Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The payments, banking, and financial services community is abuzz about a new event being held on June 15-17: Fintech Meetup. Unlike other virtual events, Fintech Meetup will not have any speakers or sessions. Instead, the online event will host over 15,000 double opt-in one-on-one virtual meetings for over 2,000 attendees.
To learn more about the upcoming event and the groundbreaking technology platform empowering it, PaymentsJournal sat down with Fintech Meetup Founder, Chairman, and CEO Anil Aggarwal. Aggarwal previously co-founded and ran Money20/20 with his wife, Simran Aggarwal, and served as the CEO until 2017. The couple then launched the leading e-commerce event Shoptalk, exiting in 2019 and returning to fintech events in 2021.
About Fintech Meetup
Fintech Meetup is an online meetings event that will connect the payments, banking, and financial services community to provide new opportunities and meaningful collaboration.
Networking and trading will take place in the form of 15-minute virtual meetings. Upon signing up, participants are taken through a series of workflows where they complete profiles that are shared with other attendees. The double opt-in nature of the meetings means everyone will choose the people they meet with — and the choices are impressive.
“We just hit 2,000 participants. It’s an incredible group of people. Not only is it a large number of people from about 1,000 different organizations, 34% of the people that are signed up are C-level executives, and two-thirds are VP and above,” added Aggarwal.
The 15-minute window is long enough for participants to learn more about each other’s businesses, but short enough to allow them the opportunity to explore conversations and participate in an average of 8 to 12 meetings each.
Technology made specifically for fintech
Fintech Meetup is powered by a custom platform that specifically meets the needs of the fintech industry. “Everything end-to-end that powers this entire experience is built in-house by our 30-person engineering team,” said Aggarwal. “This includes everything from ticketing and registration to filling out user profiles and enabling participants to share their contact information at the click of a button.”
“For the online experience, we’ve even built our own video interface so that we can do things like shut down the meeting after 15 minutes. We obviously give you a countdown clock…but being able to control the experience in that way adds a lot of value,” he added.
While this is the first time this technology platform is being used for the fintech industry, other versions of it were successfully deployed at Shoptalk’s retail and e-commerce industry events. Using this technology, upwards of 15,000 meetings were conducted for several thousand participants during the 2019 Shoptalk event based in Las Vegas. Classic in-person event booths were replaced with thousands of in-person meetings that fundamentally improved the event’s experience.
The technology was also used in three online Retail Meetup events in late 2020 and so far in 2021, which are similar to Fintech Meetup, but cater to the retail industry. Altogether, over 35,000 meetings took place during those events, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive. In fact, over 90% of surveyed meetings are designated as ‘satisfied’. “We think that is because they are double opt-in, based on mutual matches, based on extensive sharing of information about each person as part of their profile,” said Aggarwal.
Trailblazing technology will shape the future of events
While Fintech Meetup’s technology platform has been used at multiple virtual events since the onset of COVID-19, it will remain valuable when in-person events resume. Moving forward, “the events industry, like all industries, is going to be defined by technology,” said Aggarwal.
From the smallest of startups to large established organizations, the fintech industry today is working in ways that would have been unimaginable in decades past. Thanks to technology, fintechs are rapidly modernizing and fundamentally changing the consumer experience.
However, the events industry has not kept pace. Unlike the fintech industry, events have yet to be disrupted by technology in a major way. While some technological components are the norm for events, such as selling online tickets, conducting marketing through email, or displaying event agendas on a mobile app, there is ample room to truly embrace a technology-enabled event experience — whether that event is online or in-person.
“Some of the feedback we’ve gotten from the meetings and programs we’ve done is that they’re actually more efficient at meeting new people than even the traditional offline experience. But the other way in which technology is relevant to the events industry is really transforming the offline experience,” Aggarwal concluded.
Interested in participating in Fintech Meetup? Ticket sales end on Friday, May 28th at midnight ET, so you need to act fast. Visit the Fintech Meetup event site for more information and to lock in your tickets!