Global Banking Markets: HubSpot as the central source of truth

The Full Story

Global Banking Markets organises senior-level financial industry conferences and festivals across multiple countries. The audiences are senior executives, sponsors and industry innovators — commercially valuable, time-poor and used to being treated well. The operational reality behind the scenes was a long way from the polish of the events themselves.

Before the project, the technology stack had grown organically over years. A legacy CRM sat at the centre but couldn't represent the actual shape of the business. Sponsor contracts lived in one system, attendee data in another, session and speaker information in spreadsheets, and website content in a CMS disconnected from all of it. Every change — a new sponsor, an updated session, a VIP invite — required someone to update several places by hand.

The brief was not just to replace the CRM. It was to rebuild the operational backbone of the business around a single source of truth, so that every team — sales, marketing, operations, finance — was working from the same underlying data.

We chose HubSpot as the platform and designed a relational data model using custom objects for Attendees, Sponsors, Festivals and Events. This was the critical decision: rather than forcing event data into a standard contacts-and-companies shape, the model mirrors how the business actually thinks — events belong to festivals, sessions belong to events, speakers are associated with sessions, sponsors are tied to specific activations. Everything links back cleanly.

On top of this foundation, we built a secure client portal for sponsors and speakers. They can register themselves, upload their own details, manage sponsorship information and handle staff and VIP invites — all writing directly back into HubSpot. The manual back-and-forth of email chains and spreadsheet chasing simply stopped.

The website was rebuilt to pull its content directly from HubSpot. When a new sponsor is confirmed, a session is updated, or a speaker is added, the change appears on the public site automatically — no manual CMS edits, no version drift. The website became a live view of CRM data rather than a separate asset that needed to be kept in sync.

Behind the scenes, more than 500 automated workflows and thousands of daily API calls keep the operation running. Registration systems and event management tools integrate bidirectionally, so data flows in both directions without human intervention. Session management, speaker associations, sponsor deliverables and revenue tracking all happen inside one connected system.

The transformation is as much organisational as technical. With HubSpot as the source of truth, finance and leadership gained real-time visibility into revenue and sponsorship performance. The operations team stopped spending time on manual admin and started spending it on the things that actually grow the business — relationship building, sponsor experience and delivering the events themselves.