Two Conferences Worth Your Time: Port of the Future and the CFO Roundtable

Prosody earned speaking invitations at two very different but equally substantive 2026 events: the Port of the Future Conference in Houston (one of the largest, most internationally diverse port conferences in the Western Hemisphere) and the invitation-only K-State/CoBank CFO Roundtable for agricultural-cooperative CFOs. One reaches the global maritime and port community; the other reaches the senior finance leaders who run large ag cooperatives. Prosody presented at both — proof that the firm sits at the crossroads of maritime infrastructure and cooperative finance.

Port of the Future: taking the inland river story to Houston

Port of the Future is an international symposium focused on creating and revitalizing the nation’s ports and infrastructure across maritime, air, land, and cyber domains, convening leaders from more than 60 seaports across the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. Since its 2020 inception it has grown into one of the largest port conferences in the Western Hemisphere, with keynote speakers including U.S. Coast Guard commandants, CISA directors, and major port executives.

Prosody Managing Partner Charles R. “Bob” Brettell presented as part of a session titled “Strategic Inland Ports of the Future,” using the Rock Island Regional Port District as a case study, joined by Robert (Bob) Sinkler of the Corn Belt Ports and Shawn Creamer of the Rock Island Arsenal Defense Alliance. The session made a pointed case: rural regional inland ports aren’t just freight movers — they’re national-security assets, and federal investment in their infrastructure through programs like PIDP aligns directly with the Executive Order on Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance and its likely legislative vehicle, the SHIPS Act. (For the substance of that argument, see our companion piece, Strategic Inland Ports of the Future.)

Why does an inland-river firm belong at a global port conference? Because the conversations happening in that room — infrastructure investment, federal grant programs, security, and the technology reshaping how ports move goods — are the same ones we have every day with our port-district clients on the Upper Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. Given how strained federal maritime policy has become, industry-led convenings like this have stepped into the vacuum, and the inland river community has a seat at that table if it shows up and claims it.

The K-State/CoBank CFO Roundtable: a two-fer

The CFO Roundtable is an invitation-only educational forum for CFOs of large marketing and farm-supply cooperatives, hosted by Kansas State University’s Arthur Capper Cooperative Center (ACCC) — one of the few university centers in the country dedicated exclusively to cooperative business education — with sponsorship from CoBank. The ACCC’s flagship CEO Roundtable launched in 1996 in partnership with CoBank; three additional programs grew out of it, one of which is this CFO conference. The curriculum wasn’t reverse-engineered from a generic finance event — it was built from the ground up for this audience.

Prosody was honored to have two partners invited to present — on completely different topics. That reflects how the Roundtable works: it pairs the right subject matter with the right presenter rather than filling a single slot. One of those talks is on AI and the other on alternative finance — a fitting pairing for a firm that helps cooperatives think about both the tools and the capital that will define their next decade. (Our AI talk gets its own spotlight — see the companion piece on Howard Blazzard’s session.)

The format is deliberately tight: an invitation-only peer group of senior cooperative CFOs, where conversations move faster and go deeper because everyone is running organizations of similar scale and complexity — patronage allocation, retained earnings, commodity-risk hedging, member equity, and cooperative-specific tax and accounting rules. It’s one of the few venues in the country purpose-built for this role.

Related reading

• Strategic Inland Ports of the Future
• AI That Actually Ships: Howard Blazzard
• The SHIPS Act: A Maritime Workforce Strategy

Presenting at events like these is part of how Prosody stays at the leading edge of both maritime infrastructure and cooperative finance — and brings what we learn back to our clients. Talk to us about your project →