Fintech Conference Strategy: How to Turn Visibility into Business Value

With the autumn conference season underway, many teams are asking themselves how to get the most value from an event. They may have built visibility through media coverage or awards they received. Yet, when real clients and investors ask in-person questions about their product, they usually struggle to find the right words on the spot and speak confidently without relying on pre-prepared speeches.

Often, founders assume that a bigger presence should naturally produce better results. That means the larger their booth, the more investment and leads they will get. However, in practice, events rarely work this way. Even if a company holds dozens of meetings at the venue, it may still leave without securing any proper partnership.

Alina Sysoeva, Head of PR at Drofa Comms, believes that an event’s outcome is actually shaped long before the booth is assembled. Visibility and credibility cannot be shaped in just a few days before the conference. So, below, we share her insights on this topic, based on years of experience advising companies in fintech and financial services.

To get the most out of a fintech conference, companies need to identify the right stakeholders, prepare their representatives for possible discussions and prioritise opportunities that support their business goals. Success depends on the quality of meetings, messages and follow-up opportunities regardless of the size of a company’s presence at the event.

How to Define the Target Audience

Any event strategy is unlikely to deliver meaningful results unless the company decides in advance who exactly it needs to reach. Simply trying to talk to as many investors and potential clients as possible is not the best approach. This is especially true given the extreme competition for attention at every event.

For example, Money20/20 USA, one of the largest fintech gatherings taking place this October, expects more than 11,000 attendees and hundreds of speakers. Each of them will strive to grab attention. Consequently, without choosing a core audience, it’s difficult to stand out among the literal thousands of other participants.

At the same time, though, it may be challenging to figure out who exactly the company needs to reach. For better clarity, it generally helps to divide stakeholders into two groups:

• The current audience: the clients and partners a firm already works with. Conversations with them produce market insights, strengthen partnerships or even make new ones within its existing presence.
• The future audience: the stakeholders a business wants to reach over the next few years. This group defines what business development efforts should be made.

In both cases, a company needs to understand what each group currently knows about it. Do they understand the product? The way an organisation positions itself? The gap between current perception and the desired one? This is what shapes the key messages of every meeting the company is going to hold. 

Despite its value, many teams are still chasing lead generation as their primary goal instead of adopting an audience-centric approach. However, this also gives a head start to businesses that do decide to use it.

Sometimes, running such an analysis can even reveal that a company has chosen the wrong event altogether. This is also a valuable finding. It helps save budget and leaves more time to prepare for another conference that would better suit that firm’s goals.

How to Prepare for a Fintech Conference

To prepare for a fintech conference, companies should train their representatives to answer difficult questions and explain their products confidently. They should also prepare a speaking handbook with key messages and supporting facts. Finally, companies need to prioritise speaking engagements, media interviews and informal networking.

Once the audience and the message are defined, the next step is to decide who exactly will carry that message as the key representatives at the event. In fintech, this is usually a member of the leadership team, such as the CEO, CLO, CMO or Head of Product. People who run the business and know the most important ins and outs. 

But regardless of their position, speakers need preparation, which should begin with media training. It usually consists of three core stages.

Preparing to talk live

Most founders know the basic rules of working with journalists but may lack experience in defending their position under pressure or presenting their product briefly. For this reason, it is useful to structure training sessions as mock interviews with journalists who ask unexpected questions — much like a real reporter would. After going through such exercises, a founder will have a better understanding of which ideas to promote and what is best to leave aside.

Writing a speaking handbook

The founder should have a prepared list of key company messages. They should also have short answers and supporting facts for them to use during panels and interviews. Since at almost every conference hundreds of speakers compete for the attention of dozens of media outlets and analysts, journalists are more likely to quote the speaker who gives them a short, clear answer.

That said, those should not be just generic answers which are suitable for every product. The key messages should focus on what genuinely sets the company apart from its competitors. In other words, what makes it worth remembering.

Prioritising meetings

Companies often try to fill every available hour of the founder’s schedule with meetings. Still, a more effective approach is to focus on the activities that have the greatest effect:

1. Speaking on stage, where a single presentation reaches a large, relevant audience and invites direct questions about the product.
2. Priority media, with main focus given to interviews with outlets that matter most to target stakeholders.
3. Unscheduled time for informal conversations, where many of the most valuable relationships often begin.

The ultimate goal is to make each conversation worth the founder’s time. It is also to ensure that they have all the answers and practice needed to make the most of the opportunities.

Why Overexposure at Events Hurts Credibility

Another point that people tend to miss is that a company does not actually need to be everywhere or speak on every topic. Major events certainly create strong pressure to do so, but this pressure only works against the companies that give in to it.

This happens because the point of being visible simply gets lost in the surrounding noise when hundreds of participants all comment on partnerships and give interviews. The audience at these events has its own goals and tries to find the businesses that fit them best. When people see that a founder comments on every topic, from the technical details of DeFi protocols to the state of physical gold trading, they may decide to look for a more specialised company.

It is hard for speakers to stand out among their competitors. Just as challenging it is for attendees to make the right choice when they face the sheer volume of companies present at these venues. More than a third of people attending conferences agreed that there was much more thought leadership than they could keep up with. At the same time, three in four participants said that the information they consumed rarely offered valuable insight.

To make sure that their message is not missed, founders need to choose several topics they know deeply. They also should be those on which they have a strong, specific point of view that would leave a lasting impression.

Conclusion

When a conference ends, teams try to understand what exactly they have gained from attending. This is often very difficult to measure because trust and reputation are built through months and even years of consistent work, so it takes more than a single event to bring results.

Even so, to answer this question, it helps to use the same three-stage logic as before attending. If the team defines its stakeholders in advance, it can gauge whether it has successfully reached them. Whether they gained new contacts or secured follow-up meetings about possible partnerships or investments.

These results become clearer over the following weeks and months, so post-event follow-ups deserve as much attention as the meeting schedule itself did.

FAQ