Why Credit Week is what finance is missing

“And there are two reasons for this. Firstly, they’ve become siloed in their own organisation – and the bigger organisation is, the more inward looking they tend to become.   

“The other reason is, if you look at the way a lot of media in this space is structured, it’s usually structured by sector.  

“We’ve got a lot of competitors around our edge, such as events run by mortgage, commercial finance and motor titles, as well as the associations they work with. However, because of the siloed nature of these events, you only interact with other people in the same industry.  

“This means if you are at, for example, a mortgage conference – you may only interact with other managing directors of the mortgage lenders you’re competing with. And let’s say there’s £12.5bn worth of mortgage lending out there, and everyone’s looking for £5bn worth of that market, someone’s going to miss out.

 
“Now that person is not going to be you, so you’re not going to tell anyone else there all your secret tricks and they’re going to tell you theirs. However, because they’re competing in different markets, someone from a mortgage lender and someone from a car finance lender are more likely to share their secret tricks and talk more openly with one another.

And that’s where events like Credit Week come into play.” 

Q: How is Credit Week going to achieve this goal of improved cross-pollination? 
LB: “The big thing we’re doing is bringing five Credit Strategy events – namely the Credit Summit, Lending Summit, as well as the Utilities & Telecoms, the Collections, Debt Sale, and Purchase, and Car Finance Conference – into one place.  

“To do this, we’re blending the content together to make sure there’s something for everybody every day, and the intention as well will be that if somebody just accidentally strolled into a session they didn’t really know much about and it wasn’t on the top of their To Do List, they’d still come away learning something new or getting a fresh perspective.” 

Q: And how is it going to differ from some of the other bigger conferences that we’ve had in the past? 
LB: “As you can imagine, if we’re just doing conference sessions from 11:00am on Monday to 3:30pm on Wednesday, it would be a bit arduous. To that point the Credit Awards is slap bang in the middle of Credit Week.  

“The awards are in their the 25th year, and it should bring in somewhere between 700 and 850 people to the awards, and will be an evening of recognising excellence across the whole of credit and financial services.  

“Outside of formal Credit Awards, there’ll be plenty of other stuff to do. This will include a welcome barbecue on the Monday. There will also be a golf tournament, which will give attendees the chance to play on one of Celtic Manor’s three championship golf courses, including the 2010 Ryder Cup course.

“There will also be opportunities for an anti-golf tournament, which is designed for people who’ve never played golf and may be embarrassed about the fact that they think everyone else is really good at golf, so this event will bring together say 30 people who’ve never played golf before and they can just have some fun trying the game out whilst having a glass of champagne.  

“They’ll also be private dinners, which we can host at three very swanky clubhouses on the estate, as well as private member roundtables, and hot topic discussions.  

“But ultimately, we hope when people leave and go home, they feel they’ve learned three or four things that were really useful, they meet three or four people they never thought they’d meet, and they might have three or four experiences they never thought they would have experienced.

“And maybe they’ll also have a couple of things that make them laugh and think  ‘actually enjoyed that enormously, as well as getting value out of it in a myriad of other ways’.”

Q: What are you most looking forward to about Credit Week?  
I’m looking for a number of things, I’m looking forward to having a big-name speaker and I’m looking forward to that moment where the people in the room kind of go, ‘OK, this has moved on a level’.

“I’m also looking forward to welcoming some people from overseas. We think we could be bringing in some really interesting people from outside the UK, which will bring a very different dimension to it as well. 

“I’m also looking forward to that atmosphere that you get before something like the Credit Awards, where the room is packed and old acquaintances are catching up, new friends are being made, and there’s anticipation room before the music kicks in and there’s a palpable sense of excitement.  

“And then there’s some of the secret little quiet moments that Credit Week will bring that’s genuinely quite new. 

“So, we’re talking about doing a running club or a yoga session in the morning. And there’s a beautiful lawn overlooking the Welsh valleys where we’ll be doing the yoga in the mornings in the peace and quiet, with the sun shining and the birds tweeting, which might provide a moment of serenity in all the madness.”

Q: Finally, what’s happening to the rest of Credit Strategy’s programme of awards?  
LB: “Apart from, of course, the Credit Awards, the rest of our awards programme will stay broadly in the calendar where they’ve historically have been give or take. We’ll probably move them around a bit in terms of location.

“But we’re also looking at some events we can put on on the day of an awards, such as a roundtable or an Advisory Board meeting. We’re also considering hosting some problem-solving events, giving attendees the opportunity to stress test hypothetical crisis scenarios.”



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