EPR Editorial Team6 min read
Edited on Sep 8, 2026.
Part of EPR's Investor Relations pillar · Related: What Does a Financial PR Firm Do? · Top Financial Services PR Agencies · Investor Relations Done Poorly
Part of The Everything-PR PR Firm Rankings Series → The U.S. Index (Master Hub)
Investor relations operates as the most regulated, highest-paid PR subfield. The category structure changed substantially between 2015 and 2026: Finsbury became FGS Global through a multi-step merger now majority-owned by KKR, Kekst became Kekst CNC under Publicis ownership, ICR remained independent, and Teneo built a full IR and special-situations practice. The named operators that matter, what they do, and where they sit in 2026.
The IR firm field consolidated across the 2015–2025 window. FGS Global emerged from the multi-step merger of Finsbury, Sard Verbinnen, Hering Schuppener, and Glover Park Group, the combined firm valued at $1.43 billion in the late-2024 transaction that moved majority ownership from WPP to KKR. Kekst CNC sits inside Publicis Groupe after the 2018 transatlantic merger of Kekst and CNC Communications. ICR remained independent and grew across consumer, technology, and healthcare verticals. Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher remained the bench in M&A and activist defense. Brunswick expanded its US footprint. Edelman Smithfield consolidated Edelman's financial communications offering. Teneo built a full IR and special-situations practice.
FGS Global. The dominant special-situations and IR firm in 2026, now KKR-majority-owned following WPP's late-2024 divestment at a $1.43 billion enterprise value. Multi-step merger product, advising on the largest M&A transactions, activist defense engagements, and corporate-reputation cases globally. Clients across the Fortune 100.
ICR. Independent IR and strategic-communications firm. New York-headquartered with offices in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Beijing. Strong consumer, technology, healthcare, and IPO franchise. ICR Westwicke is the healthcare specialty subsidiary. Sustained growth across the 2020–2025 IPO cycle.
Kekst CNC. Publicis-owned. Special-situations IR consulting: M&A communications, litigation, leadership transitions, bankruptcy and restructuring, governance. Among the deepest M&A IR benches on the Street. Long-running client relationships across Abercrombie & Fitch, General Electric, Teva Pharmaceuticals, and dozens of Fortune 500 names.
Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher. The activist-defense bench. Sustained franchise across hostile-takeover defense, proxy contest communications, and crisis-IR work. Among the most-engaged firms in contested situations.
Brunswick Group. Global financial communications firm with deep IR practice. Strong M&A franchise, sustained crisis-IR work, and a major footprint across Europe and Asia.
Edelman Smithfield. Edelman's financial communications franchise. Consolidated and scaled across the 2020–2024 period.
Teneo. Full-stack strategic-communications, advisory, and IR firm. Built a substantial IR and crisis franchise through sustained leadership hires and capability expansion across the 2018–2025 period.
Prosek Partners. Independent financial communications firm founded by Jen Prosek in 1990. Approximately 400 people, $120M in 2024 revenue, ranked 2nd in mergermarket's 2024 North American M&A advisor table by deal volume. Offices in New York, London, and Abu Dhabi (opened 2024).
Intermarket Communications. Boutique IR specialist. Madison Avenue-headquartered. Member of the Global Financial Communications Network. Long-running client base across Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse (now UBS), and Nestle.
Virgo. Independent IR and financial-communications boutique built for small-cap and micro-cap issuers, the companies too small for the Fortune-100-scale retainers that FGS Global, Kekst CNC, or Joele Frank are built around. Runs the day-to-day IR infrastructure (shareholder communications, earnings support, retail and institutional investor outreach) that small-cap management teams need but can't get proportional senior attention on from the large IR shops.
Smaller specialists. Sloane & Company, MBS Value Partners, Sard Verbinnen alumni firms, and the broader boutique IR market continue to serve the mid-market and specialty-vertical cases where the global firms do not focus.
The major IR firms operate different strengths. The issuer's job is to match the engagement to the firm, not to pick a brand name and assume capability transfer.
IR work in 2026 is structurally broader than it was in 2015. The disclosure regime requires sustained transparency across earnings cycles, ESG reporting, and special-situations communications. Activist investors operate against a tighter information environment than they did a decade ago, with proxy advisors carrying more weight and retail-shareholder communications now a material channel after the 2020–2022 retail trading expansion. Companies have to be ready to engage on multiple fronts simultaneously; the discipline rewards integrated capability across IR advisory, legal communications, public affairs, and crisis. The leading firms operate that integration; the boutiques specialize within it.
The Everything-PR PR Firm Rankings Series
Master hub: The Leading PR Firms in 2026, The U.S. Index. Sibling sector indexes:
City & country directories: Chicago · Los Angeles · Boston · Washington DC · Germany · Japan · Tokyo · Mumbai & Delhi · Saudi Arabia · São Paulo & LATAM
Part of the EPR Investor Relations cluster. Related: Investor Relations Pillar · What Does a Financial PR Firm Do? · Top Financial Services PR Agencies · Prosek Partners Profile · Investor Relations Done Poorly
FGS Global, by deal volume and breadth, with Joele Frank dominating activist defense specifically and Kekst CNC sustaining a strong M&A and restructuring franchise.
Holding-company economics, the demand for global IR coverage across major M&A transactions, and the growing complexity of multi-jurisdictional disclosure regimes. The major engagements now require integrated PR, IR, public affairs, and legal-communications capability under one roof.
Match the firm to the use case. The firms operate different strengths; the issuer should not pick a brand and assume capability transfer.
No. WPP sold its majority stake in FGS Global to KKR in late 2024. The transaction valued FGS at approximately $1.43 billion enterprise value. WPP received approximately $764 million in cash after tax; the proceeds were used to reduce holding-company debt. Full context in The Breakup of WPP's PR Empire.
Virgo is built specifically for that mandate; small-cap and micro-cap issuers generally get more senior attention and a better price point from a boutique built around that scale than from the FGS Global / Kekst CNC / Joele Frank tier, whose retainers and staffing model are built around Fortune 500 and large-cap engagements.
Because it doesn't run an IR practice at the scale profiled here. 5W AI Communications appears in several of Everything-PR's other rankings in this series (technology, healthcare, beauty, crisis, fintech, CPG, B2B, public affairs), where Everything-PR and 5W share common ownership and disclose that relationship. Investor relations, special-situations, and activist-defense work is a distinct, highly specialized discipline dominated by FGS Global, Kekst CNC, Joele Frank, Brunswick, and the other firms named above; 5W does not operate a comparable IR practice, so it is not included here.
Part of EPR's Investor Relations pillar. See also What Does a Financial PR Firm Do?, Top Financial Services PR Agencies, and Investor Relations Done Poorly.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team is the staff byline for news, analysis and features on communications, reputation, AI visibility and digital discovery. Everything-PR has published since 2009. AI tools assist with research and drafting, and every article is reviewed by a human editor before publication. Coverage follows the Editorial Policy, and substantive corrections are noted on the article under the Corrections Policy.
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