An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Act­ing Prime Min­is­ter and Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said yes­ter­day that even though cy­ber­at­tacks and hack­ing have reared their head again, the gov­ern­ment’s cash­less and dig­i­tal agen­da must press on.

Im­bert made the com­ments at the an­nu­al In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nance and Ac­count­ing Con­fer­ence host­ed by the In­sti­tute of Char­tered Ac­coun­tants (ICATT) at the Hy­att Re­gency.

While he did not ex­pand on the cy­ber­at­tack is­sue, which saw the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of Trinidad and To­ba­go (TSTT) be­ing hacked last month, Im­bert in­di­cat­ed the dig­i­tal agen­da must progress or else the coun­try will be left be­hind com­pared to oth­er coun­tries.

“Our over­all am­bi­tion is to make as many cit­i­zens as pos­si­ble and busi­ness­es knowl­edge­able and com­fort­able with dig­i­tal bank­ing and dig­i­tal pay­ment so­lu­tions to keep pace with the rest of the world,” the fi­nance min­is­ter said.

On the is­sue of the fi­nan­cial in­clu­sion land­scape, Im­bert iden­ti­fied that in this area there is still a lot of work to be done, as the sta­tis­tics re­veal that 72 per cent of busi­ness­es do not have a busi­ness bank ac­count, 88 per cent of busi­ness­es do not ac­cept dig­i­tal pay­ments, and 55 per cent of in­di­vid­u­als do not now have the knowl­edge to use mo­bile or web on­line bank­ing.

This dig­i­tal di­vide re­mains a con­cern, as not all cit­i­zens have equal ac­cess to the ben­e­fits of dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.

He said that in fis­cal 2024, 14 more new e-ser­vices on the Sin­gle Elec­tron­ic Win­dow plat­form are ex­pect­ed to be launched.

“Our e-gov­ern­ment ini­tia­tives, to­geth­er with in­creased on­line bank­ing, and dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools have stream­lined process­es, re­duc­ing bu­reau­crat­ic in­ef­fi­cien­cies and trans­ac­tion costs. This, in turn, has boost­ed our com­pet­i­tive­ness on a glob­al scale.

“And de­spite the prob­lems caused by cy­ber­at­tacks, we can’t stop now. We must sim­ply in­stall bet­ter cy­ber pro­tec­tion, main­tain greater safe­guards and far bet­ter sys­tems for deal­ing with is­sues and in­form­ing the pub­lic when prob­lems oc­cur,” Im­bert re­vealed.

En­er­gy prices

The act­ing prime min­is­ter not­ed that over the last 10 years, glob­al en­er­gy prices con­tin­ue to dis­play ex­treme volatil­i­ty, which cre­ates sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenges for the econ­o­my of this coun­try.

Fur­ther, he said when the Is­rael-Hamas war be­gan one month ago, peo­ple who are not stu­dents of the fac­tors that af­fect oil prices here and abroad, pre­dict­ed that oil would quick­ly cross US$100 per bar­rel.

Yet, Im­bert in­di­cat­ed that yes­ter­day morn­ing, the price of oil was around US$75 a bar­rel, af­ter cross­ing US$90 a bar­rel at the end of Sep­tem­ber, while nat­ur­al gas prices re­main de­pressed.

“The rea­sons for this in­clude slow­ing de­mand for con­sumer goods in the US, un­cer­tain­ty over growth in Chi­na, and over­sup­ply of oil by the ma­jor pro­duc­ers, wip­ing out the up­ward pres­sure on prices caused by the two wars. But it is such an un­cer­tain en­vi­ron­ment that oil may cross US$90 again in a few months,” he ex­plained.

In the mean­time, Im­bert said while the oil gi­ants fight, his min­istry has work to get on.

He added that the gov­ern­ment has been en­gaged in a se­ries of re­forms that seek to strength­en the over­all eco­nom­ic man­age­ment.

“These re­forms are geared to cre­at­ing a sus­tain­able eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment that would ac­com­mo­date the gen­er­a­tion of em­ploy­ment and op­por­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness de­vel­op­ment.”