4 Key Components of a Must-Attend Forecasting Finance Event

Given the level of uncertainty surrounding the economy right now, finance and fintech professionals are looking for every possible advantage to guide their planning and forecasting. Markets are volatile, regulations are shifting, and emerging technologies continuously reshape the competitive landscape. 

As a finance event organizer, your role is to curate a program that delivers critical insights and showcases cutting-edge developments, thus ensuring that your event becomes a must-attend forecasting staple. 

Here’s how.

1. Vet Speakers for Reputability and Expertise

An event’s credibility hinges on the quality of its speakers. Decision-makers attend industry gatherings to hear from respected authorities, not generalists with surface-level knowledge. Unreliable information can lead to poor decision-making, and sifting through noise to find truly valuable insights is a major pain point for finance professionals.

Ensuring your speakers have verifiable expertise and industry clout enhances your event’s reputation and attracts high-value attendees. Develop a rigorous selection process to evaluate speaker credentials, industry experience, and past speaking engagements. This may include a threshold number of years in the industry, a leadership position requirement, research or publishing credentials, or academic experience.

You may need to recruit an industry expert to help you vet speakers as maintaining a pulse on the industry can require a lot of ongoing research. The person vetting speakers should ideally be able to recognize those with a strong track record of accurate forecasting and a deep understanding of the market. This person can review any material speakers have published to try and get a sense of their theories, how well they mesh with other speakers, how credible they are, and whether they have cited primary sources that could lead to other reputable speaker candidates.

Once selected, try to facilitate pre-event discussions with speakers to ensure their presentations are data-driven and actionable. 

Your speakers listing should also include voices from a mix of professional backgrounds – analysts, institutional investors, policymakers, industry journalists, and leading fintech entrepreneurs – to ensure a well-rounded perspective.

Which brings us to…

2. Host Debates that Encourage Discourse and Showcase Multiple Perspectives

Constantly shifting market factors mean that finance professionals rarely operate in a world of absolute certainties. Multiple perspectives exist on economic trends, investment strategies, and policy decisions; presenting only a single narrative limits your event’s potential impact. Attendees deserve to be exposed to conflicting viewpoints in order to make informed choices.

Structured debates elevate discourse and help attendees to understand key arguments on critical issues. How will AI impact financial policies and best practices? How will on-and-off tariffs impact the stock market? What will happen with inflation, and what is the best way to control it? Should you double down on cryptocurrency, and how might its prospects be impacted by the policies of central banks?

Having to structure insights in the form of an argument entails supplying evidence and recruiting expertise in order to substantiate any claims being made. In this way, debates equip professionals with the ability to critically evaluate market positions and refine their own forecasting models based on the force of the better argument.

The first step is to identify key industry topics where there are differing opinions and structure debates around them. Social media platforms like X (Twitter) and LinkedIn can be helpful here, as comment threads naturally invite discourse and your audience is likely using them to share articles and insights already. Trade industry podcasts and webinars are another great source, as editorial departments are constantly curating discussions around controversial issues.

When pairing thought leaders with contrasting perspectives, it’s critical to provide a structured format that ensures a balanced discussion. Set rules of conduct and discourse to keep everyone civil, and use a moderator to manage the participants and to ensure each has an opportunity to respond to arguments and contribute to thoughts as they’re being developed. Moderators who are well-versed in finance can also ensure the conversation remains insightful and grounded in data.

Lastly, be sure to include your audience. Panels and debates tend to inspire a lot of questions, and fielding them during the session lets all attendees benefit from them. Featuring both live polls and live Q&A, Stova’s mobile event app is a powerful tool for activating attendees during sessions.

3. Spotlight Visionaries and Disruptors to Stay Ahead of Industry Trends

Without early insights into potentially disruptive trends, businesses risk being caught off guard. Who better to introduce your audience to these developments than the visionary leaders driving these trends forward? 

Giving forward-thinking industry leaders a platform to unveil new ideas and solutions allows attendees to peer into the future and get a sense of which industry verticals to watch. Unfortunately, staying on top of these trends can be a fulltime job in and of itself. 

Use. Your. Network. Who is leading the most interesting discussions? What exclusive groups can you access to find out what the top execs are worried about? Can you cultivate a community that you own and can canvas for hot topics and the thought leaders speaking about them?

Once you have speakers in your sights, what’s the best way to feature them?

Create keynote sessions featuring fintech pioneers, industry disruptors, and unconventional thinkers. Host exclusive fireside chats with innovators who are reshaping financial services, whether through AI-driven trading models, decentralized finance (DeFi), or next-gen risk assessment tools.

4. Investor’s Showcase: Providing a Platform for High-Value Stakeholders

Education is not the only reason to prioritize visionaries. While knowledge-sharing is valuable, stakeholders also seek tangible opportunities to invest in the future of the industry.

Direct contact with promising fintech solutions and financial services innovators not only gives investors and venture capitalists the real-world insights that inform their investment strategies, but also connects them with material investment opportunities. By facilitating connections between these investors and startup founders, your event can become a catalyst for industry-shaping deals.

Dedicated investor pitch sessions where fintech startups present their solutions to an audience of potential backers is one way to take the standard “demo” up a notch. You could even frame the startup showcase as a contest in which a panel of investors, trade industry representatives, influencers, or media outlets can give prizes for different categories. Curated networking sessions that match high-growth companies with investors based on shared interests can be an effective way to reinforce these relationships in a less structured format. 

Your event technology should support all of these efforts. Live polling through Stova’s mobile event app and virtual event platform offers presenters or session moderators a seamless way to have the audience weigh in on an innovator’s solution or vote for their favorite during a session. Stova’s AI-powered contact recommendations efficiently connect investors with the most promising founders based on a range of predetermined criteria in order to give them the best networking ROI. And once those connections have been formed, Stova allows stakeholders to maintain contact through whatever channels they prefer: text messages, one-on-one video conferencing, or group discussions, demos and presentations. 

Conclusion

The value of a finance event is not just in its ability to bring industry leaders together, but in its capacity to provide indispensable insights that shape future strategies. By carefully curating expert speakers, fostering debate, showcasing disruptors, and facilitating investment opportunities, your event can establish itself as an essential forecasting resource for financial professionals. In an industry where timely and accurate insights can mean the difference between success and failure, making your event a staple in forecasting is a necessity.

Connect with us to find out how your event tech stack can support your event’s thought leadership. 

If you’d like to learn more about how Stova can help your stakeholders learn about and seize opportunities, book a demo now.