It’s been a month since I started as Non-Executive Director at Wizme, and I have been inundated with people asking me what’s behind that decision. Wizme’s business model and proposition relate to my past experience and passion for building value within meetings specialist organisations – and this is very much how I see the future of Wizme evolving. As the meetings and travel industry coexists with Covid-19, the potential threats of next strain pandemics will always loom in the highly travel connected and the heavily populated world, and so we need the specialist meeting technology to support this.
Wizme is a rewarding opportunity for me to support an energetic and highly talented CEO – Nour Mouakke. Nour has smartly identified gaps in the meetings space, and with the impact of Covid-19 on the industry, this will only put a greater emphasis on the future of meeting management as an effective way to manage safety, costs and productivity.
People tend to undertake business travel to meet, whether that be colleagues, suppliers or customers. Over the years I have heard many objections to introducing more rigour around meeting planning decisions. Some organisations have seen significant success from such thinking, but I see this new world we are entering, coexisting with Covid-19, as accelerating an irreversible journey for all corporations. This will break the traditional thinking of how we as corporate employees plan to meet and communicate.
And so the Wizme meetings technology and thinking in this space was something that resonated with me and I am delighted to be on board.
Corporations big and small will need more focus on the management of how their employees meet – authorisation to bring people together, matching the right meeting environment to meet the objectives of the meeting – incorporating both onsite and external meeting facilities.
This will put much more of a focus on the TMC intermediaries in terms of their capabilities and competence in this space. And that’s the exciting bit – the access to meetings technology today is not without significant compromise with relatively limited choices for TMC’s to select from. This instinctively is behind the lack of meetings tech innovation and one size fits all pricing models. This will be impacting on the TMC productivity, their margins, product relevance to their customers and lack of real customer online enablement in the meetings space. So Wizme can disrupt quickly and be an enabler of much-needed change.
The meetings market will have irreversibly shrunk as the new rhythm and norms of business meetings settles. I see the next generation of meetings technology being the winners in this new world as Corporations and TMCs rethink how to achieve efficiencies in their meetings and travel management as we adapt to the new Covid-19 environment.
