Financial printers bring many things to the table that commercial printers do not. First, their expertise in producing complex financial documents. Second, financial printers maintain extensive typesetting and proofreading staffs and work 24 hours a day allowing massive changes to be turned around in much less time than commercial printers can achieve. Third, financial printers are set up to produce finished products on schedules that would drive a commercial printer to drink.

Traditionally, financial printing consisted of the production of the legal and financial reports all "public⁽¹⁾" corporations and companies are required to (a) furnish to their current and prospective stockholders and (b) file with government agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Originally, that involved typesetting and printing, through use of hot lead, the tens or hundreds of pages each document contained. When a page changed, that would affect the entire layout of the document slowing down the process and requiring the financial printer to request significant amounts of lead time.

Today, state-of-the-art computer systems have replaced hot metal type with the result that changes can be made instantly throughout complicated documents. The typesetting systems used by financial printers are extremely sophisticated computer programs with features that simplify the creation of complex financial tables often seen in Prospectuses, Annual Reports and regulatory filings. They are also designed so that many different typesetters can be working on the same document at once to speed the process.

The result of all this technology is the dramatically reduced time it takes to create and modify these financial documents allowing companies to take advantage of narrow windows of opportunity in the stock market.

(1)A public corporation is one that sells its shares to the general public. Usually, the stock of public corporations