Scaling a flagship fintech event
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What
Fintech Meetup is a NYC-based events group organizing its third flagship annual event, Fintech Meetup, in Las Vegas on March 3-6, 2024 at The Venetian.
Fintech Meetup centers its programming around its core meetings technology; the anticipated 5,000 attendees in 2024 will participate in more than 45,000 meetings, in addition to 1,000 peer-moderated “table talks” and over 100 co-located events.
In news first announced by The FR, Fintech Meetup and Fintech Nexus recently agreed to a commercial arrangement in which Fintech Nexus discontinues its spring event and transfers its sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees to Fintech Meetup. In turn, Fintech Nexus will pivot its focus to content publishing.
Why
According to Jon Lear, Co-Founder & President of Fintech Meetup, current market conditions have encouraged Fintech Meetup’s organizing team to double down on their meetings focus and target core players in financial services.
Fintechs are presently dealing with constrained marketing budgets, which have forced them to more intentionally gauge the ROI of events they attend. Attendees of Fintech Meetup said 92% of their meetings were valuable, Lear said, leading to partnerships, contracts, investment, recruitment, and other meaningful engagement among fintech players.
“That's the kind of result that the industry has been really looking for across the last five years,” Lear said. “And that's what we're focused on delivering.”
Lear said Fintech Meetup’s commercial agreement with Fintech Nexus also highlights the ways content creators and event organizers can help serve the fintech industry in different ways. While Fintech Nexus made the decision to double down on its content creation, Fintech Meetup has decided to invest in a once-a-year event that emphasizes face-to-face meetings over ongoing content creation. What’s more, Fintech Meetup makes up for its reduced content by emphasizing the seniority of panelists and the relevance of the topics discussed.
“It's a real kind of back-to-basics approach,” Lear said.
How
Key to Fintech Meetup’s strategy is its meetings tech, which will handle tens of thousands more meetings than it did in 2023—given that the conference is scaling from 3,000 to 5,000 attendees this year. Emphasizing meetings addresses a major market need, optimizes ROI, and also minimizes the number of attendees who attend the event without registering for it.
Fintech Meetup will now offer its meetings tech to host co-located events, letting event organizers leverage the conference’s technology to optimize how attendees gather in spaces hosted by partners and fintech players during the conference.
Event organizers have also leveraged current market conditions to make Fintech Meetup relevant to a larger swath of companies. To entice credit unions and banks to attend the event—and survive in the long run through meaningful partnerships with fintechs—Fintech Meetup will give out more than $3M in travel reimbursements and free tickets to these financial institutions on the condition that they attend a specified number of meetings.
“Historically you go to a bank event and it’s bankers talking to bankers, and you go to a fintech event and it’s fintechers talking to fintechers,” Lear said. “We’re solving that with the hosted program,” while also addressing current economic needs and responding to new economic realities.
