Dealing with the volatile world of international financial markets and central banking can be unpredictable and difficult, as conference organiser Christopher Rogers discovered to his cost this year.

For Rogers, 46, general secretary and co-founder of the Institute of Regulation and Risk – North Asia, has had to cancel an event due to be held in November. The reason? The European debt crisis and economic instability.

“It was to have been a dualcity gathering in Tokyo and Hong Kong with keynote speakers from the US Federal Reserve and one from the European Central Bank,” says Rogers. “However, the speaker from Europe had to pull out because of the debt crisis.”

The irony is that the speaker was to have addressed the kind of issues that led him to pull out. He was central to the conference and it could not go ahead without him.

The Hong Kong-based institute, a non-profit making organisation, holds events for c-suite executives on issues related to risk management, governance and compliance within financial services, with speakers from central banking and senior players from the world of financial regulation. 

It is an irony, especially, because Rogers, who describes himself as “risk averse”, prides himself on planning events in such a way that the impact of the unexpected is minimised.

Rogers, who has another event planned for Tokyo and Hong Kong next May, works to ground rules, such as setting sensible timelines and carefully tailoring the themed events for attendees, who buy table space at the conference dinners. Drawing a distinction between highly commercial exhibition-based conferencing and his more specialised “educational” events, Rogers is critical of organisations that set a shallow lead-in period.

“I’m always surprised when more commercial-orientated event organisers give staff a three-month timeframe to pull off some magic. In my view, there is no magic in that kind of timeframe,” he says. Rogers’ usual timeframe is a year, but he says larger “signature events” can take up to 15 months to plan.

Because of his table-sale business model, Rogers says it is important that speakers and themes whet the appetite of c-suite executives.

“These are social gatherings of equals, of peers. I have built up a reputation for delivering the c-suite individuals that sponsors love to target,” he says. “My modus operandi is to get an informative message out to the industry, one that sometimes it doesn’t want to hear – it doesn’t always make me too popular – but it is a message that should be heard.”

How I did it... Christopher Rogers, IRR
Institute of Regulation and Risk general secretary Christopher Rogers pulled off a successful conference in Tokyo in April – just a month after the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami – with “sheer determination” and by keeping a smile on his face. “I took the decision to go ahead and show solidarity with the Japanese,” he says. “Whatever crises we had to overcome, I kept a smile of my face. Always smile, don’t panic and be nice to everyone.”

Smile or not, though, the event at the Imperial Hotel – close to key ministries, the Bank of Japan and Tokyo’s financial services centre – was troubled from the outset.

“One of my keynote speakers wouldn’t visit Tokyo because he was scared of radiation from Fukushima, despite reassurances. We had no time to get another speaker in, but my table guests are other businesses’ keynote speakers, so I called on one of them at short notice. That’s how you mitigate that kind of disaster.”

The Institute of Regulation and Risk: www.irrna.org