About
Established in 2014, Fintech Circle is Europe’s first angel investor network focused purely on fintech startups, education, and training. They run a multifacet business that offers distinct solutions in the fintech community.
The first arm of the business is its angel network. They have invested in almost 25 fintech startups they closely coach and help in pitching to their angel investors. Most of those startups are now up-scales.
The second arm is their acceleration programs, where they work with the internal teams of global banks, wealth managers, insurance firms, and other financial businesses and offer external acceleration to develop new services faster with the most cutting-edge technologies in the market, assisting them with digital transformation.
The third arm of the business is their fintech ecosystem which involves their community of social media followers, startups, scale-ups, tech leaders, fintech visionaries, key industry partners, and other members who engage through their content mediums such as Fintech News, Insights, and events.
The fourth arm of the business is their education programs via face-to-face and online fintech courses, including webinars, covering topics such as fintech foundations, enterprise innovation and digital transformation, wealthtech, insurtech, regtech, legaltech and paytech.
The final arm of the business is their bestselling fintech book series. These are outsourced guidebooks, include The FINTECH Book, The WEALTHTECH Book, The INSURTECH Book, The PAYTECH Book, The AI Book, and The LEGALTECH Book
The Event
The books are crowdsourced, and they have about 70 to 100 authors who contribute to each chapter of an individual book. The contributions are then rearranged as per knowledge and experience to turn into a guidebook. Before the pandemic, all the authors would be brought together for a book signing event, typically in London for an in-person launch event.
“Since that hasn’t been possible for the past year (referring to the pandemic restrictions), we were looking for a platform that would allow them to showcase as many authors as possible through panels, exhibitions, branding,” said James Hodgson, Head of Programmes & Partnerships at Fintech Circle.
They have used Airmeet for two of their book launches thus far. The event was divided across seven live sessions with a 4-panel speaker format. All the speakers were co-authors of the book. They had different booths set up for their event partners.
At their in-person book launch events, they usually had around 100 to 150 attendees. But for their book launch event on Airmeet, they attracted a staggering 700 attendees from around the world!
Challenges (And Solutions)
Challenge: Networking: Finding a platform that would allow them to showcase multiple authors for the book launch and engage a large audience as a community
A key factor of these launch events was networking. The attendees included interested readers, colleagues of the authors, partners, sponsors, and other financial community members. Explaining the nature of the event, Mr James said, “In fintech and legaltech industries, relationships are really important. When we do such launch events, not just the authors, but the colleagues of the authors, and the readers of the books need to interact, engage in a discussion, as it means a lot to people.”
As mentioned earlier, this was their second event on Airmeet. The first launch event they did was for their AI book, which was without much preparation and practice. They still had 300 attendees and were very pleased with the experience.
This time, for the LEGALTECH book they had prepared thoroughly and planned to make the best of all the Airmeet features. Here’s how the different Airmeet features helped achieve their community engagement goals.
Social Lounge & Announcements: James mentioned, “We learned from our first event that having social tables but without any themes wasn’t helpful. A lot of platforms have the social tables feature but what really sets Airmeet apart is that you can theme them and title them, which was the one thing that we really tried to promote.”
They asked their partners to take a networking break or host a networking table. So if they had a partner who was promoting a particular service to help startups scale their business, they themed a table accordingly and used the ‘announcements’ feature to send automated alerts to all the attendees asking to join that table if interested. They immediately got a dozen people joining that networking table and hosting sessions. All attendees were active and frequently jumped in and out of different tables.
Text Chat and Q&A: “The chat and Q&A functions were very busy. There were lots of good questions coming in, and we always ran out of time to answer them,” said James, emphasising the fact that almost all attendees were actively chatting and wanted to ask questions. These features were a huge help as most attendees didn’t prefer coming live on video. The questions catalysed many deep and intriguing discussions among the panel of speakers.
The Emojis: The attendees did not fail to express their joy, curiosity, and gratitude through emojis during live sessions. The constant emoji responses proved that the event delivered what it promised.
Video Quality: James also added, “We have never had issues with video speed. We had three people speaking from different continents, but it was like they were speaking from the same room.”
Challenge: Promote the Book Launch with strict brand guidelines while delivering value to our sponsors & partners
The Fintech Circle team wanted to promote the LEGALTech book as a brand while creating awareness about the budding legaltech sector among the existing network, which could prove helpful for the sponsoring partners.
“Each fintech book follows its unique brand guidelines. Each book follows a unique colour scheme, so it’s quite easy to spot each of the books,” said James, explaining how crucial it was for them to maintain a consistent theme across the event for promoting the LEGALTECH book.
Most of the companies attending the event worked in both the fintech and legaltech sectors or were interested to potentially pivot to the legaltech space from the fintech sector. Hence, they wanted to send out a clear message that legaltech is the next fintech and an important field to consider, potentially creating an audience for the book and the partners.
And here’s why there were glad they chose Airmeet to tackle these challenges-
Event personalization: “The personalisation features on Airmeet were really helpful here. We could create a stage that fits within our brand guidelines, and there was a different space to promote our sponsors and partners. There is a nice level of personalisation that makes the platform easy to navigate and very much like a fintech event” said James.
From the reception banner and event stages to social tables and sponsor booths, every aspect of Airmeet was modified to convey the ‘legaltech’ theme to leave a lasting impression on the attendees.
Sponsor booths: All sponsor partners had their customised exhibition booths to promote their legaltech or fintech services. The registration button allowed them to generate direct leads right from the event.
Post-event analytics: James said that the team loved the post-event analytics. It offered in-depth stats of the attendee behaviour, which proved really valuable for the sponsors. It showed who attended or visited specific stands or who were engaged and offered facts like how many sessions an attendee attended on average.
“We had seven sessions, but attendees joined on an average three sessions, which means people didn’t just jump out of one panel and leave, but they stuck around for half-a-day which was quite good for a virtual event,” said James, while revealing other findings of the post-event analytics. It was easier to sum it all up and send the sponsors the full-day event report and the contact list of the attendees who expressed interest in their business. Unlike an in-person event where you can only collect business cards, the data you get on Airmeet is more detailed.
Way Forward
When asked how they described Airmeet to others, James said, “We promote Airmeet to many of our clients and what we usually say is that it’s the closest thing to actually meeting in person.” The Fintech Circle is looking to grow their startup investments and has a strong relationship with its partners. Talking about their experience on Airmeet, he also mentioned, “All our partners said that they definitely wanted to do this the next year even if things open up (referring to lockdown restrictions) they would still be keen to host online events through Airmeet.”
They are planning to stick with Airmeet for networking meet-ups and future book launches. And according to James, it is Airmeet’s highly responsive support system that reinforces their belief in working with us for their future events.
If you want to experience such high-end support and seamless networking in your launch events, get a demo of Airmeet commercial features that are transforming the world of virtual networking, one successful event at a time.
