This spring I was invited to be a speaker at the next Risk and Assurance Group (RAG) Conference. It was to be held in Denver, CO at Century Link. Alas , the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled those plans so until we can meet-up again live, it was decided to move the conference online and RAG Americas Online virtual conference was launched. Today, September 15, 2020 was Day 1.
There was a mix of about a dozen presentations and panel discussions interspersed with commentary from the Wise Heads comperes; Eric Priezkalns, Rachel Goodin, Nixon Wampamba and Tony Sani . Canadians were well represented with 3 speakers today and 3 tomorrow (including me) from companies like Telus, Rogers and Xplorenet.
From my vantage the most relevant panel was the discussion on Trends in Fraud Management, especially during this pandemic. Which frauds are up, which are down and what is new ? The consensus was a large increase in social engineering and identity fraud (all manner of phishing schemes), as well as increases in CLID spoofing. Reinforcing that was an expert panel just on stopping the spoofing of calls !
A recurring theme through many of todays presentations was Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and their application in Revenue Assurance and Business Assurance. It appeared as more than just a way to automate fraud management, more as a set of tools to be able to transform the entire discipline and provide better business results.
If the telcos manage to move their massive data sets (the industry with the biggest data sets apparently) into the public cloud and could use AI/ML tools along with the other benefits that cloud brings, we could really see a profound transformation of the telecom industry ! That will be the panel discussion on Day 2 that I am most looking forward to; Moving Telcos to the Public Cloud.
If you didn’t get a chance to watch the live stream today, the videos of the presentations will be available to view at the RAG website;
https://riskandassurancegroup.org/
I will post a summary of Day 2 later followed by a separate post of my own presentation on Least Corrupt Routing.
