12:00 AM, October 19, 2018 / LAST MODIFIED: 01:05 AM, October 19, 2018
ROUNDTABLE ON
Digitalization for Life

Citibank, N.A. Bangladesh and The Daily Star organized a roundtable titled “Digitalization for Life” on October 14, 2018. Here we publish a summary of the discussion.

Raihan Shamsi
For big businesses, financing is not a problem but for SMEs and startups – which can be termed as the lifeline of the future economy – getting financing is a big challenge. To promote these business entities, we must bring accommodative changes to the whole business ecosystem of the country.
I will touch upon few areas to be considered as recommendations. Our ICT Act needs to be comprehensive enough to accommodate all the challenges we are currently facing for new digital startups who are helping to solve our challenges socially and economically.
Next is collaboration. Nowadays people don’t need own a car or physical assets. Rather they can take it as a service and this will help create a strong digital society. So there needs to be a collaborative business environment to ensure mutual benefits for all.
Another recommendation is on shared use of resources to optimize benefit. You will not find another city in the world where there is an ATM booth every two steps. We could ensure better usage of national wealth. Earlier every telecom entity used to build its own infrastructure but now they share their infrastructure. To help Bangladesh grow digitally faster, we have to bring together all our resources and have a cohesive, unified approach towards resolving the issues.
More than 90% of our economic transactions are done in cash while the world is moving to non-cash digital currency. We need to speed up enablement of digital currency to tap the benefit of digital economy.
Last but not the least, we have to improve on cyber security, otherwise, we will face disastrous consequences.

Please click on the below link for more details:
thedailystar.net