How we read a fintech conference agenda before deciding to cover it

We cover a limited number of events each year, and the decision about which ones is made from the published agenda long before the first session. The method is simple enough to describe, and it doubles as a guide for anyone deciding whether an event is worth their own travel budget.

Count the practitioner sessions

The single most informative ratio on an agenda is the proportion of speakers who operate something to the proportion who sell something. A payments conference where most panels are staffed by vendors is a sales environment with a stage. One where issuers, acquirers, scheme operators, regulators and corporate treasurers are speaking about their own operations is a trade event.

Both can be worth attending. Only the second reliably produces reporting.

Look for the sessions with a specific noun in the title

Session titles fall into two families. One family names a thing: a scheme, a regulation, a migration deadline, a specific corridor, a named system. The other family names a mood: transformation, the future of, unlocking, reimagining.

Agendas dominated by the second family tend to produce panels where four people agree with each other for forty minutes. Agendas with a high proportion of the first family have someone on stage who has had to make something work and can say what broke.

Check whether the regulator is in the room

Supervisory and central bank participation changes the character of an event. It draws a different audience, it constrains how loosely people speak, and it is often where genuinely new information appears: a timeline confirmed, a consultation trailed, a supervisory expectation stated more plainly in person than in writing.

Find the closed sessions

Many events run invitation-only roundtables alongside the main programme. Their subjects are a better guide to what the industry is actually worried about than the keynote track, which is programmed months earlier and optimised for ticket sales.

What we do with all of it

Our coverage of an event usually takes three forms: a preview that sets out the questions we think the agenda is actually asking, dispatches during the event on the sessions that produced something new, and an analysis piece afterwards on the theme that recurred across sessions without being on the programme.

The last of those is generally the most useful, and it is only possible with access to the floor rather than to the livestream. Organisers and sponsors who want to know how we approach accreditation can read our press and accreditation page, which sets out what we ask for and what we do not accept.