Message from the UFI CEO

Message from the CEO

Dear UFI members, dear colleagues,

It’s certainly a busy time again for our industry – and for the UFI team, which is active literally all around the world again these past weeks. In China, at the CEFCO conference. In Turkiye, meeting government officials and members. In Doha/Qatar, with our MEA Conference. In San José/Costa Rica, with our LatAm Conference. In Washington, DC/USA, with a joint event with mdg and SISO alongside the ECEF Conference. Updates on all of these activities in this edition of UFI Info, and always on our LinkedIn channel. If you can, please join us at any of these activities – we are doing them to connect you, our members, and to share what we know about how our industry is developing.

I am writing this on my way back from our LatAm Conference, which brought more than one hundred colleagues together in Costa Rica. The region has its challenges, and it is not always easy to prevail and grow there – but I left our conference convinced that a lot of opportunity and growth lies ahead. I was happy to see a growing number of colleagues from North America attending this meeting, forging new connections and forming new ideas for collaboration and joint business. It will be similar in a few days in Doha when our MEA community will meet at our MEA Conference. Here as well, we will have participants not just from the region but from beyond.

Creating connections – one of the core missions of our work at UFI. I experienced this as well last week at our jury meeting for this year’s Next Generation Leadership Grant. It felt tougher than ever before to pick just five recipients from the record number of applications that we had this year. A big, big thank you to all our jury members who did an amazing job. We are announcing this year’s winners this week. They will be in Maastricht next month at our European Conference – to meet each other and to connect as a group, but also to connect with the UFI team and all of you who will be there.

Lastly for today – the reminder that the first round of elections is underway, and you are all asked to elect your chapter’s leadership for the next three years as well as your leaders for the committees and working groups. More about that as well here in UFI Info.

As you see – a busy time. And that’s good!