At our recent Monetising B2B Information & Events 2026, Colin Morrison interviewed Orson Francescone, managing director of FT Live and formerly an events executive at Euromoney and Haymarket.
It organizes some 300 events, including: Commodities Summit, Global Banking Summit, Global ABS, ABS East, The Covered Bond Congress, The Central & Eastern European Forum, The Global Borrowers and Bond Investors Forum, Future of the Car, The Global Boardroom, Hydrogen Summit, Women in Business, and the FT Weekend Festivals in London and Washington DC.
At a time when most B2C and B2B media companies (especially news brands) are rushing to develop live events, it’s unsurprisingly, a growth market also for the Financial Times. Last year, it paid an estimated £80m (4x revenue) to acquire Invisso, the former Euromoney-owned portfolio of events for the structured finance, bond and private credit markets. FT Live is believed now to have annualised revenue of some £70mn – doubled in the past three years.
Significantly, the Financial Times may have become the first legacy daily news brand to generate more than 10% of its revenue from events and seems likely to continue to grow.
This is adapted from Francescone’s interview at Monetising B2B.
What is FT Live?
It’s the events business of the Financial Times. Last year we ran 260 events. We operate two main types of events. First, our flagship core events, which are public, multi-sponsored conferences where people buy tickets to attend, a bit like today. We run about 40 of those. The rest are ‘partner events’. These are bespoke, single-sponsored private activations. That’s where a large number of our events come from. They can include roundtables, breakfasts, mini conferences or larger conferences.
Most of the revenue, though, comes from the core events.
I was thinking earlier today about when I started my career as a graduate conference producer at Euromoney, which was a fantastic place to learn the business. I remember picking up the phone to do research calls and thinking: “If one day I could say I’m calling from the FT instead of Euromoney, that would be amazing.”
Then one day the call came from the FT and I thought: “Right, this is it!”
Many events companies generate the majority of profit from a relatively small number of large, marquee events. Is that how FT Live is?
Not really.
One of the interesting things is that, when I joined six years ago, we didn’t have a single event generating more than £1mn in revenue. One of my strategic aims was scale because, as we know, scale matters enormously in events.
I was looking at the numbers yesterday and we now have 12 events generating more than £1mn in revenue, several of them significantly more than that. So the business is now well distributed.
Are the sponsored events managed separately from what we might call the proprietary events.
No, not really. They’re very closely connected. We think of ourselves as a platform. We might go to the communications team at UBS and they’ll buy one type of FT Live product. Then we’ll speak to the fixed income team at UBS and they’ll buy something different.
A lot of the sponsored partner events come from conversations around our core events. Many clients buy both. Increasingly, we’re integrating advertising, thought leadership and events together. Clients now buy across the whole FT platform. The sales team is the same. The operations are the same. The marketing is the same.
We do have a separate project management function because bespoke activations are operationally intensive. Clients want weekly calls and a very hands-on relationship. But, fundamentally, we leverage the same FT Live infrastructure.
Are your events all conferences or do you operate exhibitions too?
We run everything from Michelin-starred dinners for 10 people with an editor, all the way up to our largest event, an 8,000-person gathering in Miami for the global finance community. That event is essentially a high-speed networking and meetings platform.
So we span a wide range of formats, geographies, topics and revenue generation.
And how integrated are your events with the FT newsroom?
Very integrated. One of my strategic priorities has been what I call “the long march towards the centre” because FT Live had long been somewhat separate from the core FT business. Editorial integration has been a a key part of reversing that separation. Today, we would never launch an event without involving the relevant editor – from the start. We do, however, still keep conference production separate because writing news and producing conference programmes are quite different skills. But FT Live is deeply embedded with the newsroom.
The second part of that “long march” was technology. When I joined, FT Live couldn’t even email FT subscribers. We changed that quickly and the benefits of being able to do that have – understandably – been huge. The third part was integrating FT Live into the broader advertising and ‘thought leadership’ business so clients can buy multiple FT products together.
We still maintain a strong church-and-state separation, as you’d expect from a major newspaper. Editors are not influenced editorially. But from a client perspective, the opportunity to spend time with FT journalists and editors is incredibly valuable.
What’s the geographically spread of FT Live?
Primarily, the UK and Europe first, then the US, then the rest of the world. Which broadly mirrors the FT’s own customer base.
What are the big current trends in the business conference market?
The biggest trend is dealmaking. What we increasingly ask is: can this event facilitate meaningful business connections?
That ranges from first introductions all the way through to our Miami event, where 100,000 meetings take place over three days. That event has become so embedded in the workflow of the securitization industry that the sector probably could not function properly without it.
That’s the direction we want more of our portfolio to move towards because, once events become embedded in workflows, they become indispensable.
How do you encourage that?
Content remains absolutely central. Once the FT brand is attached to an event, the content must meet the standards people expect from the FT newsroom. If there’s a mismatch between the quality of the event content and the newspaper itself, that would damage the brand. So everything starts with content.
Do you ever reject smaller events because of the risk of over-saturating the audience?
We probably have one of the strongest marketing data operations in the industry. Before agreeing to an event, our sales, content and marketing teams look closely at audience data. Sometimes we’ll tell a client that a particular audience segment has already been contacted too often in recent months and suggest delaying the activation. We rarely turn away business entirely, but timing matters.
What do you make of Semafor’s model its global news is largely funded through a large-scale portfolio of conferences and events?
It’s an interesting model.
I think they realized very quickly how difficult it is to make money from news alone, so they moved aggressively into events. They’ve run some impressive events, particularly the Washington gathering they did recently.
A few people asked me whether the FT could do something similar. Of course we could.
But our primary business is still this extraordinary 130-year-old daily business newspaper.
I could ask the editor and senior editorial team to spend three months calling speakers and organizing a major event, and it would probably be excellent. But then the newspaper wouldn’t get produced.
Without the FT newspaper, we’re nothing.
So, while Semafor’s founders may spend months personally organizing flagship events, that’s not how we want to operate. Our core responsibility remains protecting and strengthening the newspaper.
Does the Financial Times Group now have a single customer view? If I subscribe to the FT and attend some of your events, can you see all the detail of my activity on one screen?
Yes, absolutely. And the data is fascinating. We’ve built econometric models around subscriptions and events. One of the strongest findings is that if an FT subscriber attends an FT Live event, they are significantly more likely to renew their subscription.
The FT itself now has 1.6mn subscribers and around 36% of FT Live attendees are subscribers. When you model that uplift in subscriber lifetime value, you’re talking about millions of pounds flowing into the subscription business.
That’s a virtuous circle where events strengthen subscriptions and subscriptions strengthen events.
You’ve been managing director for almost seven years now. What’s been your biggest mistake or ‘learning opportunity’?
No huge disasters, thankfully. We’ve been growing around 16% a year for seven years, so it’s been a good journey. But I nearly made a big mistake.
When I joined, I took a ruthless look at the portfolio and wanted to cut underperforming events. One of them was called The Business of Football. Now, I’m not interested in football at all. The event was small and not growing. And in my view, if you’re small and not growing, you’re dead or will soon be. I told the team we should kill it. They immediately warned me that the FT’s then CEO, John Ridding, was a huge Leeds United fan and that cancelling the event might not be wise politically!
For three years I tried to shut it down. I’m very glad I failed.
It’s now one of our top-performing events and has become an important dealmaking forum where football club owners come to London to do serious business. So yes, I nearly made a very big mistake there.
