The Interactive Advertising Bureau is taking its vendor diligence infrastructure global. After a successful U.S. rollout in 2024, the IAB is expanding its Diligence Platform into the European Union, beginning with a July 1 launch in Germany in partnership with Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft (BVDW), one of the IAB’s largest EU member organizations.
The move signals a broader push to standardize how adtech companies manage, document, and share compliance assessments under the EU General Data Protection Regulation and other evolving digital regulations — and comes as enforcement pressure on advertisers and their technology partners continues to intensify across the bloc.
What Is the IAB and Why Does It Matter for Privacy?
The Interactive Advertising Bureau is the leading trade association for the digital advertising industry, representing more than 700 media companies, brands, agencies, and technology platforms. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in New York, the IAB develops technical standards, industry guidelines, and public policy positions that shape how digital advertising is bought, sold, and measured globally.
For the privacy and compliance community, the IAB is best known as the steward of the Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF) — the dominant industry standard for obtaining and communicating user consent across the programmatic advertising ecosystem. The TCF governs how publishers, consent management platforms, and adtech vendors signal user consent choices under the GDPR, and has been the subject of significant regulatory scrutiny, including a landmark ruling by Belgium’s Data Protection Authority.
Beyond the TCF, the IAB publishes technical specifications such as the OpenRTB standard for real-time bidding, the U.S. Privacy String for state law compliance, and the Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal guidance. The organization also runs the IAB Tech Lab, a nonprofit that develops and maintains the technical infrastructure underlying much of the digital advertising industry’s privacy compliance architecture.
In short, when the IAB introduces a new compliance tool or framework, the industry pays attention — because IAB standards tend to become the baseline against which regulators, auditors, and counterparties evaluate compliance readiness.
The IAB Diligence Platform: What It Does
Launched in the United States in 2024 and powered by compliance technology vendor SafeGuard Privacy, the IAB Diligence Platform is designed to eliminate the fragmented, duplicative process by which adtech companies assess and document the privacy compliance of their vendors, partners, and counterparties.
Under the current status quo, a publisher vetting a supply-side platform, or an advertiser evaluating a demand-side platform, must issue its own privacy request for information (RFI), collect documentation, and manage responses independently — a process repeated hundreds of times across the ecosystem with no shared infrastructure or standardized questionnaire format. The Diligence Platform collapses that redundancy by allowing IAB members to complete a single set of standardized diligence assessments and securely share them with any counterparty on the platform.
Questionnaires are role-specific, tailored to each entity’s position within the adtech supply chain — publisher, advertiser, agency, SSP, DSP, or data provider. The platform also incorporates secure document and evidence management and vendor-specific data flow modules adapted for applicable regulations.
SafeGuard Privacy Co-founder and CEO Richy Glassberg framed the platform’s value proposition plainly:
“Standards equals scale, and there is no reason for everybody [in the industry] to go write their own privacy [requests for information]. Solving the fragmentation is critical for the industry. Everybody asked for this. [IAB members in the EU] saw the success in the U.S. and they wanted to replicate that in Europe.”
Since the U.S. launch, approximately 800 of the 1,100 adtech firms invited to join have signed onto the platform — an adoption rate that gave IAB leadership confidence in the EU expansion.
The EU Launch: Germany First, Pan-European by Design
The July 1 German launch is a partnership between the IAB and BVDW, which will make the platform available to its EU member base. Critically, however, the platform is designed as a pan-European tool — not a Germany-only product.
“This product we are releasing is a pan-European product because the GDPR is a pan-European law,” Glassberg said. “People are going to be able to use [it] for their vendors outside of Germany as well.”
BVDW CEO Carsten Rasner emphasized the timeliness of the initiative given the pace of regulatory change across the EU:
“Increasing regulatory requirements and the growing complexity of digital advertising ecosystems call for a more standardized and collaborative approach. With the IAB Diligence Platform, we are establishing a new standard for compliance matters in the German market, making responsibilities more transparent and strengthening both efficiency and trust within the industry.”
IAB Executive Vice President and General Counsel Michael Hahn pointed to enforcement reality as the business case for adoption. Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information issued a 45 million euro fine to Vodafone last year — one of the clearest signals yet that the bloc’s data protection authorities are moving aggressively against advertising-related violations.
“We partnered with SafeGuard Privacy to ensure marketers have a solution that’s comprehensive, defensible, and industry-specific,” Hahn said. “It combines legal, business, and data flow questions with specific questions designed for publishers, advertisers, agencies, [supply-side platforms], [demand-side platforms] and beyond.”
Certification Program Through Nexidia
Alongside the platform launch, BVDW is partnering with Nexidia to offer a formal certification program for EU adtech firms operating in the German market. The certification is designed to provide a recognized, third-party-audited standard for demonstrating GDPR compliance using data drawn from the Diligence Platform.
Nexidia Co-Founder and Managing Partner Christopher Reher described the certification’s purpose:
“Our goal is to bring greater consistency and transparency to how privacy compliance is managed across the ecosystem. By introducing a certification-backed framework tailored to the German market, which ties to the IAB Diligence Platform, we are helping organizations navigate GDPR requirements more effectively while reducing duplication and operational burden.”
Glassberg drew a distinction between the local certification and the platform’s broader geographic reach: “Nexidia is going to be offering a certification in German, and that is very much a local market certification that a third-party auditor will be doing. But this product we are releasing is a pan-European product.”
Three New AI Features — All Human-in-the-Loop
The EU-facing Diligence Platform includes three newly embedded AI tools, each built with a human-in-the-loop requirement for all final operational decisions. None of the tools are designed to replace attorney or privacy professional judgment — they are built to reduce the time those professionals spend on mechanical review tasks.
- Privacy Assist AI: SafeGuard Privacy’s team authored the underlying prompts based on adtech business requirements and applicable U.S. state privacy laws. Members can input their privacy notice and other required documents and, within approximately 12 minutes, receive suggested answers and comments for 75% of the platform’s questions.
- Privacy RFI: A tool designed to help customers align their own privacy RFIs so they can respond adequately to requests from non-IAB members operating outside the platform’s standardized framework.
- Proprietary AI Model / Chatbot: An AI model trained on proprietary platform data that allows members to query aggregated responses across their vendor relationships. For example, an adtech firm could ask which of its vendors have indicated consent to transfer sensitive data under applicable state or EU law — and receive a synthesized answer drawn from existing RFI data.
Glassberg was candid about the boundaries of the AI tooling:
“It’s very hard to build the right AI for the legal world. Our AI never does the work for you, but the user experience is built to make it easy for a lawyer or privacy professional to review all of the information they would put on the platform. All of our AI products are built with enterprise software in our secure environment, there’s no data sharing, so your data is always protected.”
Built to Evolve: The Digital Omnibus Factor
With the EU’s Digital Omnibus package still under active negotiation — a process that could reshape obligations across the GDPR, Digital Markets Act, and related legislation — platform longevity depends on adaptability. Glassberg framed the Diligence Platform explicitly as a living compliance infrastructure rather than a static product:
“This is a living, breathing platform. As things change, the platform changes. There are all kinds of workflow within the platform that let either a vendor or a host or a participant know something has changed with a law.”
That design philosophy mirrors how the U.S. version of the platform has responded to the rapid expansion of state privacy laws — continuously updating questionnaires and data flow modules as new statutes take effect and enforcement guidance accumulates.
What This Means for Compliance Officers and Privacy Professionals
For GDPR-obligated organizations operating in the adtech supply chain, the IAB Diligence Platform’s EU launch represents a meaningful shift in how vendor due diligence can be operationalized at scale. Key implications include:
- Reduced duplication: Organizations that join the platform complete their diligence documentation once and share it across counterparties — eliminating the need to respond to dozens of bespoke RFIs annually.
- Audit-ready documentation: The platform’s evidence management infrastructure is designed to produce defensible records for regulatory review, not just internal tracking.
- Certification as a trust signal: For German-market participants, the Nexidia certification program provides a third-party-validated compliance credential that can be shared with partners, clients, and regulators.
- AI-assisted, not AI-decided: The embedded AI tools reduce mechanical review burden while keeping attorneys and privacy professionals in the decision seat — an architecture that aligns with current regulatory expectations around high-risk automated processing.
With the certification program launching in tandem and the platform’s pan-European scope extending to vendor relationships across the continent, the July 1 rollout is likely to draw attention well beyond the German market.
How Captain Compliance Can Help
Navigating GDPR vendor diligence, adtech data flows, and emerging EU digital regulation requires both technical fluency and legal precision. Captain Compliance helps privacy professionals, compliance officers, and in-house legal teams build the frameworks, documentation, and vendor oversight programs they need to meet regulatory expectations — and demonstrate it when it counts.
