This week, we kicked off our 2026 Financial Services Peer Roundtable, hosted by Jamie Ryan, SVP. We brought together collaboration, workplace experience, and IT/Voice leaders from across the financial services industry. The goal was simple: create an open, candid environment where peers could discuss challenges, compare approaches, and together identify the trends shaping the future of the financial services workplace.
The result was an energizing, honest conversation—one that left us grateful to have customers willing to share, learn, and build community together. This session is the first of many as we plan to meet quarterly with our Financial Roundtable and roll out similar gatherings for additional verticals.
The Realities of the Meeting Room: RTO Pressure + Multi-Vendor Complexity
Return-to-office mandates are reshaping how financial institutions think about their physical collaboration spaces. Many leaders shared that they still lack the data needed to understand:
- Whether their current spaces can support the increasing in-office demand
- How meeting rooms are being used (one or two or 10 people)
- The trend of room-ghosting and how that affects scheduling
Even when some utilization data exists, via scheduling, occupancy sensors, platform analytics (and maybe some facial recognition), insights are often fragmented, inconsistent, or too limited to drive planning decisions.
At the same time, meeting rooms themselves have grown more complex. This group of organizations operated across a mix of:
- Webex
- Microsoft Teams
- Zoom
- Various hardware vendors such as Neat, Logitech, and Q-Sys
Cloud Observability Has Become Foundational
As institutions migrate from on-prem platforms to cloud calling and collaboration ecosystems, observability is no longer a “nice-to-have”—it’s a critical layer of operational risk management.
Leaders emphasized the importance of:
- Real-time experience monitoring
- Early detection of degradations
- Proactive Synthetic testing to confirm meeting rooms are ready for the day
Rising Security Concerns, Especially Around Voice
Security was a recurring theme, with specific concern around:
- Call spoofing
- Verifying authenticity of inbound communications
- Ensuring secure, compliant interactions across mixed environments
Participants stressed the importance of proactive detection, not just awareness after an incident.
Why These Conversations Matter
Sessions like this remind us that no organization is navigating these challenges alone. Hearing leaders openly compare pain points and share learnings reflects the incredible strength of this customer community.
We are excited to have customers who are willing to collaborate not just with us, but with each other. Their willingness to share insights helps us build better products, solve bigger problems, and support the industries that rely on dependable collaboration experiences every day.
We’ll be expanding this program to additional industries in the coming months, building a community where shared challenges become shared ideas and ultimately shared solutions. If you’re a Nectar customer and are interested in participating in the next roundtable, please reach out to Jamie Ryan (jryan@nectarcorp.com)
