Cooperation between Portugal and Spain vital to develop Iberia’s digital economy
The Portuguese are increasingly feeling at home in the digital world according to the President of ACEPI – Digital Economy Portugal, Alexandre Nilo who was the opening keynote speaker at the Portugal Digital Summit that took place towards the end of October.
The ACEPI President revealed the findings of a study unveiled for Portugal Digital Week that showed that 88% of the Portuguese population use the internet, and 81% use digital online services, and reminded that Portugal has been a pioneer in many initiatives and public services offer.
Alexandre Nilo said that 57% of the Portuguese shop online, and reminded that “a few years ago we were behind much of the rest of Europe, but since then there has been a huge revolution” adding that companies needed to “boost the continued digitalisation of the Portuguese economy and businesses”.
There was also an opportunity for closer cooperation between Spain and Portugal in the digital market towards developing a digital economy.
Looking at the Iberian market, the potential of 60 million inhabitants needed to be explored jointly by the two countries in developing digital online services, digital commerce, and cloud infrastructures.
On the first day of the two-day Lisbon Portugal Digital Summit on Wednesday, 23 and Thursday 24 October at the Técnico Innovation Centre – the summit, whose slogan this year was ‘AI and Beyond: Shaping Tomorrow’s Digital Landscape’, featured 150 speakers, 1,000 delegates and multiple panels and keynote speakers over three stages – César Tello, the CEO of the Spanish digital association ADIGITAL, said “I think we have an opportunity for Iberia (Portugal and Spain) to join forces and develop the digital economy together, and build a bridge to Latin America”.
Tello also revealed interesting statistics that showed that the digital economy in Spain was growing more than the country’s overall GDP and was therefore a driver of Spain’s economy.
During the opening session of the summit, Luísa Ribeiro Lopes, President of .PT underscored the importance of this collaboration and reminded that running that same day was the 35th Iberian Summit in Faro between Portugal and Spain where the central topic was the oceans, an opportunity where cooperation on digital technology would also have a role to play, and at which 11 protocols was signed between Portugal and Spain by the two Prime Ministers, Luís Montenegro and Pedro Sanchez.
A showcase for girl power in the boardroom
The company .PT is the Portuguese entity responsible for the management, registration and maintenance of .PT domains in Portugal, and was one of the leading women senior management figures to take the stage on the first day of the summit along with Ana Figureiredo, CEO of Altice Portugal, Madalena Talone, Board Member at public bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD), and Ana Paula Reis, Founder and Chairperson of BizTarget (A consultancy that helps companies to grow their business).
On the panel ‘Igniting Innovation to Explore New Business Frontiers’ the focus moved to the role of innovation in expanding the limits of traditional commercial practices at which Madalena Talone (CGD), Ana Paula Reis (BizTarget), and Luisa Ribeiro Lopes (.PT) discussed how companies could foster a culture of accelerated innovation within the current economic and geopolitical backdrop.
Madalena Talone admitted that digital transformation was no easy task and required “courage”. The CGD board member said another important challenge to digital transformation had to do with “galvanising organisations”, arguing that company organisations changed when there was a shared vision on agreed objectives, and that calibrating tolerance and error to open up the field to initiative was also important.
Luisa Ribeiro Lopes (.PT) reminded that people made the changes. “We need people to carry out this digital transformation, in organisations but also in society too,” she said.
“Innovation, Artificial Intelligence and all of these new tools have an impact, not just on organisations, but on our lives, but we have to have the necessary skills to make this transformation”, she added.
.PT – Over 1.8 million domains
The .PT boss also pointed out on opening the summit that 13% of registered domains in Portugal were Spanish – the second largest percentage of registered domains in Portugal after Portuguese entities themselves.
Sharing some statistics for September, Luisa Ribeiro Lopes said .PT had had one of its best years ever. In 1991 when the company started, it had only 7 domains registered on .PT; today it has over 1,800,000 registered domains.
“This means that the entire digital sector has made a spectacular progress since the first modems were introduced, with AI already having a considerable impact on everyone – we all use it,” she said, reminding too that that September was Cybersecurity Month and that cybersecurity was fundamental when in came to operating securely in the digital space.
It was also European Digital Skills Month which was important since “digital cannot exist without people with the skills to develop it”.
The company .PT is based in Lisbon but also has offices in Porto and Viseu, as well as having 200 points distributed across the world so that whenever someone wants a domain “we can get one to them through our DNS.PT system” which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year.
SIBS – Purposes, not just products
On the panel ‘People and Communities at the Centre of the Digital Transition’ Madalena Cascais Tomé (SIBS) said the payments company wasn’t so much about products but purposes: to bring more convenience and security, and despite its clients being businesses in the financial services sector and companies, how SIBS had developed systems that reached “everyone in the population, making their lives easier”.
The SIBS CEO gave the example of the Multibanco network which had democratised payments and brought a range of services to ordinary people to even those more isolated parts of Portugal’s interior.
It was about producing products that everyone could use and not leaving anyone behind. “From payments to financial transactions, SIBS works with partners, particularly in the financial sector, to serve the community”, she said.
“In the interior of the country as well as the (high population density) coastal areas the Multibanco system is not just about withdrawing cash, but rather offering a whole range of payment services to pay taxes to the State and others.
And added: “Now with our smartphone app (MB Way) we have been able to extend these services to more people who can now make payments on the move, making it more convenient for everyone.”
The challenge of retaining talent
Manuel Maria Correia, Country Manager Portugal of DXC – an HP consulting spin-off – discussed the problem of brain drain and talent retention in Portugal but explained that DXC has a team of engineers and aims to create and retain talent.
“In this area there is a great shortage of engineers in Portugal. We have the best universities that turn out excellent graduate engineers compared to other countries internationally, but the size of the Portuguese market does not allow us to be very competitive. And that’s why talent retention remains a challenge”, he admitted.
And added: “This is, like cybersecurity, a problem that is equally common to all of us and this is why companies join forces to create talent attraction programmes. The Upskill programme is a success story, as it reshapes people from other areas for engineering and these types of programmes offer people opportunities to enter this field”.
On the issue of immigration, where in Portugal there was still a certain stigma attached to sector professionals coming from different markets, such as Brazil, despite a shared language, which has an advanced IT and digital ecosystem and good engineers, Manuel Maria Correia sad: “The challenge is to help these people adapt to the country, but despite the challenges, our success rate is very high”.
Community cooperation
Manuel Eanes, Executive Board Member NOS – a Portuguese telco – admitted that in the 5G era not much had been done of value for people and communities.
NOS had created a structure to support clients in different sectors to implement 5G solutions withindustry, health, education, cities, agriculture, and other areas having benefitted from 5G.
“Clients who had only parts of these functions were brought together to expand into other areas. Customers had contact with each other to benefit from technological innovations in the community”, he said.
“There are communities that suffer more attacks through malware, but there is an alliance of partners to protect their operations and customers in the field of cybersecurity. When one of the partners is weaker (by working together) everyone is much safer. Everyone has joined forces in an ecosystem to create solutions for best practices and develop to a safer world. This is what citizenship is all about, he added.
As for information sharing issues around cybersecurity, the question was to what point can companies, that are competitors, share information?
Manuel Ramalho Eanes made clear that “No one has anything to gain from keeping information to themselves that could provide more cybersecurity for everyone.”
Balancing data protection and risk assessment management
Pedro Carvalho, CEO of insurer Gererali/Tranquilidade pointed out that the insurance sector never seemed to be associated with digital transformation in the public’s eye, but stressed that the sector did make a difference in the way customers and people interacted with their insurers and how they managed their risk, of any kind.
“Through a smartwatch you can monitor the state of your health and fitness and this data can help insurers assess insurance premiums for their customers. People with better health translates into a more adequate premium for everyone”, he said.
This was equally valid for car insurance, where data “allows us to gauge the potential risk of the driver, the average speed at which they travel, or other indicators of behaviour and profile”.
“The cost of Insurance in one postal code may change compared to another location. Data serves to calculate the potential for risk and create the fairest prices for customers. Of course, there is always the challenge of customers blocking access to data when it does not suit them”, he said, adding that people are afraid of their company insurance when certain sensitive data is known, such as medical conditions that might disadvantage them professionally”.
However, data protection regulated access to information for commercial use. Pedro Carvalho considered that the role of the insurer was to “mutualise” the risks, so that no one paid more than they had to, and “those who reduce their risks and aim for sustainability should be rewarded”.
AI – balancing productivity with a human touch
On the panel ‘The Driving Forces of Tomorrow’s Businesses: Technology, Sustainability and People’, in which technological advances such as AI would unleash a wave of change, the CEO of MEO (Telco Altice Portugal), Ana Figueiredo, compared AI and Big Data advances to “superpowers”.
“If the industrial revolution brought us machines able to do physical tasks (Manufacturing) and computing allowed us to process information at great speed, AI will give us the superpower to accelerate, automate and even increase productivity,” she said.
“We can view Altice as a technology company, but Altice is fundamentally a services provider”, she stressed. “We provide services and provide connectivity through technology to serve our customers”.
And Altice is already applying AI technology in customer support, with, for example, around 40% of calls answered on MEO being handled by chatbots or having AI built in. Monitoring, trouble- shooting, anticipating and acting on network availability are other areas which will benefit from AI.
Rogério Campos Henriques, CEO of insurer Fidelidade – a company preparing the join the stock market in 2025 – said that while automating processes traditionally done by people was to be encouraged, it was important to never “lose that human touch”.
Rogério Campos Henriques said the insurer was an example of “i-tech’ and ‘i-touch’ whose mission was to “protect people today and help them prepare for the future of tomorrow and this meant assuring that technology had the capacity to transform businesses while guaranteeing that it was still “all about the people”.
Above all, a balance had to be struck so as not to “dehumanise the relationship with customers, at a time when there was “a certain fascination with automating everything”.
João Pedro Oliveira e Costa, CEO of Banco BPI/Caixabank argued that the centrality of innovation (Context, Culture, Capability and Collaboration) should fund a middle path. (between automisation and people).
“Banking has always been a pioneer in many areas of innovation and artificial intelligence and also is first in line”… when it comes to technology uptake.
The Banco BPI CEO pointed out the “vast range of data”, the competition from fintechs, and the demands from regulation, concluding that cybersecurity had forced the bank to make “a huge investment”.
The banker also warned of “collateral damage” from technology and about where to strike a balance when it came to the centrality of innovation, which was neither all in companies nor in customers, but “halfway”.
