SpeakUp Next 2026: a day of honest conversations and new product innovations

On April 14, 2026, we hosted SpeakUp Next at the ARTIS Groote Museum in Amsterdam. It was the largest event SpeakUp has ever put on, and by some measure, the largest event an ethics and compliance software vendor has organized in Europe.

The day brought together around 100 ethics, compliance, HR, and legal leaders from across Europe for keynotes, panels, a hands-on workshop, and the first public showcase of our newest product innovations. Here is a recap of what happened.

Opening keynote: compliance as a value driver

The day opened with a keynote from SpeakUp CEO, Tim Morss, built around a simple argument: compliance is no longer a back-office function. As regulatory pressure grows and employee expectations shift, ethics and compliance teams are increasingly at the center of how resilient, trustworthy businesses are built. Younger generations hold employers to a higher standard and act on it. That creates a direct link between the quality of your compliance program and your ability to attract and keep the people you want.

The keynote also addressed where compliance technology is going. AI is beginning to shift the work from reactive to preventative: from writing up problems after they surface, to identifying patterns early enough to intervene. The question most teams are sitting with is not whether to use it, but how to build it into their program in a way that strengthens human judgment rather than bypasses it.

Panel: collaboration between HR, compliance, and legal

The first panel brought together senior leaders from ASML, Integrity Bridge, Electrolux Group, and Weisshaar Legal, moderated by Robert Greco, General Counsel at SpeakUp. The conversation focused on a challenge most organizations recognize but few have fully solved: ethical issues do not fit neatly into one function. They require HR, compliance, and legal to work together, with shared clarity about who leads, who inputs, and when to escalate. Without that, investigations slow down and the people who reported lose confidence in the process.

"If we say 'we are from the head office and this is the way of working', you are not going to build trust." - Ann Milstig, People Ethics & Wellbeing Director | Electrolux Group

The panel was candid about what makes this hard in practice. It is not a structural problem. It is a trust problem. When teams operate with different incentives and different definitions of what a good outcome looks like, coordination defaults to territory protection. The organizations doing this well have invested in building genuine relationships between functions, not just shared processes.

"Business leaders are allergic to fluffy text, we need to provide far more clarity and provide less fluffy text" - Sebastiaan Biesheuvel, Chief Ethics Officer, Head of Ethics & Business Integrity and Human Rights | ASML

Interactive workshop: fraud investigation with Ezekiel Ward

Ezekiel Ward of North Star Compliance led an interactive fraud investigation workshop that moved the day from discussion into practice. Attendees worked through a real scenario: making decisions, flagging concerns, and working through the judgment calls that investigations demand. It was not designed to teach a process. It was designed to surface how much individual perspective shapes the way investigators read the same set of facts.

The session generated strong discussion in the room. People came out of it with specific things they would do differently. Compliance skills are not built by reading frameworks. They are built by working through situations where the right answer is not obvious.

Product showcase: the next chapter of the SpeakUp platform

The product showcase gave the room a first look at where SpeakUp is heading. The headline announcement was SpeakUp Paths with Campaigns, a new feature built around a gap compliance teams know well. Employees may understand the policy, acknowledge it, and still not report when something is wrong. Campaigns addresses that by enabling compliance teams to reach employees proactively, at the right moment with the right message, rather than waiting for reports to come in.

We also shared early details on Sienna Insights and Sienna Case Intelligence, two AI-powered developments that point toward a platform handling more of the analytical and operational work automatically. The goal is straightforward: give case managers more time for the decisions that need judgment, and less time on administration that does not. Keep an eye on the SpeakUp website as these new product offerings will be announced once they are available.

"Even though you have your policy and people understand that and acknowledge that, they still don't proactively tell compliance. So this is where our Campaigns solution fits in — making sure you have a more direct connection between disclosures and staff." — Jason Philipsen, Product Marketing Manager | SpeakUp

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Fireside chat with Barry Matthews from Pennon Group

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Barry Matthews, Head of Legal and Company Secretary at Pennon Group, joined us for a fireside chat on what it takes to build a speak-up program that holds up under scrutiny. Pennon operates in the UK water sector, heavily regulated and publicly visible, and Barry has built whistleblowing programs across media, defense, and utilities before arriving there. His approach at Pennon goes beyond reactive case management. He uses speak-up data to track trends, spot concentrations of concern in specific teams or areas, and intervene before situations become crises.

A significant part of the conversation focused on the Ofwat whistleblowing review in 2022, which pushed the UK water sector to raise its standards. Barry treated it as a mandate to rebuild properly rather than a box to tick. His three focus areas: investigator capability, better management information linked to employee relations data, and a platform flexible enough to support a more preventative approach.

"The flexibility of your compliance platform reflects the flexibility of your program. It is worth choosing wisely." — Barry Matthews, Group Deputy General Counsel & Director of the CREWW | Pennon Group

Panel: encouraging people to speak up in the modern workplace

The afternoon panel, moderated by Emily Miner of Ethisphere, brought together compliance leaders from Wolters Kluwer, NXP, and Fugro to discuss what holds people back from reporting and what actually changes it. The data on this is consistent across industries. The top three barriers are fear of retaliation, concern about confidentiality, and doubt that anything will happen as a result. All three are trust problems. They are not solved by better process design or a more prominent hotline poster.

The panel focused on what organizations can do to demonstrate, over time, that speaking up is taken seriously, handled confidentially, and followed through on. That means visible action on reports, clear communication back to reporters where possible, and leadership behavior that matches the stated policy. The panelists were honest about how long that trust takes to build and how quickly a single badly handled case can undo it.

"The top three reasons cited for why people don't speak up are that they fear a lack of confidentiality, they fear retaliation, or they didn't think anything would happen — highlighting a lack of trust." - Emily Miner, Director of Data and Service | Ethisphere

Strengthening trust by making it safe to speak up at SOS Children’s Villages International

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The final session came from Marta Krajewska-Beentjes, Global Safeguarding Project Lead at SOS Children’s Villages International. SOS CVI works with children and families in vulnerable situations across more than 130 countries, operating as a federation where an international office in Vienna sets standards while member associations run independently across different legal contexts, languages, and infrastructure. For an organization with that structure and that responsibility, a reporting system that does not work consistently is not an operational inconvenience. It is a safeguarding failure.

Marta walked through an honest account of where their old system had failed: unable to reflect federated workflows, controlled by the vendor, and increasingly bypassed in favor of informal channels. Early results after transitioning to SpeakUp are strong. 78% of internal users are satisfied or very satisfied, with zero negative ratings. 67% need no day-to-day technical support. AI-powered translation has removed a manual bottleneck that previously slowed multilingual case management. She was also clear about what is still being worked through, which made the session more useful than a standard success story.
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"Technology does not protect people. People do. But the right tools make it possible." — Marta Krajewska-Beentjes, Global Safeguarding Project Lead | SOS Children’s Villages International

Thank you

Thank you to every speaker, panelist, and attendee who joined us in Amsterdam. The conversations across the day were honest, specific, and grounded in real program experience. That is exactly what SpeakUp Next is built for.

If you want to learn more about the product innovations we announced, or talk through how they apply to your program, our team is ready to help.