New Research Charts the Path to a “New Normal” for Virtual & Hybrid Investor Events

The transition from in-person to virtual investor conferences was a sudden one, forced by the onset of the pandemic. But transitioning back to a “new normal” will be a much slower process. It’s quite apparent that the shape of the future investor conference environment will be quite different from its pre-pandemic state.  In just over a year, investor communications professionals have learned new skills, realized new benefits, and established new habits that have dramatically accelerated experimentation with virtual and hybrid formats that had already been taking place on a small scale before 2020.

In the last 12 months, OpenExchange has established itself as the leading partner for virtual investor events. Our team of video specialists hosted 514 virtual conferences between April 2020 and March 2021, setting up more than 117,000 virtual meetings, streaming 95 million minutes of video, and facilitating 2.4 million interactions involving investors, companies, bankers, and analysts.

Now, as our clients begin to plan for investor events in late 2021 and beyond, we felt it would be important to take the pulse of conference organizers across our clients and to report back to them on how their peers are viewing an investor conference future.

The survey was administered April 5 – 16, 2021, to the hundreds of contacts we work with every day in the investor conference field. 139 conference professionals responded, representing 30 different investment banks (including seven bulge-bracket banks) and 3 major stock exchanges. The picture they paint is one of an industry anxious to return to some in-person events, but which is expecting to retain a virtual component to their events indefinitely.  Specifically:

• The majority of respondents expect to hold their first hybrid event (with both virtual and in-person components) by the end of 2021, most of which would be in the 4th quarter.
• In 2022, organizers expect that about 70% of investor events will be either hybrid or virtual.
• Even in 2023 and beyond, nearly 60% of all investor events will have a virtual component, with this number ranging between 41% and 80% among the largest banks.

Get your copy of this landmark survey: “The State of Virtual and Hybrid Investor Events, 2021”

This survey is playing an important role in the forward planning we’re doing at OpenExchange. We’ve recently introduced OE VIZION, a next-generation platform for virtual and hybrid events, and two new key applications for virtual events — OE Passport (a personalized event portal for attendees and presenters) and OE Central (transparency and control for conference organizers). As these and other applications in the OE VIZION suite evolve over the course of 2021, they will directly address the priorities identified in this survey.

We hope that it helps you plan ahead as well.