Paolo Casamassima, CEO of the Middle East Investor Relations Association: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is Paolo Casamassima (LinkedIn), CEO of the Middle East Investor Relations Association (MEIRA). Edited excerpts from our conversation:

My name is Paolo Casamassima. I am the CEO of the Middle East Investor Relations Association, also known as MEIRA — the go-to professional body for investor relation professionals across the GCC region, with over 170 members, mainly corporates, as well as investor relation advisors.

We cater to our members across 10 different countries. We have chapters across the UAE — Abu Dhabi and Dubai — and Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, with a couple more chapters that we're looking to establish in the future.

I’m British-Italian — born in Italy, to Italian parents, but moved to the UK at the age of 21 and spent the next 18 years and most of my professional career there, until my relocation to the UAE. I've worked as an investor relations advisor across three different businesses — Orient Capital, King Worldwide, and Ipreo, which is now Standard & Poor’s — supporting publicly listed companies globally with their investor relations programs. I have also built in the UK a business called Bighous, which is a social impact business that helps homeless and vulnerable people, or people with troubled backgrounds like orphans and victims of family abuse, with housing. I manage it from Dubai.

MEIRA operates across a number of areas. First and foremost, we have a number of networking events of IR professionals across the region — the so-called chapter meetings — to allow them to learn and grow their investor relations knowledge and ultimately become better IR officers. We provide a number of tools in that respect, including an education program — a proper qualification called the certified investor relation officer program.

We run a number of paid and unpaid events alongside our partners, such as webinars and workshops, on topics that range from very generic investor relation programs to more specific courses that could focus, for example, on ESG and financial literacy. We also do sector-specific courses for IROs working in a specific sector, like telecoms, oil and gas, utilities, etc. All of these tools are aimed to equip the investor relation officer to raise the standards of investor relations, which will ultimately drive the valuation of publicly listed companies across the GCC region.

For the region, historically and until a few years ago, the investor relations figure within a publicly listed company was more of a marketing and communications figure, considered to be a person that handles queries with the media, and sometimes with investors. Only through the support of the GCC exchanges is the education towards this function growing. We are working closely with them and other regulators to be able to make sure that the investor relations function does what it is supposed to do and what it has been doing in Western countries for decades.

The IR officer is supposed to ensure stakeholders and current and prospective shareholders are informed about what is happening with a publicly listed company, and ultimately should aim to achieve fair valuation of a specific stock.

When companies go public, it’s not just a matter of creating a liquidation event for the founder and the shareholders, but that's supposed to drive the valuation of the business up and improve access to further funding, because you're ultimately aiming to find the right capital structure for the business. I would say that the challenge is that a number of corporates in the region, in comparison to [capital markets in] the Western world, still have a relatively small freefloat, which is the number of shares that are traded on the exchange, making for a very retail-focused shareholder base.

If a company has 100 shares, many companies will go for a 20-30% freefloat. That's often not enough to attract institutional investors because there will not be enough shares or enough liquidity, and the large funds want to invest big tickets. They need to come in, and at some point they'll need to come out, and there needs to be enough trading to enable that mechanism. This is one of the challenges that IR officers are facing. We’re working with market participants — the IR officers, the regulator, and the exchanges — to try to improve that.

I think that the role of the investor relations officer is changing and becoming a lot more professional and will reach the point where in five years, if we want to be ambitious, or 10 years, if we’re realistic, it will be among the top three positions alongside the CEO and the CFO. You’ll have the CFO, CEO, and the chief investor relations officer.

I spend maybe 80% of my time meeting and engaging with our members and prospective members. I am a big fan of face-to-face meetings, so I struggled a little bit when, in the last two years in London after covid, all meetings went online. When I was traveling to the region, I noticed that people here still do meet in person and they don't do online meetings very much.

There's a lot of traveling, given the fact that we cover 10 countries. We organize events on a quarterly basis across different regions. There could be a week to 10 days where I'm off on the road and I will do one country per day. When I'm in the UAE, we usually spend quite a lot of time, besides the organization of events, planning our annual conference — probably 50% of the time. I started planning for this year’s event in December last year, and I'm already planning the 2025 event right now.

This year, for the first time, we have also created a new category in our awards segment for ESG and sustainability, with a view to award and recognize the best reports and practitioners in the field of ESG and sustainability.

I start my day with a triple espresso around 5 or 6am in the morning. While I'm preparing the espresso, I'll do 30 to 50 pushups and I will then take my kids to school. It's a routine that I particularly enjoy, because sometimes I don't get to see them much throughout the day, or if I'm traveling, I don't see them at all.

There is one thing that I try not to skip every week. One of my children, Leonardo, who’s 8 years old, is very good at football, and he plays for both Juventus and Paris Saint Germain. He plays two different leagues and plays six times a week. My wife and I spend pretty much the whole day on Sunday taking him around different football pitches. I support Juventus, so the fact that he plays for Juventus is a dream, and when I go, I’m the loudest dad.

I have an agenda to organize my time, and the pages are divided into four — important, urgent; not important, urgent; important, not urgent; and not important, not urgent. I write all my tasks there usually on Sunday, and I try to complete 75% of what's on the agenda by the end of the week.

At the end of the day, I like to put the kids to sleep. I think putting the kids to sleep really changes the energy in your body and mind and makes you calmer. You need to be calm to be able to put them to sleep.

I try not to watch TV. We may watch a Netflix movie once every two weeks, but I am a big supporter of not having TVs or too much technology because it's very addictive and it has a negative impact on your children’s development and education. I prefer to listen to music.

I think the best advice I’ve gotten is that if you really want something and if you put your mind and your heart into achieving a goal, you will get there. In 2022, I started to travel to the Middle East, and one day I told my wife, I think I want to get a job in Dubai. I set a goal to get a job here, and I got a job that I couldn’t even imagine at the time. In 2020, my father was diagnosed with lymphoma, and was given six months to live, and my wife and I relocated to Italy to help him. He's still with us four years after we found an experimental chemo drug. So my advice would be to make some radical decisions, and if you really want something, it’s in your hands to get it.

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