Our Technical Director, Matt Taylor, summarises the 2025 Accountex exhibition and latest Pro Drive IT news from it.
In May Pro Drive returned to Accountex for our 2nd year exhibiting there. For those of you reading this that have never heard of Accountex (also known as ACX) it’s the largest finance and accounting expo in the world with over 12,000 unique visitors across 2 days, hosted in 3 halls at the Excel centre in the heart of London’s Docklands. This year the organisers stepped it up to a new level and debuted a brand new “bring your own headphones” system for listening to the sessions on the 12 stages, as well as holograms on the welcome stand and even an Inuit sponsored airship floating around inside the halls.
The Pro Drive team (Bruce Penson, Matt Taylor, Debbie Alexander and Chris Ross-Lewin) were all there bright and early for the opening day with a new stand design, lots of bottles of water and a few goodies to give out to people that visited us. This year, as well as talking to people about our IT support offering with integral strategic consultancy and cyber security built in, we wanted to speak to people about Microsoft Copilot and how that can help their businesses to be more efficient and therefore more profitable. Visitors to the stand had a chance to benchmark their IT against best practices via our unique survey tool and could opt for a personalised Copilot demo.
Wednesday night at ACX is “party” night with lots of the vendors sponsoring events in the evening to give other exhibitors a chance to wind down and relax after a hard day on the stands. Bruce and Matt made sure to say hello to our friends at the legendary IRIS after party at The Fox pub just outside the Excel centre before moving on for a few drinks and another chance to network at “The Oiler Bar”, a bar and pizza restaurant on a boat moored in Victoria Dock.
Both Bruce and I are active in the accountancy world – I have lots of relationships in the vendor space thanks to the AIR group and Bruce is a respected speaker on the accountancy circuit on topics such as AI and cyber security. This year Bruce was invited a guest speaker on a panel session discussing AI for accountants hosted by Callum Macrae of JE Consulting. ACX gives us a chance to meet our existing contacts and find out what they’ve been doing and to make new ones. Each year I make so many new connections from vendors & other exhibitors through to people that one day could be potential clients.
Thursday is generally a quieter day at ACX but still with thousands of visitors through the door. Day 2 finishes a little earlier than day 1 and once the doors shut at 4:30pm the weary stand holders get to make their way home reflecting on a hectic but amazing couple of days. ACX 25 – we loved you and can’t wait for ACX 26!
We have a follow up webinar looking at the results of the benchmarking data we have collected from all the companies we’ve spoken to about their cyber and information security. If you would like to see how your company stacks up against your competitors and against industry best practices, register here and join us on June 26th for a look at the data.
