Greetings from Brussels!

I am writing to you from the home base on the occasion of our 7th annual IAPP Europe Data Protection Congress. What an incredible event we have been having here this year; if you hadn’t heard, we were sold out at 1,500 attendees on site, making DPC the second largest data protection conference in the world after the IAPP Privacy Summit in Washington, DC. We have come a long way: Our first DPC event in Paris had all of 150 attendees.

A couple of acknowledgments of note: Allianz has been awarded the second 2017 winner of its HPE-IAPP Privacy Innovation Award in the category of privacy-operations innovation, following Teleperformance's award last month at the IAPP's Privacy. Security. Risk. event in San Diego, California. One of the largest financial services companies in the world, and headquartered in Munich, Allianz serves more than 86 million customers and has subsidiaries in more than 70 countries. I spoke with Philipp Raether, CPO, of Allianz and some of his privacy team yesterday, and they were delighted with the award. Similarly, attendees were delighted to hear them present on how they put their privacy operations together — it was standing-room only. 

This week, we also announced the appointment of Country Leaders to IAPP Europe to provide high-level membership, privacy stakeholder, and business development support to continue to ensure the organization’s steady growth and success in Ireland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Trevor Hughes, IAPP CEO, and I were delighted to announce Kate Colleary (IRL), Dr Sebastian Kraska (D), Yann Padova (F), Jeroen Terestegge (NL), and Giles Watkins (U.K.) in their respective roles as Country Leaders, and I look forward to working closely with them to further the mission of the IAPP in those countries and beyond. 

This year we have witnessed a significant surge in our European membership. Year-to-date, our regional membership has grown by 75 percent, and our numbers are north of 7,200 members in the EU as of today. As I approach the third anniversary of my tenure as Managing Director of IAPP Europe, the growth curve for the region has been outstanding, and I can only commend our growing community for their faith and trust in our organization. Indeed, as you may know, we are launching our CIPP/E and CIPM exams in both German and French; in a second step, we will be providing our training courseware and additional resources in those languages in early 2018. We even this week launched alternative versions of our home page in French, German and Spanish. 

Let us know what you think!

Last but not least, the revised CIPP/E textbook, “European Data Protection — Law and Practice,” for which Eduardo Ustaran, partner at Hogan Lovells, served as executive editor, was available for the first time here at DPC, and will soon be available on our website — I think a lot of you will be pleased, as I have been inundated with requests for its release in the last weeks. Safe to say, they have been flying out the door of the Square here.

It's been a great couple of days here in Brussels, with much conversation and engagement from the privacy community, and much more to come.