Our big reveal
October 24, 2022
It's been quite the hectic week and a half as we've managed to squeeze in 3 conferences back to back. ABS East, Opal's Family Office Conference, and Money 20/20. It's also a bit of a coming out party for us as this is the first stretch of conferences where we've had the chance to demo our platforms from end to end.
At ABS East, the team collectively took ~30 scheduled meetings over two days in Miami, predominantly with prospective underwriters. Many of these were long standing relationships but others were first time conversations and it was the first opportunity we’ve had to pivot the conversation to the services our platform has to offer them, as well as the software that underpins it. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic about what we are offering, primarily on the syndication side, but also with meaningful discussions around potential committed facilities as well as referral/co-underwriting opportunities for borrowers in their respective pipelines. Coming off the conference we have about a dozen demos lined up over the next few weeks, a relatively high hit rate of prospects to add to our growing roster of active/interested underwriters.
At Opal's Family Office Conference, more so than just potential family office and investor contacts, we managed to secure a number of potential borrowers as well across various different asset classes. Family office conferences are always difficult to tell whether the right audiences will be in attendance as investors but this one had enough diversity across both investors and underwriters that we certainly have plenty of follow-ups. The blended notes took a front seat in particular as many larger investors tend to not want to manage the deals directly and want to just have capital continuously deployed.
This is our first showing at Money 20/20 but it's already proving to be an invaluable experience and one that we'll be sure to sponsor and have a booth set up next year. Over the course of just two days, we have interviews lined up with the WSJ, PitchBook, and podcasts, along with invites to exclusive events held by SVB and FT Partners. I've shared the research from FT Partners with you in the past on these weekly emails and they are one of the top investment banks in all of fintech. The founder reached out to me directly ahead of the conference, sharing that he'd been following our progress for a while and is very keen to learn more.
It's been fascinating to witness our conference strategy evolve over the years. In 2019, we were bright eyed and bushy tailed with nothing truly to sell, just trying to soak it all in and build up our network. In more recent years, we were all in on trying to find borrowers at these conferences or pairing up the borrowers we have with potential institutional investors. It's this year that we've finally been able to go out to market as a real software company with real solutions to sell. It's a refreshing and welcome change that will only continue as we build out a bigger and better reputation as a true infrastructure solution in this space 🚀