My eldest son James recently started his first proper job with Bakkavor.
He decided to go straight into work rather than university, and watching him begin to navigate companies, colleagues, careers and all the strange rituals of working life has led to some interesting conversations.
There is, incidentally, a slightly ridiculous family connection with Bakkavor. My uncle was once Group Treasurer there during what he still remembers as a particularly eventful period involving its Icelandic connections. He has been retired for years. It is fair to say he still has opinions.
But that is another story.
James recently asked me a much simpler question:
Why do people actually attend events?
I thought about all the usual answers.
To network.
To generate business.
To hear from experts.
To meet investors.
To find clients.
To learn about a market.
To develop relationships.
All true.
But none of them really answered the question.
So I told him:
To be human.
And the more I have thought about it, the more I think that is exactly right.
Business has never had more ways to communicate
We have LinkedIn.
Email.
WhatsApp.
Teams.
Zoom.
CRM systems.
AI assistants.
Automated introductions.
Newsletters.
Webinars.
Digital communities.
Data platforms capable of identifying almost anyone, anywhere.
We can find a company in seconds.
We can discover who works there.
We can read what they have written, understand what they invest in, see who they know and send them a message before breakfast.
Technology has made communication extraordinarily efficient.
But communication and connection are not the same thing.
That distinction matters enormously in private markets.
Capital does not ultimately move because two email addresses have exchanged information.
Transactions do not happen because someone downloaded a PDF.
Partnerships are rarely created because two people appeared in one another's CRM.
Business happens when people develop sufficient understanding and trust to do something together.
And trust remains stubbornly human.
Sometimes you simply need to be in the room
There is information you can put in a presentation.
And there is information someone tells you over coffee.
There are questions people ask publicly.
And there are questions they ask once the microphone has been switched off.
There is the official position.
And then there is:
"What are you actually seeing?"
That question matters.
Particularly in credit, private markets, restructuring, special situations and institutional investment.
Markets are made up of numbers, regulation, capital structures and legal frameworks.
But they are also made up of judgement.
Confidence.
Concern.
Experience.
Reputation.
Timing.
And people.
You understand those things differently when you are sitting opposite somebody.
You hear the hesitation before an answer.
You can challenge an assumption.
You can ask the second question.
And the third.
A conversation which might have taken six weeks of emails can sometimes take ten minutes.
We need somewhere to tell our truth
This was the other thing I tried to explain to James.
Good events create a place where people can tell their truth.
Not some grand philosophical truth.
Their truth about the market.
An investor can explain why capital is not being deployed.
A lender can explain where credit appetite is changing.
A fund manager can explain what they are actually looking for.
A restructuring professional can describe what happens when the original investment thesis goes wrong.
A lawyer can explain where regulation is creating friction.
A servicer can describe what is happening inside portfolios.
A family office can explain what would make an opportunity investable.
And somebody else in the room can disagree.
That is important too.
The purpose of a good event should not be to manufacture consensus. It should be to create a good enough room for an honest conversation.
That is where knowledge comes from.
A platform matters
This is also why, at DDC Financial Group, we spend so much time listening.
When somebody tells us a subject matters, we listen.
When investors tell us what is preventing capital deployment, we listen.
When a sponsor tells us there is a conversation missing from the market, we listen.
When somebody attending one of our forums has experience that deserves to be heard, we try to give them a platform.
Sometimes that platform is a panel.
Sometimes it is a fireside conversation.
Sometimes a presentation.
Sometimes it is simply an introduction to the person they needed to meet.
That is why I have never thought the best events should simply reproduce the existing hierarchy of an industry.
If the only people allowed to speak are already the loudest people in the market, very little gets learned.
The interesting conversation often comes from bringing different parts of the capital ecosystem together:
institutional investors, allocators, family offices, private credit managers, banks, asset managers, restructuring professionals, servicers, advisers, lawyers and operating businesses.
Everyone sees a different part of the same market.
Put those perspectives in the same room and something interesting starts to happen.
The conversations between the sessions may matter most
Event organisers naturally spend enormous amounts of time building programmes.
We certainly do.
Who should speak?
Which subjects matter?
Who should moderate?
What questions should be asked?
Which perspectives are missing?
All of that matters.
But anyone who has attended enough events knows something else.
Sometimes the most important conversation of the entire day happens nowhere near the stage.
It happens while waiting for coffee.
At lunch.
Walking back from a session.
Between two people who had never met before.
Someone says:
"You should speak to..."
And suddenly two previously unconnected parts of the market are connected.
There is no algorithm for that.
It is serendipity — but good events can create the conditions in which serendipity becomes much more likely.
That is particularly important in private markets
Private markets are, by definition, relationship-driven.
Private credit.
Special situations.
Restructuring.
Real assets.
NPLs.
Distressed investing.
Institutional capital.
Cross-border investment.
These markets depend heavily on networks, specialist knowledge and trust.
Often the opportunity is not sitting on a public exchange waiting to be clicked.
It comes through relationships.
A borrower.
A bank.
An adviser.
An allocator.
A fund manager.
A family office.
A restructuring situation.
A proprietary introduction.
Someone who knows someone.
Someone who understands a situation before everybody else does.
That makes the quality of the network extraordinarily important.
And it means a private markets event or institutional investment forum should do far more than assemble hundreds of people in a hotel ballroom.
It needs to bring together the right people.
Bigger is not necessarily better
The events industry has traditionally been rather obsessed with numbers.
1,000 delegates.
2,000 delegates.
10,000 attendees.
There is obviously a place for major global conferences.
But size and value are not synonymous.
For a specialist investor, lender or adviser, fifty genuinely relevant people may be considerably more valuable than five thousand random ones.
This is one of the principles behind the way we are developing DDC Financial Group's events.
We are not trying to create the biggest room.
We are trying to create the right room.
A focused audience.
Relevant institutions.
Senior decision-makers.
People deploying capital.
People originating opportunities.
People financing transactions.
People solving problems when investments become complicated.
And enough space for them actually to speak to one another.
From Riyadh to Athens to Bucharest
That philosophy is now running through our international programme.
At the Saudi Arabia Credit & Investment Forum 2026 in Riyadh, the conversation brings together Saudi and international institutional capital around private credit, investment, market development, restructuring, recovery and the wider credit lifecycle.
At the Athens Credit & Special Situations Forum 2026, we bring together investors, lenders, servicers and advisers from Greece, Cyprus, the Balkans and Southeast Europe around private credit, NPLs, restructuring, real estate, infrastructure and special situations.
And in February 2027, our Romania Credit & Investment Forum in Bucharest will bring another market into that conversation, examining capital deployment, private credit, restructuring, real assets and institutional investment across Romania and Southeast Europe.
Different countries.
Different markets.
Different opportunities.
The principle is the same.
Get the right people into the room. Give them something worth talking about. Then give them the opportunity to talk.
Events are part of the infrastructure of a market
Perhaps this is the point we sometimes underestimate.
Events are often described as marketing.
I think the good ones are closer to infrastructure.
They connect capital with opportunity.
They connect local knowledge with international experience.
They connect people who have capital with people who know where it can be deployed.
They allow new entrants to understand a market faster.
They allow established participants to compare what they are seeing.
They give organisations a platform to demonstrate expertise.
They create relationships before those relationships are needed.
And occasionally they create a transaction, partnership or idea that would simply never have happened otherwise.
You cannot necessarily measure that at 5pm when everybody hands their badge back.
Sometimes you discover the value six months later.
AI makes this more important, not less
There is an interesting irony here.
As technology becomes better at connecting us digitally, I suspect physical connection becomes more valuable.
AI will make research faster.
It will make prospecting faster.
It will make communication faster.
It will make matching investors, companies and opportunities dramatically more sophisticated.
All of which I welcome.
But if everybody has access to increasingly similar technology, something else becomes scarce.
Human trust.
Knowing somebody.
Having spoken to them.
Understanding how they think.
Knowing whether you would do business with them.
Remembering a conversation.
Sharing a joke.
Disagreeing about something.
Changing your mind.
That cannot simply be generated.
So why attend an event?
James asked me a very simple question.
And I suspect my original answer probably sounded slightly overdramatic to a young man starting his first job.
But I stand by it.
We attend events because we need to connect.
We need to talk.
We need to listen.
We need to challenge one another.
We need to tell our truth.
We need to discover what other people are seeing.
We need the unexpected conversation.
And every now and again, we simply need to stop looking at one another through screens and be in the same room.
That is what we are trying to create at DDC.
Not an audience.
A conversation.
Not just another conference.
A platform.
Not simply a collection of companies.
People.
Because however sophisticated markets become, business is still ultimately done between human beings.
And perhaps that is the real value of events.
Join the conversation with DDC Financial Group
Explore the Saudi Arabia Credit & Investment Forum 2026 — Riyadh, 7–8 October 2026
Explore the Athens Credit & Special Situations Forum 2026 — Athens, 12–13 November 2026
Explore the Romania Credit & Investment Forum 2027 — Bucharest, 9 February 2027
If you are attending, investing in these markets, considering speaking, looking to deploy capital or simply believe there is a conversation the industry should be having, talk to us.
We listen. And where we can, we give you the platform to have it.
Related DDC insights.
Capital Is Available. Deployment Is the Question. →
Why Riyadh Matters: Inside the Saudi Arabia Credit & Investment Forum 2026 →