Brightstar's New Zealand CFO Summit runs as a one-day, dual-stream conference in Auckland on 8 September 2026 with a fifteen-plus speaker line-up. The organiser says the next New Zealand CFO Awards will not be held until 2027.
Brightstar's New Zealand CFO Summit returns to Auckland on 8 September 2026 as a one-day conference, and it comes with a notable change. The awards dinner that has traditionally capped the day is not part of the 2026 programme. The organiser's event page states plainly that the next New Zealand CFO Awards will be in 2027, making the 2026 edition a summit only.
The published agenda opens with registration and coffee at 8:30am, a mihi whakatau at 8:45am and a welcome from the chair, Madison Malone of Business with Madison, at 8:55am. The opening keynote at 9:00am is from Merriden Varrall PhD, chief executive and founder of vantage geopol, on what fragmentation across the US, China and the Indo-Pacific means for New Zealand decision-makers. Brightstar's agenda closes the day at 5:10pm with the chair's summary remarks, followed by a networking reception.
From late morning the conference splits into two concurrent streams: a main plenary track and a Finance and Technology stream with its own MC, Jasmine Sim, chief financial officer of Speirs Finance Group. The 2026 theme is "Building resilience and leading in an ever-changing world", and the sessions Brightstar lists cover the move from the CFO chair to the boardroom, raising capital for growth, AI-driven payment fraud, data strategy and governance, sustainability and New Zealand's energy constraints, psychosocial risk, and digital trust and cyber resilience. The closing keynote is from Melissa Crawford, director of Tech with Heart.
Named speakers on the organiser's agenda include Lyle Brady, group chief supply chain officer at the Warehouse Group; Scott Maud, CFO of Halter; Wendi Bains, chief safety and sustainability officer at Fletcher Building; Kirsten Patterson, chief executive of the Institute of Directors; Michelle Teirney, deputy chief executive finance and business insights at Hato Hone St John; Phil Ross, chief information security officer at Air New Zealand; and Manvi Madan, head of data governance at SkyCity Entertainment Group. Brightstar has not published a delegate number for 2026.
The summit is produced by Brightstar, which its own website identifies as a trading name of Conferenz Ltd. The company operates from B:Hive at Smales Farm in Takapuna and runs a large commercial conference, awards and training portfolio spanning finance and accounting, technology and cyber, health, education, law and governance, energy and construction, and marketing.
The CFO Summit sits in what Brightstar calls its Key Sector Events, the signature summit-and-awards properties it groups alongside the New Zealand CIO Innovation Summit & Awards and the Primary Industries New Zealand Summit & Awards. Within the finance and accounting stable it runs beside the long-standing One Stop Update for the Accountant in Business and the Management Accountant Conference. The 2025 edition ran at Cordis on 4 September and finished with a 7:00pm CFO Awards ceremony dinner, so the day-plus-evening pairing is well established even though it is not repeating this year.
Brightstar directs anyone interested in entering or nominating for the next awards to email its awards team, which will share category information, entry details and timeline. No 2027 categories or dates have been published, and the organiser has not said why the cycle has moved. It has kept the 2025 winners visible through a CFO Awards alumni page, and several 2026 speakers carry past award recognition, which is the sort of alumni loop that keeps an awards brand alive across a fallow year.
The audience is senior finance: chief financial officers, deputy CFOs, finance directors and heads of finance, with the technology stream widening the room to finance-adjacent data, digital and risk leaders. Brightstar says it will offer a limited number of scholarship tickets to CFOs and senior finance leaders from not-for-profit organisations, or from organisations that are not able to fund attendance, applied for through a form on the event page.
Here the record is not clean. The banner at the top of Brightstar's 2026 event page reads "8 September 2026 | NZICC, Auckland", while the venue block further down the same page gives Cordis, Auckland, 83 Symonds Street, Grafton. Meeting Newz's 2026 events calendar lists the summit at Cordis, Auckland, and Brightstar's own event-listing cards give only "Auckland". Anyone planning travel or accommodation around the date should confirm the room with the organiser.
Cordis, Auckland is the city-fringe conference hotel the summit has used before. The hotel's own meetings pages describe the Great Room as the largest pillar-free ballroom in Auckland, backed by purpose-built Gallery meeting rooms, with guest accommodation in the same building, which is the combination that makes it a default for one-day corporate conferences that end in a dinner. It sits on Symonds Street in Grafton, on the ridge immediately above the CBD and adjacent to the motorway and the hospital and university precinct.
A single-day, single-city corporate conference with a dual-stream agenda and a fifteen-plus speaker line-up is the workhorse format of the New Zealand business events calendar, and the CFO Summit is one of its better-established examples. The 2026 pause on the awards matters commercially, because it removes a gala evening, and the catering, staging and full ballroom sitting that go with it, from an Auckland September that is already dense. Meeting Newz's calendar puts the Climate Change & Business Conference at the Viaduct Events Centre on 7 and 8 September, the New Zealand Institute of Architects National Conference at the Aotea Centre from 8 September, and Brightstar's own Cyber Security Risk Conference in the same window. For Auckland venues, that concentration is the opportunity and the constraint in the same week.
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