In defence of the mega-conference, and the case against it

It is close to a professional obligation in fintech to complain about the big conferences. They are expensive, the keynotes are thin, the floor is a wall of vendors, and everyone comes back tired. It is also true that the same people go back every year, and not out of habit.

Both things are true because the event is really two events sharing a venue.

The case for

It clears a market that otherwise clears badly. Financial infrastructure is sold through long, relationship-led cycles between institutions that are hard to reach cold. A large event puts the buyer, the vendor, the sponsor bank, the scheme and the investor within walking distance of each other for three days. Nothing else in the industry's calendar does that, and no amount of video calls reproduces it.

Serendipity has real economic value. The scheduled meeting produces the expected outcome. The conversation in the queue produces the partnership nobody had modelled. At sufficient density, the unplanned encounters stop being luck and start being a reliable yield, which is, precisely, what you are buying.

It compresses diligence. Seeing eleven vendors in a category in two days, in the same conditions, with the same questions, is a genuinely efficient way to build a shortlist. Doing it remotely takes a quarter.

It is where the industry calibrates. Consensus forms in rooms. Attending tells you what the industry currently believes, which is information, including when the consensus is wrong, which is more useful still.

The case against

The agenda is a revenue line. When speaking slots are bundled into sponsorship tiers, the programme stops being a curated view of what matters and becomes a reflection of who bought. This is the single most legitimate criticism of the format, and the tell is easy to spot: panels where every speaker is a vendor of the thing being discussed.

Cost per outcome is rarely measured honestly. Between passes, stands, travel, accommodation and the time of the people attending, a serious presence at a large event is a substantial line item. Very few of the teams that fund it can state what it returned, and the ones that can are usually the ones who treated it as a meetings exercise with targets rather than as marketing.

The main stage is optimised for the wrong thing. A keynote is judged on the room's reaction, which rewards confidence and narrative over specificity. The result is a lot of stage time spent on directional claims that nobody will be held to.

It crowds out the smaller events that carry more signal. Budgets are finite. A team that spends its annual event allocation on one large conference has, in practice, chosen density over depth for the year.

Fatigue is a real cost. By day three, the quality of attention in the room has collapsed. Anything scheduled late is being delivered to people who are no longer listening, which the programming rarely acknowledges.

How to hold both positions

The resolution is not to decide whether the format is good. It is to be explicit about which of the two events you are attending.

If you are there for the market (meetings, pipeline, diligence, partnerships) the large event is very likely the most efficient purchase in your calendar, and the thin keynotes are irrelevant to you. Book the meetings, set the targets, measure the result, and treat the programme as a coincidence.

If you are there for the information, the calculus is different, and the honest answer is that a regional forum or an industry utility meeting will usually serve you better for a fraction of the cost. The exceptions are the sessions with a supervisor on the panel and the closed roundtables, which is where the large events still carry information the smaller ones cannot.

What nobody should do is buy the first and grade it as the second. Most of the annual disappointment on the circuit is a category error, repeated at scale, with a lanyard.