No. An English moderation needs confident business English and stage craft, not a passport from London or New York. What matters is whether the moderator can host freely, listen and react spontaneously, and whether she can switch languages when the room is mixed.
The fallacy behind the native speaker question
Many organisers use "native speaker" as a seal of quality because they do not trust their own judgement of English. Behind this sits a misunderstanding about the audience. At international business events in Germany, most people in the room speak English as a foreign language themselves: engineers from Stuttgart, buyers from Milan, developers from Warsaw. This audience understands clear, calmly spoken international English better than fast, idiomatic English from everyday London. An English moderation almost never fails because of accent. It fails when someone reads from a script because free speech is missing, when no real follow-up question works in the Q&A, or when the industry's technical terms do not sit. All of that is craft plus language confidence, not origin.
The real test is the switch
German events rarely run entirely in English. Usually the room is mixed: one part international, one part German speaking, speakers in both languages. The valuable skill then is not flawless English but the clean switch: introducing in English, summarising the German answer, leading the panel bilingually without losing pace. A monolingual native speaker cannot deliver exactly that. Jasmin Wölke hosted the Bosch Global Sales Summit, a corporate reference with over 500 participants from 40 countries, in English for an audience that had mostly not grown up with the language. Her English comes from corporate projects and international committee work: precisely the register in which such events take place.
What you can do now
Test candidates against practice, not against their CV. Watch video material in both languages and look for unscripted moments rather than polished passages. Hold the preliminary call in English: after ten minutes you will know more than from any self-description. Clarify your industry's key terms, then fix the language plan. When an event should run entirely in English is covered in moderation in English; how the switching works in practice is shown in bilingual moderation explained. Profiles and use cases are gathered in the hub English speaking moderator.