we will be releasing the next upgrade of MeetMax CAM - with some unique features that other Roadshows scheduling systems don’t have.  Here’s a quick peek:

• An Event Calendar that can be published to the whole firm.  Let colleagues see the Calendar itself without them having to login to anything - or require an expensive username.
• Request Process for Roadshow Meetings  - again without requiring expensive usernames for salespeople and sales assistants.
• Batch reporting on Accounts – that will process activity reports on a schedule and email them to the correct salespeople or account contacts for a hundred or more accounts.  Automatically.

Greenwich Associates recently released some summary data from its 2010 survey.  For 2010 in the US – Greenwich estimates $6.4 billion in commission payments for research and corporate access and other services provided by sell side firms.  Of this – Greenwich estimates 33% is for Corporate Access, 27% for Research and the rest for Sales and Account Management. For Hedge Funds the share for corporate access is higher still at 40%.

So just over $2.1 billion for Corporate Access.  Greenwich goes even further and  divides this between Conferences ($0.9 billion) and Roadshows ($1.2 billion).  The Wall Street Transcript estimates that there are approximately 200,000 one on one meetings per calendar year at investor conferences. The Greenwich data would therefore suggest that an average value per conference meeting is about $4,500.   This is consistent with our working estimates, so its great to get some supporting data on it.   So, to be clear, on average, a 1×1 meeting is worth $4,500.

Reprising the type of investigation that got Siebel into hot water a few years ago - the WSJ reports on the SEC’s probe of a Mylan analyst/investor day at its premises.

The event was not webcast.   Foolish on Mylan’s part - and foolish on the part of their IR firm - not to webcast a meeting with analysts and investors.   Any shift in stock price, the day of a private meeting, is a prima facie basis for an SEC investigation.   Pointing to a webcast is the best possible response.   Having no webcast to point to suggests either something to hide, or negligence.

We are seeing more clients than ever looking for ways to reduce the paper used at their conferences.

How many times have you gone to a conference or a day-long seminar and carefully collected copies of all of the presentations and handouts, put them in your briefcase or tote bag, brought them home to the office and then?  They sit in a stack on your desk until you decide you need room for some new stack of information.  In paper form, the information embodied in this stack of materials is difficult to access and so its use is limited as a library of useful information.

And yet, as conference organizers we know that speakers want to bring handouts and attendees do want to bring materials home with them.  How can you reduce the amount of paper and still provide the benefit of a take-away materials?

The answer for an increasing number of MeetMax clients is the MeetMax document kiosk.  At the MeetMax document kiosk, the conference attendee selects the speakers/sessions for which he or she wants materials, and downloads the materials on to a flash drive.  The materials are indexed by session and because they are electronic, they are easily searched and easily shared with colleagues.   And, the conference organizer can pre-load sponsor materials onto the library so that all downloads include the sponsor’s information — which is a great way to extend the value of a sponsorship.

MeetMax’s speaker registration process allows presenters to upload materials — documents, powerpoints, videos.  MeetMax client support builds your document library and compiles the Document Kiosk software for you into an easy to install package.

If you happen to attend one of RBC’s conferences this month, or Needham’s or Lazard Capital Markets’, you will have a chance to see for yourself how the meeting planning teams for these conferences are using technology to make their meetings more green.  How are you greening up your conferences?

MeetMax CAM has been delivering meeting data to FactSet for over a two months now - currently to a list of 25 large buyside firms- but we are about to expand this to a greater number.  We have more than 20 banks permissioning their buyside clients to receive their meeting records in order to get better visibility and higher attribution for their corporate and analyst meetings .   This was the first of several partnerships for direct feeds.  We are also live with themarkets.com.

MeetMax’s partnership with Factset enables specific details of corporate access meetings to appear on Buyside Factset terminals.  With no distracting work for the sales people or the sales assistants - it’s automatic, accurate and weekly.

MeetMax CAM was developed to help the sellside maintain the integrity of its corporate access data. The specifics of such services provided by a sell side firm to an asset manager are critical.  Many sell side applications are simply not designed to maintain the integrity and accuracy of the data (location, date, time, participants, meeting size) of the data for reporting purposes.  This is despite the fact that corporate access meetings are incredibly valuable. In fact, once you add in meetings with analysts, they are amongst the most valuable piece of sell side firm’s service offering.

The other valuable component - written research - is already widely distributed via buyside terminals like FactSet.

To illustrate the power CAM’s distribution arrangement with FactSet:   If a Portfolio Manager met with a management at Bank A’s conference in March 2010 this will appear on the Portfolio Manager’s FactSet terminal shortly after the event.

The PM looking at the stock may then do one of several things

• Call Bank A’s analyst to get a current read on the stock
• Call Bank A  to find out when management is in NYC any time soon
• Call Bank A to place an order to buy the stock

Applications where this will appear in FactSet include a stock price chart and the company events page (this shows events for that stock in the last 6 months such as analyst days).

FactSet is a great partner for us as it is used by the buy side as a workbench. A PM is likely to get into his office and spend the next 12 hours in FactSet.  And constant exposure to corporate access meetings provided will only increase awareness for the banks providing them, improve their vote scores, and increase their revenues.

Corporate Access reports are becoming a staple of Investment Banking presentations to Corporates.  The problem for Bankers in many sell side firms  - is that generating these reports is much harder than it should be.

The Wall Street Transcript’s corporate access software has been designed to maintain the details and accuracy of the data set generated by a sell side Corporate Access business. MeetMax CAM generates clear and accurate reports of what management meeting took place, where, when and the buy side attendees.  These reports are then used for direct discussions with buy side firms about services and compensation.

What is less often discussed, is the considerable value of Corporate Access reporting for the investment banking side of the business. MeetMax CAM generates the most detailed reports available for each Corporate of which buy side firms the Corporate has met with, when, and where. This can be of great value to a banker in his dialogue with the issuer as part of the day-to-day relationship management. In banking, relationship management is critical as the deals are infrequent but very profitable - and it is vital that the bank demonstrate support of the Corporate between deals.

While the role of the Corporate Broker is well established in the UK, it does not have an exact counterpart in

• Advising Corporates on fund raising (e.g. new issues of shares).
• Helping generate interest among investors for the company’s securities.
• Making a market in the stock.

The global settlement of 2003 between the SEC, NASD and NYSE placed strong constraints on using research to provide Service #2 above.  Corporate Access is not subject to these constraints - and is a vital part of Service #2, that is needed to get to Service #1.

We are seeing increasingly that Investment Bankers include Corporate Access reports in their presentation materials for Corporate meetings. MeetMax CAM makes that quick, easy and accurate.

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.

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.