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GERMANY – ‘Young, old, multicultural-demographic opportunities’: DZ Bank’s 5th Investment Dialogue with Hagen Invent
In line with tradition, DZ Bank invited around 1,000 boards of the Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken and their major private clients to the annual Investment Dialogue at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt in mid-September. With the motto ‘Young, old, multicultural – demographic opportunities’, high-profile speakers from the worlds of politics, finance and society engaged in a dialogue with the finance experts from DZ Bank about the challenges and opportunities presented by changes in German society. The focus was on questions such as which new business segments can be developed profitably and how Germany can best use its enormous potential in terms of knowledge, experience, drive and sense of responsibility in order to prove itself against the competition from young, emerging economies.
Some of the renowned speakers included Volker Bouffier, Minister-President of the State of Hesse; Stephan Sturm, CFO at Fresenius SE & Co. KGaA; Bernd Raffelhüschen, Head of the Intergenerational Compacts Research Centre at the University of Freiburg; and representatives of the DZ Bank Group. In the final round of talks, Investment Dialogue presenter duo Corinna Wohlfeil (n-tv) and Christian Sievers (ZDF) were brought in to host a discussion with Friedrich Caspers, Chairman of the Management Board at R+V Versicherung AG; Raimund Becker, Director of Unemployment Insurance at the Bundesagentur für Arbeit [German Federal Employment Agency]; and Hermann Requardt, Member of the Board of Management at Siemens AG and CEO of Healthcare. The programme was given a more relaxed feel by Cologne’s popular cabaret artist Stefan Reusch, who approached the topic with linguistic acrobatics and intelligent humour.
For the fifth year in a row, DZ Bank entrusted the staging and implementation of its Investment Dialogue to the event marketing experts at Hagen Invent, who also helped Germany’s fourth largest banking group to establish a theme and motto, as well as to select speakers. The successful partnership started in 2009, when the team at the agency proved its expertise to DZ Bank with a brand-new concept for the Investment Dialogue event: since then, the focus of the annual stakeholder dialogue has been an approach that has seen the agency once again make the dialogue – the original core concept – the star of the show. This year, the event was supplemented with statements from the public for the first time, which were presented using various media and were the push-off point for an exciting and lasting discussion that extended far beyond the event itself.
‘The fantastic feedback from the guests at this year’s Investment Dialogue and their exceptional willingness to engage in discussions, even well into the evening, have once again shown that we have developed the ideal format for DZ Bank to stimulate social discourse and to promote dialogue with its stakeholders,’ said Carina Mattern, Senior Project Manager at Hagen Invent.