Made in Europe: what our location means for your exams in practice

When we say 'made in Europe', we do not mean that we put a flag on our website. We mean that the people who supervise your exams are in Europe. That the data generated during those exams stays in Europe. That the company behind the service is built, registered, and operated in Europe. And that all of this is not a marketing decision – it is the foundation of how we work.

What that looks like in practice is worth explaining. Because 'European' can mean many things. We would rather show what it means for us.

Every proctor who supervises a Certory exam works from Europe. They are trained to European standards of professionalism, privacy awareness, and cultural sensitivity. And they operate within European labour and data protection frameworks.

Certory proctors work in English, German, French, and Italian. That means candidates can go through their onboarding, ask questions, and interact with their proctor in the language your institution offers for your learners. Many proctoring providers offer their service almost exclusively in English – for a German Fachhochschule, a French certification body, or an Italian professional exam, that creates a barrier that has nothing to do with the exam itself.

But there is something else that sets our setup apart, and it is harder to put on a feature list: we actually know our proctors. We work with them. We understand their work environment, we designed the processes and the standards they operate in. This is not an anonymous workforce on the other side of the world – it is a team we collaborate with closely and continuously.

In the proctoring industry, offshore operations are the standard at most large providers. Proctors are often distributed across time zones with little direct oversight from the company that sells the service. That model can easily scale. But it comes at a cost – in motivation, in quality consistence, in the speed and depth of feedback loops.

And it comes at a cost in something else: trust. A proctor is observing a person in a genuinely vulnerable situation – taking an exam at home, often with a lot at stake. That is a responsibility. And we believe that responsibility is better placed with people you know, people you work with, and people whose standards you can directly shape and verify.

Certory is headquartered in Germany. That means we do not adapt to European regulation from the outside – we are built within it. All data generated during a Certory exam – video recordings, proctor notes, identity documents, session logs – is stored in data centres in Europe. Our processes are designed under GDPR governance from ground up.

We do not collect biometric data, and we do not use AI-based behavioural analysis. This is a deliberate architectural choice, not a workaround. With the EU AI Act coming into effect, this matters even more. Proctoring systems that use AI for behavioural analysis or biometric recognition face new obligations around transparency, risk classification, and documentation. Because Certory does not use these technologies, our compliance path is fundamentally different – and, we believe, simpler.

We are not retrofitting European compliance. We are built at the heart of it. This article is not a legal assessment. Whether a specific institution's use of any proctoring solution is compliant depends on the institution's own context, and that is a question for legal professionals. What we can say is what our own architecture looks like – and why we made the choices we made.

For many institutions, choosing a proctoring provider is not just a pedagogical or operational decision. It is a data protection decision, a reputational decision, and sometimes a political one.

Questions like 'where does the data go?', 'who has access?', 'who is actually watching our candidates?', 'what happens if a candidate files a complaint?', 'can our candidates interact with the proctor in our institution's language?' – these are not hypothetical. They have everyday implications.

Having clear, honest, simple answers to these questions is not a nice-to-have. It is a prerequisite. And that is exactly what a European setup is designed to provide: answers that do not require footnotes, exceptions, or 'it depends'.

We could have built Certory differently. We could have used cheaper infrastructure elsewhere, outsourced proctoring to other time zones, and adapted to European rules from the outside. Many providers do exactly that, and for their context it may work.

But we believe that when you supervise exams for European institutions, with European candidates, under European regulation – then being European is not an afterthought. It is the starting point.

Made in Europe is not a label we put on. It is where we come from, how we work, and why institutions trust us with what matters most.