Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on August 2, 2021
6 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
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By Vanessa Lovatt, Chief Evangelist at Glisser
In some industries, company events represent an added ‘nice-to-have’ element and, in others, they are fundamental. Across the financial services sector in particular, in-person events have shown their value time and again. They help to educate clients and nurture relationships, upskill teams, provide vital market insights to investors and reinforce company culture, all while creating a shared sense of mission and purpose across vast, dispersed workforces.
So, when the pandemic hit and in-person events were suddenly off-limits, event planners within financial institutions faced a big problem; how to shift their year-long events programmes into the virtual domain and salvage months of careful planning and preparation. Event technology came to the rescue and it now has huge growth potential, with the global virtual events market expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 23.7% from 2021 to 2028 from its 2020 value of USD 94.04 billion.
But as is so often the case with emerging technologies, rapid adoption quickly exposes software shortcomings. This is a particular problem for organisations which operate in highly regulated industries, which explains why the financial services sector is often a comparatively late adopter of new technology.
In the case of event tech, organisations are starting to recognise that their decision to move events programmes online has left them facing a raft of potential security and privacy issues.
This is not just about the growing number of vulnerabilities being uncovered within prominent event tech platforms (although clearly that’s a significant concern). It’s about a broader range of data governance challenges, many of which have been overlooked as providers rushed to capitalise on the surge in demand for their event technology.
Retaining control of event attendance
Perhaps the most obvious issue is how events are accessed. There’s a balance to be struck between giving attendees a ‘frictionless’ registration and login experience and making sure that only authorised attendees are able to show up and get in. This is particularly pertinent if it’s an internal company event or market sensitive information is scheduled to be shared. Unfortunately, too many event tech providers have prioritised the former, which is one reason why there have been so many media stories about online gate crashers over the past 12 months.
At a physical event, the combination of registration desks and security personnel to determine who comes through the door. For financial institutions, this approach needs to be replicated for online attendees too, which means that their event tech must, at the very least, support PIN code or password access.
Of course, passwords, like delegate badges, can be passed around. Fortunately, some event tech providers offer attendee whitelisting functionality, an essential feature that allows organisers to restrict access to only approved email addresses, social IDs or unique event IDs, with limits to how many times a delegate can sign in with their whitelisted ID.
Retaining control of event content
The second issue to be aware of is the need to secure the event content being delivered. Just because a presentation is being made online rather than in a physical auditorium doesn’t mean that the presenter or host organisation is happy for the content to be downloaded ad infinitum or shared across the internet.
It’s much harder to protect intellectual property in the virtual domain, but unauthorised event content sharing can be discouraged by choosing an event tech provider that offers content watermarking. This allows event planners to watermark each individual delegate’s details on the slide images they’re seeing, to discourage excessive screen-grabbing and allow better tracing of any leaked content.
Retaining control of attendee data
They won’t advertise this fact, but some event tech providers are much more interested in serving their clients’ event attendees than their clients.
Event planners need to check the privacy policies of every provider they consider, as it’s common for these tech platforms to routinely hoover up all available attendee data, such as registration details, time of sign-in, IP logging, questions asked, polls answered, content viewed, logout times, and more.
Many providers also require all attendees to register with them before they can attend the desired event. This creates the thorny question of who actually ‘owns’ the attendee (and their data) – the financial services institution hosting the event, or the tech provider they’re using to host it?
If this doesn’t appear particularly alarming, consider it in the context of events held in years gone by. Pre-Covid, no right-minded event planner would have been comfortable feeding their attendee details into another company’s data machine, especially not if those attendees were customers or employees.
This type of backdoor user growth is happening all the time. Once a user is signed up, however unwittingly, the event tech provider can harvest their data and market any of their other events to them, including those held by rival financial services organisations.
More recently it has emerged the same challenge around ‘ownership’ is also present around the content of the event with some event tech providers also including co-ownership of all event content that is delivered on the platform.
That’s why every event planner needs to gain a clear understanding of what information will be stored by their chosen event technology provider, for how long and whether attendees and panellists will be made aware of this fact.
Can security promises be substantiated?
Finally, before they roll out third-party event technology, every financial services institution needs to check that the chosen provider is ISO27001 certified or equivalent. This type of security framework goes beyond the bare minimum technical requirements to consider the entire culture of the provider. This includes how they handle and store data, how they consider security within day-to-day processes and what sort of employee education and training they provide.
Across the world, the pandemic continues to prevent a full return to large-scale physical events, whether due to local restrictions, border policies, reduced budgets, or simply attendees’ unwillingness to travel. Indeed, it’s likely that all future company events will be required to have a meaningful online component to cater to the hundreds of thousands of people no longer willing to show up in-person.
Given that these online event attendees are likely to be customers, employees, key partners and stakeholders, it’s in every financial services event planner’s interests to get their head around these emerging security and privacy issues and determine a better strategy for keeping their intellectual property and attendee data safe and secure.
Vanessa Lovatt is Chief Evangelist at Glisser, an award-winning tech platform powering unique company event experiences, anywhere.
Vanessa Lovatt
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