Vietnam Investment Capital Ecosystem Seminar 2026: an investment forum built to run in two languages at once

The seminar ran under the title Hội Thảo Kết Nối — Hệ Sinh Thái Vốn Đầu Tư Vào Việt Nam 2026, hosted by Golden Highway and Silver Nile Global Investment at JW Marriott Saigon on 24 July 2026. The subject was the capital ecosystem for investment into Vietnam, and the audience came from both sides of that sentence — which is what set the central problem of the build.

That problem was language. This was not an event with a Vietnamese programme and a translation service bolted on the side; it had to be legible in Vietnamese and Chinese at the same moment, to people sitting next to each other. The backdrop and the screen carried both languages together rather than alternating, and wireless interpretation headsets were laid at every seat rather than confined to a booth at the back. Nobody in the room was a guest of the second language.

The room was set as a forum rather than a banquet: long tables laid in rows facing the screen, each place carrying a printed name card, with a low riser at the front for a six-person panel. That setting is a deliberate choice for this kind of programme. Rounds are built for talking across a table; rows are built for following a speaker and then turning to a panel, and the evening was structured around both.

Richard D. McClellan, CEO and Executive Director of the Vietnam International Financial Centre in Ho Chi Minh City, presented from the front of the room and then sat on the panel — the same voice in both formats, which keeps a programme from feeling like two separate events stapled together.

A signature wall stood at the entrance and filled up over the course of the evening, and the programme closed with a gift presentation on the riser and group photographs at that wall. Those two things are the same device used twice: they give an arriving guest something to do in the first minute, and a reason to still be in the room at the last one.