Diary from NACFB Commercial Finance Expo
01/10/2021
30 September 2021 - NACFB Commercial Finance Expo Day:
8:30am: Covid wristband on, a reminder that for all the triumphant return to industry live events, it is still 2021.
9:00am: half an hour spent getting a handle on the layout of the new room at the NEC. It’s surprisingly easy to get disorientated when you’re used to navigating the rooms of your own house; “turn left at Close Brothers” becomes a useful mantra. This year Leasing World has the central spot in the Exchange room, where throughout the day two industry experts take to an informal stage, with their audiences donning headphones to listen in on the insights. The Exchange is also a kind of break-out room for business meetings over tables, or just a place for coffee breaks 3 and 4.
9:30am: doors open to visitors, and this is the acid test…is there demand for a full return to in-person events?
9:45am: emphatically yes.
9:55am: we don’t remember an Expo being busier or louder than this year’s, and it’s still early; they are still queueing.
10:00am: we start out first full tour of the day and immediately lose track of time. It’s great to check in with the exhibitors at Wesleyan, Allica Bank, Kingsway, Funding Xchange, Aldermore and Shawbrook. Then it’s back to the official Leasing World “pod” (that’s what they’re calling it this year) to replenish the sample magazines. Fortunately we brought a heavy box; even more fortunately, we didn’t have to carry the heavy box all the way from the East Car Park.
10:30am: the Conference Theatre opens with an official welcome from journalist and presenter Naga Munchetty and NACFB Chair Paul Goodman.
11:05am: we catch up with UK Agricultural Finance, Corporate Asset Solutions, Next Finance, Kingsley Asset Finance and Cornerstone Finance. Renaissance Asset Finance shares some very valuable insights with us too. Satago is a new name to us, so we go and have a chat about their invoice finance offering too. Then it’s photography time, trying to find the Catch the Money Machine, the darts board and the golf driving range. The Expo always excels at this sort of thing; it’s 90pct networking and business, and 10pct recharging.
1:15pm: we tear ourselves away from a conversation about forbearance to visit the Conference Theatre, where Naga Munchetty hosts a discussion on The Drive to Digitise; Threat or Opportunity? It’s a subject that comes up time and time again in our conversations with lenders - what are the limits of tech, and how does a business choose the balance between online business and the handshakes-and-highways approach. Katrin Herrling (Funding Xchange), Andrea Reynolds (Swoop Funding), Ruth Anderson (Starling Bank) and NACFB MD Norman Chambers are refreshingly unafraid to disagree on the specifics, but are broadly in agreement on the basic principle: good background technology can take the hard work out of handling compliance, leaving staff and brokers to concentrate more on providing the best levels of in-person service.
2:00pm: trying to meet Haydock, but we keep missing each other in the labyrinth and the crowds. Instead we fall into a conversation about the construction sector.
2:30pm: we find our Haydock contacts.
3:00pm: no time for a proper meal, but we do take five minutes to eat half a defrosted bagel and a Werther’s Original. Truly the lunch of champions.
3:10pm: we finally track down the Funding Circle stand. It’s such an attractive sort of garden - complete with trees in bloom - that we had previously assumed it was a kind of breakout zone. This time we spot the big logo and wonder how we could have missed it before. But there’s still time for the full debrief. Then we find Newable, Time and the legal experts at Greenhalgh Kerr. There’s a rumour going around that one of the exhibitors is making cocktails, and FundingXchange has beer bottles in a bucket of ice.
4:00pm: we make time for a spot of virtual reality courtesy of Liberty Leasing’s Head the Football challenge and a little circuit racing with Adrian Stalley and the very generous people at Ultimate Finance. We figure we’ve earned fifteen minutes of the other side of the Expo, and there’s professional pride at stake, though our heading technique in virtual football is going to need some work.
4:15pm: a bit more photography. Now the crowds aren’t so thick, we can pick up details like Shawbrook’s 10th Anniversary Wheel of Fortune, the abandoned coffee-cups, the wall of houseplants, and the popcorn machine.
4:30pm: it’s all over so fast. The other half of that bagel doesn’t seem particularly appealing. Still a dozen people we’d meant to see and hadn’t found the time to track down. But we’re out of time. We brought back issues of BrokerWorld and Leasing World; we’re taking home mugs, pens, exercise books and a seed and seed-growing kit from Asset Finance Solutions (but we have no idea what it’s going to grow into)!
6:30pm: sat in traffic on the M42, realise we’re still wearing that Covid wristband. We’re looking forward to doing everything again next year, except, we hope, the wristband part.
Next up: our own Leasing World Gold Awards in less than three weeks!
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