American Express Meetings & Events has announced Meetings Express, a partnership platform that white-labels and integrates regional simple meetings sourcing providers into a single interface and aggregates data through the firm's business intelligence tool, Meetings Insights.
Amex M&E is working with Groupize in North America, MeetingsBooker.com in the U.K. and the Nordics, BizMeeting in France, Meetago in Germany and Ivvy in Australia. Amex M&E SVP and general manager Issa Jouaneh said more partners are coming. "Within six months, there will be another expansion, both geographically and from a solution standpoint."
The Meetings Express collaboration is the first to officially hit the market as part of Amex M&E's Meetings Marketplace initiative, which the firm announced in November without citing specific initiatives or partners. The smaller, simple meetings market was a priority, said Jouaneh, given the pent-up demand for a straightforward solution. “Client demand for service in the small, simple meetings segment is significant. Yet until now, no one has addressed it globally,” he said. "Solutions have lagged in terms of delivering content and giving buyers the ability to shop and transact with the best content locally. We've found that local content is quite differentiated and packages are very localized."
Groupize founder and CEO Charles de Gaspe Beaubien agreed the in-market approach is smart, given the ways different regions package and sell meetings. "The technology needs to be configured for those," he said. "There's not a single tool that can do it."
De Gaspe Beaubien said clients are lined up and partners anticipate an uptick in volume. MeetingsBooker.com founder and CEO Ciaran Delaney echoed that enthusiasm in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: "[Smaller, recurring meetings] represents 50 percent of the global meetings expenditure. We believe within three years 80 percent of this market will be online. And we are looking forward to a really busy period rolling out the solution."
Amex M&E wants to leverage Meetings Express to align simple meetings strategies with existing meetings programs and to promote policy compliance. Part of that is the technology, and the other part will be supported by Amex M&E service, said Jouaneh. "Organizations historically have had difficulties consolidating [small meetings] spend for a number of reasons: cost, content, culture. It could be a combination. We are operating Meetings Express within the policy and program design ... and enabling meeting owners and stakeholders to shop and transact through a simpler process." He predicted, however, only 10 percent of these meetings will be truly touchless. "The vast majority will still need intervention from a professional so we can support the preferred supplier strategy and the managed programs."