PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

The pri­vate sec­tor is be­ing en­cour­aged to play a role in the de­vel­op­ment of T&T’s dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

This was a com­mon view shared dur­ing a hy­brid pan­el dis­cus­sion ti­tled “The Dig­i­tal Econ­o­my: Rewiring the Ana­log Econ­o­my to Achieve Durable Ben­e­fits,” host­ed by The Cen­tral Bank to com­mence the Bank’s an­nu­al re­search re­view sem­i­nar.

Deputy gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank, Do­ri­an Noel, not­ed that as the CBTT ac­knowl­edged the grow­ing glob­al trend to­ward a cash­less so­ci­ety, it was nec­es­sary to en­sure the wider pub­lic was not dis­en­fran­chised by such a shift.

“In 2025, the val­ue of glob­al e-com­merce is pro­ject­ed to reach US$4.8 tril­lion and it is ex­pect­ed to sur­pass US$151 tril­lion by 2034. To put this in con­text, the val­ue of the e-com­merce trans­ac­tions cur­rent­ly sur­pass­es the GDP of ma­jor emerg­ing mar­kets such as Brazil and In­dia. Elec­tron­ic trans­ac­tions have be­come more promi­nent do­mes­ti­cal­ly, am­pli­fied by the pan­dem­ic-in­duced re­stric­tions glob­al­ly,” Noel said.

The cen­tral banker asked the at­ten­dees at the sem­i­nar how does the coun­try ad­dress the is­sue of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

“Care­ful con­sid­er­a­tions must be giv­en to the best ap­proach to ad­dress cit­i­zens who may be po­ten­tial­ly com­pro­mised by the de­vel­op­ment of the dig­i­tal econ­o­my, such as the el­der­ly and those from less priv­i­leged so­cioe­co­nom­ic back­grounds,” Noel said.

He al­so said con­cerns about cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty need­ed to be ad­dressed. Sev­er­al ma­jor lo­cal com­pa­nies have been sub­ject to cy­ber­at­tacks in re­cent years, such as TSTT and Massy Stores.

He asked, “How do we en­sure our cy­ber re­silien­cy on an on­go­ing ba­sis. Para­mount im­por­tance must be giv­en to build­ing pub­lic con­fi­dence in our abil­i­ty to de­fend against cy­ber­at­tacks and dig­i­tal virus­es, which not on­ly threat­en the dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture and our per­son­al da­ta but al­so the eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty.”

How­ev­er, Denyse White, deputy na­tion­al chief dig­i­tal of­fi­cer at the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Ar­ti­fi­cial In­tel­li­gence, said im­ple­ment­ing a dig­i­tal econ­o­my in Trinidad and To­ba­go would not be as sim­ple as copy­ing a mod­el from a Eu­ro­pean coun­try, as she not­ed T&T’s unique busi­ness struc­ture.

White said, “We are a na­tion of small busi­ness­es, so we can­not use the same types of mea­sure­ments that are need­ed glob­al­ly to as­sess what is go­ing on. But with that be­ing said, how do we scale up our glob­al busi­ness­es? And it can’t be busi­ness as usu­al. Even sit­ting with­in the gov­ern­ment, we look at some pos­si­ble pol­i­cy levers that we have to pull to be able to stim­u­late and crank that en­gine.”

She said the gov­ern­ment can­not do it alone, but needs to be able to part­ner with the pri­vate sec­tor, which has the ex­pe­ri­ence and has made bet­ter mea­sure­ments in terms of re­turn on in­vest­ment.

White point­ed out that dig­i­tal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tems orig­i­nat­ed in the Eu­ro­pean bank­ing sys­tem, not the gov­ern­ment.

“It’s one that has been ac­cept­ed and it came out of the pri­vate sec­tor. So again, let’s col­lab­o­rate to make that hap­pen,” she said.

White not­ed that the oth­er pil­lar that needs to be looked at is the idea of in­clu­sion.

“So MSMEs, SMEs, these are the guys who are the main en­gine of what they’re do­ing. And if we want to stim­u­late ac­tiv­i­ty, then we need to be look­ing at the low­er lev­els in terms of busi­ness size,” White said.

En­tre­pre­neur and founder of Pub­lic Good Stu­dio, Agyei Archer, ex­plained there were sev­er­al chal­lenges faced by small busi­ness­es in terms of scal­ing dig­i­tal busi­ness­es such as busi­ness un­der­stand­ing, pub­lic sec­tor sup­port, and fi­nan­cial in­fra­struc­ture.

Giv­en these chal­lenges at this point, there is a need for small busi­ness­es to fo­cus on the nuts and bolts of busi­ness op­er­a­tions be­fore em­brac­ing the tech­nol­o­gy. He al­so stressed that poli­cies were re­quired for the tran­si­tion to oc­cur.