2018 - What a Year!

You might have noticed in recent months that Lumi has been a lot more vocal. From blogs and ebooks, to a fantastic whitepaper, Global AGM Trends (which you can download here), you might have realized that we have taken a bit of a new approach to our comms activity and the way we share our experiences of running thousands of meetings around the globe.

All of this has been great at generating engagement with both existing clients and new prospects and from the feedback I receive regularly, has been very well received. So when our new CMO suggested that an end-of-year blog piece would be a great idea, I couldn’t very well say no!

But rather than look ahead to 2019 just yet, I wanted to take a moment to look back at what our amazing team at Lumi has accomplished over the last twelve months.

We are ending the year with two more offices than we started with, through the creation of Lumi Middle East in Dubai and also Lumi Canada based in Montreal, with the acquisition of Feedback Interactif. This takes the number of countries in which Lumi has operating teams to eleven even though we run meetings in far more countries than that.

We continue to have a strong presence in the ever-evolving event space. We even had our technology used weekly on a popular Belgian TV quiz show.  In addition this year, we have widened the events technology platform, to include registration, website and onsite badge printing, as well as event apps and realtime interaction. This is all hosted under our umbrella brand, Connect by Lumi. 

Product has been a core focus again this year, as it always seems to be. Our technology continues to be at the forefront of development, and our team are constantly pushing the boundaries as to what can be achieved to make meetings more streamlined, more transparent and more effective.

The launch of our Pre-Voting platform, to allow shareholders and members to vote online in advance of the meeting, has been hugely successful. We’ve introduced airport style ‘speedy boarding’ for self-registration at AGMs, as well as tablet-based kiosk voting to allow votes to be cast at any time whilst the voting is open. And we have also launched electronic signature capture on tablets, initially for the legal requirement in the French market, but it is being adopted by larger companies to allow personal registration for VIPs as well.

Perhaps most excitingly, we have seen the number of hybrid and virtual meetings run by Lumi more than double in the last year again, and this trend isn't confined to one or two countries, it is playing out on a global level. We have continued to refine this functionality and will continue to do so. You may remember from my previous blog Get real or maybe even go hybrid, I mentioned my suspicion that, over time, it will become increasingly difficult for companies to justify, from a corporate governance perspective, not enabling the technology which facilitates remote, online attendance. Whilst pure virtual is still not widely accepted in many markets, due mainly to some legislative ambiguity as well as the negative influence of the proxy agencies, the implementation of hybrid meetings is continuing to gather momentum. I expect to see more and more organizations amending their constitutions and Articles of Association to allow for remote participation and for the number of hybrid and virtual meetings to continue to increase significantly during 2019.

So you’ll forgive me if I don’t want to look ahead in to 2019 for another couple of weeks (although I suspect the aforementioned CMO has a plan for another blog quite soon!).

I’d like to take a few moments to reflect on what an amazing team we have here at Lumi, and to recognize how much we have all achieved across the last 12 months. 2018 – what a year!