CaixaBank moves its Iberian Conference off a spreadsheet

A very tailored event

“It's a mid-size event with about 80 investors attending, in two or three days of one to one and small group meetings. So it's a very tailored event, and it has basically been known as our flagship event of the year.”

What they were replacing

The matching of investors to companies had been run for years on a model the team had built themselves.

“We used to work with basically an Excel-built model to organise meetings, so it was actually an in-house, let's say, algorithm model. It worked for us obviously, but it was a very big leap and quite a big improvement.”

What they asked for

“The objective of your solution for us was to add flexibility for the registration website, and also to work with the algorithm of organising agendas, building agendas, and distributing that information to investors.”

Seeing the whole picture

Because the conference is run in-house and built around a bespoke experience for CaixaBank BPI's own clients, how far the platform would bend to the team's requirements mattered as much as what it did out of the box.

“An app-based platform, a website where you could actually move things around quite easily and see the whole picture together of the event organisation. I think that was a big improvement, and much easier to use.”

“We had the support of the team as well, who were available to answer our requests, and they were also very eager to understand how we wanted to tailor-make it and customise it to fit our goals. We needed a lot of flexibility in it, and the platform had that flexibility.”

The first year

Sergio is direct about the cost of the switch, which is worth reading before you plan your own.

“Having worked for so many years on an in-house solution that we had built ourselves, I can't say that there was no learning curve and that we didn't have any hiccups. But they were things that were relatively easy to overcome. In the beginning it was a little bit hard, because it was the first year, trying to move from something that was totally under our control to learning how to use the platform. But I think it worked out well in the end.”

Would you recommend Eventogy?

“It's a very easy solution to use, and for complex events it's definitely a benefit.”

About Sergio

Sergio Godinho is Head of Equity Sales at CaixaBank BPI, leading a team of eight covering UK, Continental European and Iberian institutional accounts, and covering the Nordics and Central Europe himself. He has more than 20 years in Iberian equity markets, including roles as macro economist, financial analyst and equity sales.