Crafting a Vision for a Virtual and Hybrid Event Future

We’re all anxious to get back to in-person gatherings of friends, family, and work colleagues. But we also need to acknowledge a new reality — that some of the events in our lives will remain in the virtual world, and still others will cross over between the physical and virtual world. How many of us have invited distant relatives and friends to virtual dinners and holiday celebrations over the last 13 months?

So, too, will it go with investor events.

Long a staple of New York, London and other financial center hotels, investor conferences have continued to flourish in a virtual setting. OpenExchange partnered with major banks and stock exchanges to host 389 such events in 2020, and another 143 in just the first quarter of this year.

All indications are that there will be a slow return to in-person events. In research that will be released next week, OpenExchange polled 138 of its client contacts, and found that 93% of the events in the second half of 2021 are expecting to have some kind of virtual component, and even in 2023 and beyond, the majority of investor events will either be hybrid or fully virtual.

With this in mind, and as the leader in virtual investor conference technology and services, OpenExchange has been mapping out a vision for a virtual and hybrid future that will extend long past the current pandemic.

The first step along the way is the announcement today of a next-generation platform for virtual and hybrid events, which we call OE VIZION.

OE VIZION is a suite of applications that work together to elevate the virtual and hybrid event experience — for attendees, for presenters, and for event organizers. These applications are purpose-designed for the special demands of financial communications, but they can apply to every complex event setting where reliability, security, and privacy are paramount and especially where one-on-one and small group meetings are at the heart of the event experience.

Two core applications are being demonstrated for the first time publicly today: OE Passport and OE Central:

• OE Passport offers an engaging, personalized experience for event attendees and presenters; and
• OE Central offers transparency and control of every aspect of the virtual conference experience for event organizers.

Click to view a demonstration of these two core applications, early versions of which have been used already by ten of our clients to conduct events.

Over the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be highlighting more applications and tools in the OE VIZION suite. And more importantly, we’ll demonstrate how the OE VIZION platform unifies the experience between remote and in-person attendees to a virtual event.

The effects of the pandemic came upon us suddenly in 2020, and we all had to adapt. The return to a “new normal” will come much more gradually in 2021 and 2022, and OpenExchange is committed to working with its financial services and corporate partners to make that “new normal” a richer and more engaging experience than ever before.