Bloomberg Technology Summit | Session 2

foreign foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] hi everyone good afternoon thank you so much for joining us for this Think Tank launch my name is Lauren Keel I'm the general manager for Bloomberg green which is the climate sustainability section of Bloomberg News excited to be with all of you thanks again for joining us I'd like to give a big thank you to Erickson for sponsoring our lunch today and helping to make this conversation possible look forward to hearing from Catherine in just a little bit we're going to be talking a bunch today about connectivity both how it can improve business outcomes but also how it can make companies more sustainable so excited to share share that with you with us with some great speakers before I introduce our first speaker and bring him up here I want to remind you to eat this is a lunch so please please eat we know it's going to be a little noisy there's going to be coloring it's totally fine we're used to it we're going to project you'll hear us fine so please the food's going to be coming in and the courses are going to be coming through as we go through this so make yourselves at home and with that I'm going to introduce our first Speaker Sandeep you want to come join me on on the stage here we're going to jump up into these chairs you guys get to enjoy how short I am trying to get into the tall chair now I'm stuck okay now I'm swirling the other way this is hilarious okay um we should have gotten these adjusters sooner I know exactly um Sandeep thank you so much for joining me um you're joining us from Virgin Media I'm sure many people are very very familiar very familiar with you guys in the room today um we want to talk about the the iot and really just kind of give us a state of the union where are we with iot right now kind of where have we evolved and where do you think we're going yeah no definitely so really good to me and thanks for the opportunity so as I said we're part of Virgin Media or two and Virgin Media are now to have really come together combining mobile and fixed and as you said iot and and connected to like 5G is really on a bit of a journey iot has been around for you know many many years connecting a number of things and devices that we work and live around but what's really exciting is we're at the point where we're starting to see some really some real scale and scale with iot with new low power wide area network Tech Technologies and then with the introduction of 5G we can start to see iot scale and what that will mean is really helping businesses start to unlock their digital transformation and that's why it's really exciting for me thinking about some of those products and capabilities those Innovations and as you unlock the digital transformation you know we'll start to see that change and impact people's lives our communities and then make places much more sustainable as well okay great yeah no I think that's a good question so thinking about iot and 5G one great example from earlier this year is some of the work we've been doing with on a topic called private networks and British Sugar so private networks are these dedicated Ultra secure mini mobile networks that we put onto our customers sites really thinking about how they can use connectivity to start and begin their journey of transformation so working with British Sugar one of the largest sugar manufacturers in the UK making about 1.2 million tons of sugar really they had a challenge of how do they provide the connectivity to get to know their things their systems their tools their people and then really begin a journey of how do they start to automate improve reduce waste so we deployed this amazing private Network that was running across four sites in the UK so one of the first which runs across all their operations that produce the sugar and then really working with them on a bit of a transformation Journey thinking about what are the things that this connectivity can enable by monitoring their Factory and their automation line to monitoring their people with maybe camera tourism artificial intelligence but what's really important is thinking about how can this technology really enable a change or an improvement in their production to produce more sugar ideally reduce waste and then from a sustainability perspective you know reducing energy and the impact they're having on the environment as well and it's a great example of going from a small trial and a proof of concept and explaining about what the benefits of the technology to then really rolling it out at scale as well that's a very cool example um you mentioned both of these and I know I mentioned in the intro to you we're thinking about both business value here and environmental value and sustainability right do you think is one of those leading and the other one following yeah I think obviously I think with sustainability and we're all seeing the impact of climate change in our day-to-day lives you're seeing as as that then flows into businesses thinking about it that's becoming more and more prevalent as well I'd say still it's really important to have some business outcome and business benefit and then in turn also in parallel show the benefits from a climate perspective as most organized Nations will start to have really ambitious climate goals it's like Virgin Media are two where we have a challenge to have uh you know zero net carbon emissions by 2020 2040 across our supply chain products and operations all organizations are looking to do the same but then also need to invest on in these Solutions with Benefits right so they need to see benefits in their operations as well as sustainability and can you give us some examples on this environmental Focus what are some of the things that iot and connective Technologies can help with yeah so I think a great example of a deployment we're doing for one of our partners the other day was really in this current climate we're in now this twofold one is obviously we're seeing the the price of energy and especially for businesses who don't have some of the restrictions on on energy costs and so we're hearing from customers and partners looking at how can they monitor and understand their energy usage in their in building and environments we've been deploying an iot solution for them and this really helps them understand Energy across their floor their buildings State and then really rather than just Gathering the data which is the first step with the internet of things you really need to then Monitor and then analyze using artificial intelligence and then really act on it and then as you can start to act on that data you can then decide you know are certain windows open is the air conditioning running too much is there enough footfall to have this level of heating and so on and then make those changes which then will have a reduction in energy usage a better operational experience which is great from a satisfaction perspective but then have the sustainability impact as well are you seeing your customers ask you for more data or different types of data with this kind of sustainability lens on knowing that they're reporting on this or probably trying to think about their scope 123 emissions like are they asking you for a different data than they had been asking you from before yeah definitely I think we're seeing that maturity and understanding of the data that well first of all understanding yeah that where where data is really important and then we've been working with Partners to feed in data from our iot platforms into the right carbon calculators to then give our customers the right inputs as well so you're definitely seeing much more maturity you compare where we are today to maybe a few years back where there's just much more on let's do a demo or proof of concept to really measuring benefit now as well and how much you're using the evolution within your customers of them having the knowledge base around this already are you guys helping them understand those sustainability pieces more are they coming to you you know like help us or more like we've got the smart people inside now yeah exactly what we're asking for definitely I think it's a bit of a mix so we're here with Virgin Media so we have a whole face the customers from really small medium businesses obviously the consumers but then the Enterprise there's large Enterprises and public sector and each of those organizations as you said are investing in sustainability and their skills and their team so in some cases we can learn from them where they've done so much investment and have so many plans in other cases where we're using isg initiatives and plans to share best practices case studies and examples and then helping them Define what to do as well so it's definitely a bit of two-way it's definitely not a one-way Street and that's a great collaboration where you can share your sustainability plans and goals and then learn from each other as well that's interesting are you seeing what business benefits are you seeing for Virgin 02 from this yeah definitely so like even thinking about the idea of E-Waste as well as the E-Waste being the largest uh stream of waste electronic waste at the moment uh we're seeing that as a big big challenge even for our divisions where we're selling so many handsets and devices how do you start to work through creating a circular uh motion where you're bringing those devices back through you know Solutions like O2 recycle and we're really setting challenging targets you know having 10 million E-Waste uh or circular transactions by 2025 which will of course see then uh upside in Improvement in waste but then also benefits providing the right handsets to customers that want it and then recycled handsets as well so is that also requiring you to kind of work with people up and down the supply chain to make sure that you're actually able to recycle those if you get them back or oh yeah definitely I think that's where we've been thinking about when we looked at our ESG strategy and sustainability plans it's not just about our operations and our Network and making sure our Network's running well it's talking to our partners and really asking our partners to work with us and understand their supply chains to see how they're sustainable but then actually making sure they can support us with that level of volume as we get there as well for sure and what would you look for in a good partner in this way yeah definitely so I think we we often as we work with our partners through uh through initial meetings to Contracting have requirements around ESG and sustainability and then rankings and we use tools to Benchmark and score Partners um in a clear and transparent way as well so you know we can understand where our partners are and often we're working with them to to drive their sustainability goals and measures which will then in turn you know meet and help meet our 2040 Target as well so I think it's really important to have the collaborative collaborative relationship use the right tools to do the measurements and then work towards fixing and supporting them on their journey to be sustainable so that our overall Solutions and products are completely sustainable as well you're seeing uh more or new requirements like the rfps that you're getting from from potential customers around sustainability yeah you know I think that's a great question as well I think definitely if you reflect back in a period of time if you think back over five or six years you'll probably see that mentioned once or twice or as a bit of a token but definitely now in more cases and so it's definitely much more of a weighted Factor making sure that we have our own sustainable plans we have our own policies and then really providing much more detail than we would ever have to do before so and it's great to see because that keeps us really clear on our Ambitions and goals and then we can align and make sure we're supporting our customers as well I know you're thinking of it as a better yeah I think so I think definitely if you look in across the landscape and the industry it's always a challenge for all the industry and operators to get towards this Net Zero emission for both their Network their their supply chain and then the products they own as well so I think definitely we see this as a differentiating factor where you know making that commitment for 2025 for our operations Network and then 2040 which is 10 years before the the Paris agreement gives us a really key talking point and an advantage at this point in time anyway so where for people who aren't quite where you guys are in this in this in this process kind of where would you recommend to start like how do you go how do you what's a step one yeah yes I think and in general as we've seen with like the pilots with British sugar or the work we were doing recently where we connected a hospital with the South London Mosley trust with the NHS where we set up a private network with 5G connected hospital I think it's all really starting with understanding the business outcomes that the customers are looking to achieve be it linked to sustainability or operational improvements and really thinking about the outcome and they're not thinking because all this amazing technology is great to play with can create lots of fun news stories or PR opportunities but it's really thinking what's the business outcome and then how can you make the first small step to show the benefit for then the organization to help create the case right because all these Innovative Technologies and solutions require investment and to create the investment and the need internally it's to show the benefits in one simple way with one example often a trial or proof of concept and then working with customers to then scale it out so they can see clear kpis with benefits of operational efficiencies or sustainability and that's what we're doing as an example with the ESL London Mosley trust where we're connecting up their teams with 5G enabled connected tablets so they could actually perform and run more efficiently and then measure before and after does that really make a difference or not as well and with those examples or any other ones that you've worked for do they have to see immediate returns like are they willing to give you a couple years to say we'll pay it more for two or three years knowing that we're going to be on this path towards 20 30 20 40 or is that just too hard to get people to accept yeah I think it depends on the organizations and their investment profiles and what they're looking for I think definitely most in the current climate and the challenges many organizations have they they really want to only invest in these connected Technologies like iot and 5G where they can see a clear benefit some will give a 12 or 18 month window knowing that these new technologies take time to adapt and they want to be at the Forefront of those and really want to innovate as well so you know we see when we've worked with British Sugar we work on our journey with them together with 15 or 16 different use cases and then look at what those could mean but I think it's definitely it's um I think there is a bit of a window but it's not it's not open-ended so I think people will not make the investment if they can't see the value in in you know one year or two years so and you mentioned this and I know Brad Stone opened it up with the beginning of the the day today like we're in a really tough time you know we're in a tough time in the UK just in the world in general do you have do you have any kind of positive lights coming out of that is there anything you think that this tough time in the UK is going to push you guys in a positive direction yeah no definitely I think yes obviously we all relate it's been a challenging couple of years and many events have happened that we've never planned for as an organization so think about the pandemic how and it's really or the current crisis where we have today really think about each one as it comes to think how do you react and support the environments or our customers now so with the covid-19 here and at the time of the pandemic as we're looking at how do we support the NHS with the vaccine program providing with iot connected devices or tablets but then as we came out from the pandemic thinking about how can 5G and iot help with improving Health the healthcare industry by remote Healthcare consultations or the transport industry with alternative transport or hybrid working with 5G so it's thinking having a plan of how to solve the crisis Here and Now with Innovative technology but then also starting to plant the seeds of what you could do as you come out of the the pandemic or the challenge as well and then you know making sure you have good control of your supply chain is always a key one as well we have a great group with us in the room today what would you want to see your peers who are here in the room doing to push this forward more yeah great so I think with five git and then sustainability I think definitely I think Beyond sort of technology for Technology's sake or doing things that will generate PR but think about the business outcome and then start small so we've always had these challenges where you have a big Grand Vision try to create an over-engineer complex Solutions which then never materialize I think our recipe for success is really keeping customer focused focus on the business outcomes or problem problems and the start really small create the benefits and the case and then step up from there so you know take that step-by-step approach and that pragmatic approach rather than thinking you know Big Bang this is going to transform your organization in a day last last question um anything else that they could do to help you definitely so I think it's having those conversations so we like to always hear about your business problems your business challenges and I think what we've found is it's just not one organization that can create that solution right you need a partnership ship you need to create the environments where organizations in this room can come together so I think it's really having those informally or formally through through Partnerships and collaborations hearing about your problems thinking about how we can all help work on those and then creating projects and opportunities to Showcase what we can do together so I think that would be key coming forward with your challenges and let's work through them sounds great yes it's been like a quick fire into it there you go I know we did it thank you thank you so much everyone join me and thank you Cindy fantastic now for our next to joining us on the stage Catherine ainley is the CEO of Ericsson UK and Ireland and Peter Vincent is head of connected systems for Scania r d join them both on stage good luck with getting on the seats [Laughter] well done very graceful thank you guys both so much for joining us um so I want to continue the themes that that Sundeep and I were just talking about um Catherine to you first kind of where do you see the biggest and most exciting opportunities for 5G right now with dealing with these challenges around business outcomes and sustainability yeah and it's interesting listening to Sandy because obviously there's quite a big overlap with what we do and there's probably two things to think about the first is how you can use the 5G Network as a whole so you know as that's getting rolled out across Europe but across the world but um across the UK as well but then also some specific examples which Sandeep talked about really well around private Networks and I think um they give us I mean they give us so many opportunities it's quite hard to know where to start there but I think to your point about what's driving it um I think that business efficiency and you know how we can reduce energy 5g's we're aiming to be 10 times more efficient with 5G versus 40 by the end of the year so it's hugely more energy efficient but it also gives you so much in terms of speed the latency and the things you can do with that from a business perspective whilst also helping the sustainability agenda are just enormous Peter what do you think about that do you think the business value is driving and the sustainability value is following or or where's the lead here no I think it's a hard question because as uh said here we need to start small but we also need to have the skating options so we need to have the products available for scaling and I think uh fresconia electric trucks are the next step that's this step where we need to provide the product and scale up but also provide the the efficiency of the actual transport happening and understand how to make that efficiency and how to make the step to Electric Wheels so I think it's it's the combination of both that gives the kind of the big impact rather than than just one or the trucks where do you see the the opportunities coming from there like where is the energy where's the growth and where the challenge is um I think the challenges are many one is energy clean energy uh that's a lot of talk about that the other one is to understand which cons which customer can actually Electrify what transport in what time frame and helping out with data from existing networks can help from that so using the existing transport that they're running and using the measurements from that and then transforming that into okay let's do the let's take these routes and make them electrified that's this both money in that and it's sustainable and and go from there Catherine what about you any good examples that come to mind yeah I mean actually just to follow him from that and Erickson's part of the CEO Alliance and one of the things we've been looking at as part of that is um you know there's going to need to be 800 000 um electrified trucks across Europe and to enable that you're going to need about 400 000 about charging points you know and how do you you know they're all going to need to be connected they're all going to need to work together so you know you start to get a sense of how Central that connectivity is going to be to solving this problem um but also to just the opportunity that it gives us and I think my and one of the big themes that I bang on about is that it isn't about you build 5D and you build some connectivity and then you've got the kind of the answers it needs to be part of Ola integrated into all our thinking into our Innovation and I think that's how you get the biggest impact both from a business perspective and from a sustainability perspective it all goes hand in hand talk to us more about the integration of that we're all out like how are you dealing with you know getting the the companies and the leaderships on board how are you thinking about the changes with the jobs and the trainings that are needed for for people as these Technologies develop fantastic question say from a 5G perspective yeah so I mean it's it's kind of I think of a bit of a snowball so I think you know there are so many different organizations in this infrastructure plus of course government and Regulators also playing a really key part in it that you you need it all to build on each other so you know we see Ericsson we see that we've got a really key role to drive the some of the idea and the thought leadership and you know a bit like sandeep's talked about in terms of some of these pilots and we've got you know lots of examples of those but then the whole piece needs to sort of snowball on and you need companies like scamia who are really embracing it to go actually this is how it can work but you also need the infrastructure but the infrastructure won't get built if it's not getting used so it's sort of yeah and we saw with 4G you know if you look take a if you rewind and you look at 4G actually the thing that kind of really got 4G with going was those applications and the usage and more from a consumer perspective you look at things like uber that's when everybody went oh I really get it now and 5G will be the same but I think Enterprise is much bigger for 5G team is still important but you know the opportunity for business is huge and any learning is from 4G that you're applying to 5G especially as you think about Enterprise yeah I think um I mean the main ones are around you know actually that Energy Efficiency and and how we can make it more sustainable so say our Target by the end of the year is that 5G will be 10 times more efficient than 40 and we're at 9.3 more efficient at the moment so yeah well on our way um I think we need to go faster I think what we saw with 4G is actually the countries that embraced 4G quickly and got the rollout out got ahead so you look at Asia and the countries which really got ahead with 4G got the benefit from it and Europe is at risk of of lagging behind Asia and what it is lacking behind Asia and America on 5G rollout and and Peter to you I would love to hear more about how you guys are thinking about the implementation of this you know maybe a bit to my earlier question about the jobs and how you guys are thinking about reskilling and retraining what and what might need to be done or or you know enthusing people about this this shift well the shift from from uh from diesel to to biofuel or electric that's happening I mean we are investing heavily into that both on both parts because both parts will be needed electric vehicles will be in the future or that type of vehicle will be very important but also in the transition period we need to have biofuel so that is also happening but looking at it from the perspective of data connectivity of course that is also going to happen and and that's a fact at sconia r d today we have more software engineers and Hardware engineers so so the shift has already happened and and we are more embracing making sure that our customers can take on the shift and that they can be sustainable efficient and profitable and transport industry is a low margin industry so it isn't the margin that you will have to fight and ensure that you can bring customer value all the way through so and this will incorporate a larger portion of the workforce not just r d this will be all the way out to the workshops to the salesperson and all of that so enabling them with the tools of of persuading customers to go electric that is kind of one of the things that we're working with now there we use connectivity data and and tools to bring the sales cycle down for electric vehicles that's interesting that the shift from kind of more Hardware Engineers to to software Engineers do you feel like that is changing a little bit of the culture of the company are you feeling like a little bit more of a tech company rather than a transportation company I I have had the the idea for for marketing to say that we are sustainable tech company right now they haven't took that bait yet but I think we actually are and the fact is that we're coming into more of the tech companies discussions uh from a point of view rather than to just be a provider of of hardware and and that comes in also when we're working with autonomous vehicles we will be in another part of the value chain because we will have to integrate the autonomous vehicles into the customers it system on a total different scale than we are today okay we're talking a bit about vehicles I mean just to finish because I guess I didn't quite answer your question on skills and that's what prompted me as well I mean I think the software piece is really key and also Cloud you know so what we're also seeing is what connectivity enables you to do is to move a lot of your activity further towards the edge and that changes that skill set as well and cloud and software rather than it just being a fixed Hardware which may be 15 years ago would have been but other Industries I mean I think sandeep's points around the pandemic are really interesting because I think it's made people all of us think really differently about how we work and as a result it's really inspired quite quite a lot of big fundamental changes for some companies and that's where you can see the benefits I mean if I look at some of the factories that we're working with this hyperbat which is an electric car battery manufacturer in the UK we work with and one of the things they've done is they've introduced a private Network which means that they can work in a virtual reality world on a battery from hundreds of miles apart and they can sort of go you know my non-engineering left a bit right a bit you know can you change this and and they can work on that virtual reality world without having to travel or in reality what was happening was sending lots of emails so the pandemics forced people to rethink what they do but it's also made people go actually do I need to travel or can I use the technology to to change that and then that has environmental impacts as well massive it makes the company more efficient um I mean the other thing hype about doing is they're removing all the they're looking to remove the wires from their production line so they can move that around more easily it makes it loads more efficient and effective and the environmental benefits huge that's interesting are you seeing an increase desire from companies post pandemic to be like okay we're open to how can we do this more virtually how can we do this in a different way I think so I think it's still a little bit Niche so again if you know between San Diego said I think there's definitely these Trailblazers who got it you know or embracing it and transforming their business and starting with the business problem and you know how can we be more efficient but there's still lots of organizations who haven't quite got the head around it and I guess that that's the ask is this is this is coming and the benefits are huge and for those Trailblazers what what why do they got it that was a weird funny way of saying it but you know what I'm saying like where is there like a straight is it is it the CEO is it the industry is it the what is the thing that you think is catalyzing the people who are actually jumping on this it's really interesting I think for some it's you know you've got someone who's particularly does get it from a techie perspective I think also you know the pandemic did make some companies go oh gosh we just can't do it I mean another another really good example from within Ericsson is we when we're doing rollout of 5G masks and well at Mars in general we'll we'll send out drones now to create a digital twin of of that mast and that Tower and then we can have different people work on it without having to travel so you know sometimes and while we could travel it was much harder so actually you know that came much quicker as a result so I think it can be external triggers but also some people are just embracing it more quickly would you agree with it what do you think Peter yeah who who are the Trailblazers and who are the followers I think that that's a that's a trick question because I assume that people in this room are the Trailblazers but but the question is how do we scale up the Trailblazers and how do we create the the the the fight for sustainability as we will have to fight to be a a fight not just about sustainability but operational benefits and and revenue because if we don't chase the revenue yeah and we get the sustainability they will be a lot of these events that we are seeing now the covet is maybe not a sustainability event but for sure the war in Ukraine or the crisis in Bangladesh as it is right now and those kind of events are coming to an extent that will be more events they will be higher and the resiliency we build in by using more data and understanding the real situation chasing the revenues chasing the operational efficiency not just for the small scale but for the big scale so the bigger question is how do we go from 5G RT data into small scale experiment into the big scale experiments that are kind of one plus one is actually three or at least 1.1 for each of the involvements so I'm not sure that there is an easy answer to it I think it's a super complex problem to see those Trailblazers and get inspired you know you you have to keep up don't you mean that's the joy of the competitive world that we live in you'll get left behind if you don't so there's a carrot which is you can do all this fantastic stuff and you can be more efficient and effective in the sustainability benefit but the the sort of stickers if you don't you're going to get left behind and both your customers will question it but also from a business perspective you're going to have a higher cost base so um yeah pays off so is it really the the businesses now having to build that case to say we have to make this change we have to invest in this or five years 10 years 30 years we're not going to be in business anymore or a business is going to fall or do you think there's going to be more external pressures like are there going to be you know policy changes are there going to be customer changes either of you take it away I think that I said previously also in the big room the the policy makers they will raise the bar on what's acceptable lowest level and I think that's what policy maker can do they takes time standardization Etc and and the trade bases are on top right and the question is how can we get the good Innovations and the good things down as quickly as possible because that will drive our ability to save this planet as fast as possible so by using the trade bases and getting it down I think that is so I think that the area for for business that are not either Trailblazers or barely making it it's going to be smaller and I think we are seeing that already now the the pace of innovation is going faster and as software is eating the world as somebody said a couple of years ago the the cycle for software is now maybe sometimes a limiting factor for for the change it is not a 5D rollout we have that it electrically Vehicles will come but the question is how do we combine the different parts into values and who is going to do that and how can we find the Trailblazers scale them up and and policy makers is coming from the bottom and and the training base is from the top so how do we how do we make that happen faster I think you know the other thing is sometimes it can look huge but I mean one of the other interesting pieces of analysis we were going through is actually if you look at sort of the four sectors where you can make the biggest impacts around energy manufacturing um transports and you can see that technology can drive a 15 reduction in their emissions from those sectors but actually um if you add 5G on top of that you get another five percent so you know you can be quite targeted that there's certain industries where you're going to have a disproportionate impact from a sustainability perspective and almost certainly from a business perspective I mean to put that into contact text that is um slightly more than the 33 million cars that were in the UK in terms of the impact that has on the environment and on sustainability so it's a massive difference you can make it's a huge difference yeah one of the themes that's come out a bunch of times in the conversations around this is is Europe's role with technology and whether Europe has kind of does it have this stuff that needs that is needed to make big tech companies work here and make big technological changes I think there's been a little a little uncertainty about whether you know whether there's kind of uh some things holding things back here I would say it's the opposite for sustainability if any if any if you were going to say anywhere in the world is a leader in sustainability Europe is the leader by far and then the you know the rest I'm here from New York we're trying to catch up still many other places are trying to catch up um what do you think about that combination of kind of like being a leader in sustainability but maybe being a step behind in technology Peter what do you think do they think that's a good combination or can one pull the other yeah what do you think that is the edge yeah so I have the sustainability Edge and then be good enough on technology and combining those and that's what we're trying to achieve and and I think that Europe has an advantage here and and and if we can get use of that and get the partnership with the right people in the right room to take the right decisions then we can speed it up it will we will not get that from the policy makers we should get that from from us and we need to take that kind of deep of faith of doing that I mean we part of a couple of alliances and and I think that that is a good step the next step is to get the people on the next level to actually see the benefits see the revenue see the combined roadmaps and take them together and not not fight each other and not do that and I think that's super hard so we be we are part of this journey and we are trying to do it it's just it gets to be very very harder to see the the North Star on those scientific based targets super easy to see in the North Star what other Revenue targets that we want to do in this area those are not too easy to see and not how the Partnerships form around that but I think we're seeing good examples like we are doing with our competitions about charging Network yes yes this is something we do together this is for Europe we we put the money together and we just make it happen more of those I think is going to see and then we can go sustainable technology sector Maybe and Catherine I know you're you're leading for UK and Ireland what would you kind of say are the the competitive differentiators for the UK and Ireland in this yeah and I think I'd probably disagree on one point which is I don't think um I don't think we are where we need to be on that 5G roller so I think particularly if I take that European View and you compare it to the US and Asia you know we are behind um and we do need to get more because actually you know well you might have it in uh certain urban areas and you've got the private networks actually that Asia and the US are racing ahead and you do need it to kind of underpin it I think um I think that then also you know that network will drive The Innovation and at some extent the market things like the cost of energy what we're seeing is we're seeing quite a big focus at the moment of lots of organizations because the cost of energy goes up they're suddenly like this is much higher on our agenda it's costing a lot of money so you know as that happens the The Innovation will kick in and the network needs but I'm asking the same question again because I don't think I totally got an answer but but you got you answered feeders um but but thinking about the UK and Ireland specifically what would you say are kind of I know the energy you're spending the energy price in a good in a good way that that's kind of forcing forcing the Renewables conversation here enforcing adaptation but anything else you feel like I think oh I mean it's a really long answer with me I think we say where are we we are slightly ahead of Europe in terms of that well certainly On a par in terms of the connectivity piece so we're about 50 coverage I don't um population coverage I don't think we've really embraced how we're going to use it I think from a sustainability perspective I think there's other countries in Europe who've really got their head around it probably the sustainability side but maybe don't always have the connectivity to back it up um I'm always impressed when I go to swim you kind of look at the connectivity and the just the whole infrastructure you know that they are really beginning to to embrace it but it will be the it'll be the Innovation for me that private sector Innovation with a bit of help from government that will really Turbo Charge it and that's probably we've got to help that along and that's our job kind of bringing it together yeah yeah so yeah UK okay but I don't know sort of middle of the road um Peter imagine we're having this conversation in five years what do you think is going to be the biggest difference first I think that we will see the electric vehicles much more saturated in especially in urban areas and and where we probably see that we also start to shut down parts of the city because walking is better and we can actually see that Transportation works I think we also will see it start to see the autonomous vehicles taking offload and that we can have transportation happening on off-peak hours especially in in condensed cities like in London you don't need the car the transportation on on the street because you can run it on on night um I think we'll actually be there I'm an optimist I don't think that would be as fast as everybody says but especially on the autonomous side it's going to take time but for some parts it will be there and I think we have sold the energy crisis we have realized that we have to accelerate the investment in in renewable energy significantly and we can't wait 10 years to build power plants super big power plants we will have changed that yeah so I think that those are three technology investment areas that we will see totally different from now and then maybe the life is better hope so fingers crossed for all of us Catherine what about you what do you think in five years or so all changed I think we will be at a point where you can't you know you know that you'll take that connectivity for granted you know I really hope that you'll go everywhere in that super fast super low latency connectivity will just happen um and then that just enables so much I think where you'll see the biggest impact the fastest you know some of those areas you've talked about but the more slightly more dangerous jobs the jobs people don't want to do um and the ones that are kind of expensive and high risk so you're looking at things like you know yeah Lorry driving driving cranes for example um visiting remote sites in bad weather you know all of that stuff will probably be turning around and going gosh we used to send someone out in a storm to go to a remote location and you know wow so I think it will make a massive difference to quality of life and business efficiency and and yeah safety great I want to ask the two of you the same last question I asked citizenly what you know what do you need from the the rest of the the people in the room yeah so you're thinking about other peers other technology leaders what would you love to see them doing Peter first and then Catherine and there to do the they're to there to be a trailblazer there to there to experiment and and find Revenue fast so you can be faster in in teaching others and and I think take the opportunities to to do cross-section and not stay just within your your path and and find those kind of areas where you innovate faster than the rest of of the world is innovating and where sustainability if we aren't on this path on on not hitting 1.5 degrees we will see more dramatic effects in this sustain in the in the in our society the planet Will Survive but will the humans survive that's the question so take the opportunity to speed up the this and don't do it on your own find a partner find somebody in adjacent areas where you can combine your your money your talent and and your outcome and help your customers to be sustainable and profitable great Catherine what about you yeah I mean I think I'd probably come at it from two directions actually I'd say one is you know what are the things that you can test and try out to sandeep's point so you can kind of start doing it what's the Innovation you can feed in but I think my other challenge would be actually I think we all need to take a step back and think of some of the problems we're trying to address in society and there could be a completely different answer to many of the problems with the connectivity that we have and and sometimes and they're the really interesting Innovations where you know honestly they'll make the biggest impact on sustainability but also you know they'll be the they'll be the business ideas of the future so I think think creatively and and carve out the space to to think about how this massive change in connectivity and the future can can work for you that's great so it's an exciting opportunity yeah thank you both so much for joining me everyone join me in thanking captain and Peter all right and thank you all so much for for being part of this Think Tank lunge a huge thank you to Erickson for for sponsoring our conversation please continue to sit and enjoy eat a little bit longer we're gonna be back to the main stage at 1 40. um so have a little cup of coffee and we'll see you back in the room very soon thank you all so much again foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign [Music] she gets me [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] because I ain't looking back foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign foreign [Music] please welcome back to the stage Brad Stone author and Senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg [Music] all right welcome back everybody hope you had a great lunch we will be ushering in everyone else here for a jam-packed afternoon uh during the afternoon sessions we're going to talk about energy we'll look at how green Tech's future really is and we'll hear from a regulator from the very influential competition Market authority of the UK but first let's hear from Sri Ram viswanathan chief executive IBM UK and Ireland foreign in our homes and offices our schools our stores our cars our planes and in our pocket happening in our supply chains and our security systems in our Workforce in our weather and in waves of the pandemic change change is all around us change is inevitable there are those who are content to comfortably sit on the sidelines and watch change happen and then there are those who lead it those who use technology in Creative new ways and what they've set their sights on changing will spark a radical reinvention of how we work and live so let's get to it let's modernize business with the help of hybrid cloud let's simplify the way we work with Automation and AI let's manage Risk by taking cyber security threats head on let's activate a sustainability plan that's good for the planet and good for business let's fast forward to the future of computing and discover what's next [Music] let's create [Music] welcome back I have five minutes to inspire you about the possibilities of technology so not a big challenge um so as as you heard my name is sriram I think everything around us is changing rapidly every single industry is changing and throughout today you probably heard lots and lots of presenters talking about the power of AI cyber security hybrid cloud metaverse and everything else right I do think in 20 years in this industry I see a dichotomy between the startup companies that that grew up in the digital space and the incumbents and the incumbents ability to change rapidly enough is I think our biggest challenge as Tech leaders so what I hope to do in the next few minutes is to give you some some perspective and hopefully spark some some thoughts so why now what is actually happening right now because necessity is a mother of all invention right so why now we've got lots of external forces that are outside of our control hyperinflation you've got cyber security issues you've got social political economic issues that is driving change and above all of that we have this fundamental issue around digital skills especially in our Market so all of this economic or external factors is going to make every single industry and every single organization change but the potential of change the actual impact of how we scale that change I believe is down to us so the moment is now there are external forces that are going to make this impossible techno so what are the benefits why why do we need to change I believe that the next decade throughout the world will reshape Industries and will Define winners and losers and I feel that Winners will have certain characteristics first they will challenge the status quo they'll break down organizational silos and question why we do the things we do in the way we do them second Innovation will not be at the periphery of the business but will be called to the business think about The Big Industry players that you work with the incumbents that you work with do they really operate today in the UK that way where Innovation is at the center in most of my experiences at the periphery technology will no longer be a cost technology will be seen as an asset technology will be the business and lastly I would say most companies will be a lot more open to creating ecosystems and digital platforms so that they can add and deliver much more value to their customers so in this changing world if that's what good looks like and if you Benchmark yourself against that list which is a shorthand list if you like where are we today in my engagement over the last couple of decades I can tell you the conversation with cios and chief digital officers hasn't changed that much they spend a lot of their time talking about keeping the lights on keeping the I.T infrastructure and the systems running they talk about how to keep the business users the noise coming from the business users that bay and on the periphery we have these experiments with all the Technologies you're hearing about today so how do we scale this where do we scale at the same time the CEOs we conducted a CEO study with 3 000 CEOs around the world and they gave they gave us a list of things that they would like from technology number one was scale and expedite Innovation at PACE make it more relevant allow us to invent products and services faster for our customers help us change the customer experience and the third thing they said to us is help Tech let technology help us really address the sustainability agenda these are the three things that they said so on the one hand you have cios and cdos trying to keep the lights on and you have CEOs demanding a lot more and how do you bridge this so let me leave you with some parting thoughts for me what we see as a storage company which has been in existence over 110 years we're probably the oldest technology company that there is what do we see in the market we see in the UK Market a lot of innovation we have 44 unicorns that have come up and we work with many of them just during the pandemic we had 25 unicorns over a billion dollar companies we are not short of innovation in our Market as UK Inc we really have an opportunity to compete with the rest of Europe and with the rest of the world to reshape net new Industries there is increasing demand for us to do this and so the real Delta the real potential for us is each one of you it's the power of leadership in this tech industry and technology is a great leveler around the world as I visited in various roles what I've observed is countries and companies are leveraging technology to pull ahead of the competition [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] foreign thank you [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] he's presented by just the mobile technology that can help you program a lot of this but I think even before that there is an opportunity to make energy transition Energy Efficiency work for everyone and having worked in fintech before digital inclusion is very close to my heart we need to make sure that we include everyone in this transition so that's why even before you go into mobile tech you need to supplement that complement that with energy advice offered on the phone for example that's why we are training a number of our customer service agents to be what we are calling home Energy Efficiency advisors in many cases they will offer basic advice around insulation of your Loft and in some cases they will dispatch people to your homes to actually do an audit and then in many other instances it will come down to adoption of smart thermostats smart meters and if you have an EV linking that to what's happening inside your home and then really tapping into the opportunities around flexibility so you use energy when it's cheap it's also clean at the same time all of that can be done through Smart Home Tech um so I think there is quite an interesting result from that showing perhaps the size of the opportunity when it comes to the smart home we can see that everybody or the majority of people in the room are aware but perhaps don't have the technology and the tools themselves to kind of change their energy so apart from quite crudely by just turning stuff off so I think one of the things I wanted to ask you about that you were sort of touching on there is the kind of idea of energy Independence and perhaps things like rooftop solar having an EV how the what the smart home looks like um and also how that links to decarbonizing as well and the longer term goals yeah so I think if you imagine a typical UK home I go back to the first and foremost the opportunity around insulation it's not on the Glamorous end of decarbonization but we still have the draftiest leakiest homes in Europe so you'll do insulation fast and then when you come inside the home 80 of our homes are still powered by uh you know gas powered boilers electrification of heat and there are competing Technologies there uh your electric heat pumps uh there are targets around 600 000 by 2028 we have a long way to go there but decarbonization of heat is an urgent imperative for us in the UK now you go on the roof solar penetration we are not the brightest country in the world the sunniest country but there is still a tremendous scope for solar right now that's less than four or five percent of UK homes where solar is creating electricity and that can increase many fall old and when you go outside the home into if you have a car if it's an EV then the interaction of that with what's happening inside your home becomes very interesting you can have a shifting of your consumption patterns and for select users the tech is now becoming bi-directional so for instance your EV then can have a battery which will sell energy back to the grid now the interaction with a smarter grid makes it even more interesting because you you have the the makings of a new Energy System I think there are about enough cars in the UK EVS in the UK now if they were to become bi-directional they can power more than 100 000 homes so that opportunity is actually real and present now we just have to design the right incentive structures and we as OVO need to play a key role in addressing customer confusion complexity around all of this and it is complex at the moment so do you think owning an EV will be that Tipping Point for people towards caring more about their energy use because you have this you know car that you need to charge and you're thinking about charging at the cheapest time whereas at the moment we don't really think we just think about using energy when we need it yes and actually that's proven now there are studies showing uh EV adoption does create greater engagement around time of usage flexibility and then the interaction between that and what's happening inside your home and it will increase over the years and I'd like to return to the idea of the kind of just transition and how we as the UK and OVO as a company kind of make sure that the smart home isn't just something that the wealthiest homes can take advantage of you know how do you incorporate that into social housing and different levels of society yeah well I think if you take decarbonization as a shared Mutual agenda it has to be it has to work for everyone and it has to work as a team sport as well everyone needs to play a part all stakeholders and we have a key role as an energy supplier to make sure energy transition is an inclusive one so for instance we are working with local government authorities all over the UK to retrofit social housing there are 15 live projects all over the country we have in fact installed uh electric heat pumps in uh in Thousand uh homes across the country and I think that this is where government plays a key role and there are some existing schemes which create the incentive structure for suppliers as well as reduces barriers for uh people who may not be able to afford smart stack um and smart decarbonization Services yeah I think it's an interesting point because a lot of people say that you can't be driven by the lowest common denominator you know technology has to move forward and all of these things have to be developed at PACE but it's about sort of bringing everybody with you as as easily as you can um and I would just like to go back a little bit to some of the things that you mentioned about electric vehicles and you know bi-directional charging and how much thought do you give to things like how do you make sure that you know you must know a lot about people's behavior and how they interact with technology and how do you stop that um super peak in the evening where everybody comes home from work plugs in their car turns everything on in their home and we get this giant Peak and electricity demand you know what incentives are there that will stop that happening sure so I think the first thing there is driving engagement around energy usage again fintech comes to mind the whole realm of money management and I was leading hsbc's digital Bank we had so many uh different experiments opportunities to drive people's engagement around saving outcomes investment outcomes the same Tech is available in energy now in fact we have something called energy tracker which is a mobile app based solution which helps you make those decisions exactly the ones you pointed out the grid is pretty dirty and expensive between 4 and 7 PM for instance so maybe not use your tumble dryer if you have one at that point and then when you interact with your EV then OVO as a energy supplier can actually stitch together an experience where you have a new tariff where we'll guide you around flexibility and the time of usage which will then help you save money and also help you drive further engagement around your energy system and how the home as a whole and this is happening now and it will become even more of a reality when Smart Meters can share data every 30 minutes so imagine intraday Peak management uh is is a reality now but at scale it becomes very compelling yeah it's interesting that kind of Engagement that people need to have and that attitude that has to almost completely transform an energy because before this crisis you know one of the things that the regulator of gem was trying to do was get people to switch supplier because just saving 200 quid wasn't enough to make people want to to you know change and then nowadays you know that would be a huge driver for people so it's it's interesting to see that kind of shift and do you think that people are interested in their app and looking at you know their energy use or do they want to just you know use that term set and forget I think it's a combination as you rightly point out the energy crisis is acting as a forcing mechanism for all of us to really confront our energy usage uh energy tracker the app I mentioned we've seen our 250 increase in uh in adoption and just the eyeballs around it but as I said this needs to be a combination of digital Technologies as well as hand-holding for people who are perhaps not uh in that digital fold and I think a combination of that then can drive engagement around energy which is about smarter consumption not necessarily using less but using better and smarter yes I think when we were talking before you mentioned how efficiency can kind of help you preserve your lifestyle rather than this feeling of having to cut back on everything and not be able to do the things that you want to do that involve energy um and I guess maybe for the final question um what do you think the lasting impact of this crisis will be do you think it will give the Energy Efficiency you know the kick that it needs to get going because we're not really hearing that message from government and what are your expectations we were talking a little bit before we came in about what people will do this winter um do you think they'll use less energy overall maybe at the beginning and throughout well I think the polls suggests that is true uh people will be more mindful but let's go back to the crisis and the long-term opportunity I think that's where I started and that's the uh you know over mission to power uh clean energy for everyone and I think the long-term way out of uh the the crisis is to reduce our Reliance on fossil fuels to drive adoption of uh alternative renewable Technologies there's a lot being said about production Supply security Generation all that is great our job as ubo is to make sure as a retailer with no Upstream assets we want to make sure that we stand for consumers we reduce complexity we create seamless experiences so that people in their homes and around the home can really confidently Embrace uh what new technology has to offer and I hope this crisis acts as a catalyst for all of that I think it would be really interesting to come back and ask you these same questions in maybe a year or two and see how things have changed but I think we'll leave it there thank you very much for your time thank you thanks foreign [Music] to the stage Tania Bola founder and CEO of LV and Daniel faulkman SVP for business at gopuff and Bloomberg's Alex Webb [Music] foreign [Music] good afternoon thank you so much for sticking around to follow this conversation I'm delighted to be joined by Dan and Tanya and we're going to be talking about how there is something of a reinvention of consumer Tech and it's great that we have both of you because you come at it from slightly different angles on the one hand of course gopuff is delivering food to our doorstep in five to fifteen minutes at times and you guys want a slightly different price point maybe Tony will start with you like you have you're in the health Tech space which is something that a lot of massive tech companies are looking at and doing things in where you guys are different is you're doing a product that is regulated and I'm wondering how you know you first you start selling that to investors to begin with and then approach it and how then if there's a big company like Apple or Google you guys are a big company I mean a huge massive monster Mega Tech you know what learnings could they take from your experience and just hi everyone by the way created LV we were building the Global Tech brand for Women's Health so we create connected devices and Alex said a lot of them are the regulated medical space our dominant category is Breast Pumps so we've created the world's first silent wearable breast pump in terms of scale we're at about 100 million dollars revenue and 80 of our revenue is is from the US so I think in terms of your question of what makes this different yes we're about consumer Tech but I think we're part of a new generation of what we're calling personal health Tech or consumer health which is bringing together those traditional verticals of consumer Tech and health so what does that mean it means really the products and services that we make are at we have to adhere to quite strict clinical standards and and regulation but we see this as a positive because it creates a lot of defensibility but it's really about being Innovative in how we market and sell it so that's really doing it as a consumer Lifestyle brand So when you say Innovative and how you market and sell it what would be different well our first category is pelvic floor Health often women wait till they have yucky health problem they would go and see a doctor the doctor will prescribe some sort of treatment and generally medical devices are not designed they're designing quite a utilitarian way so we've designed our products which actually it sounds so obvious but they're customer-centric women-centric so women actually enjoy using the products and then they therefore they talk about it more um but in terms of The Branding for example we launched our breast pump on a catwalk at London Fashion Week for us our social following is about half a million and we work a lot with influencers that's not the traditional way to to Market a medical device which would normally be go to you know medical conferences and talk to Physicians done for you guys it's a space that has exploded in the past few years obviously during lockdowns but when you set about I think your company's six seven years old now no nine my bad I apologize um this is why we usually have editors um it was not as hot as it is now how in those early years in particular do you go around selling the product and you know it's quite a capital intensive business at least from from day one what was your sort of an initial pitch yeah absolutely so just a little bit of history on the company uh as Alex mentioned uh it's a nine-year-old company started out in Philadelphia back in the States and and the impetus of starting the company was really like how do you make convenience more convenient because at the time this is 2013 uh you know you don't have anyone really in the delivery space I think today all the companies that we know and order all of our goods from were just starting or didn't exist and so the big difference in how gopuff started versus like what you've come to know as third party marketplaces uh is gopuff is a fully vertically integrated model so we operate our own micro fulfillment centers there are eight to ten thousand square feet we own all the inventory that we sell in the U.S that's over 4 000 skus in the UK it's a little bit less and then we deliver Goods to people in under 20 20 to 30 minutes wherever they are whatever they need and that range of goods is everything from snacks ice cream and alcohol to baby pet beauty products over-the-counter medication things like that when we started the business you know the the trend that we saw in technology really out of Silicon Valley was like building these asset-like marketplaces that Connected Careers and Merchants and the problem with that was it's very hard as we're seeing today for a business a third-party business model to actually produce cash and that's why you see a lot of third-party players start to invest in ancillary businesses but also you can't control the customer experience because you're delivering Goods that someone else owns and manages and so our Founders when they started the company really wanted to make sure that they could control the entire customer experience and that the business produced cash and so for the first three years it was actually profitable at which point we started taking on Venture Capital to expand the network both domestically and globally and today where it sits is go puff covers around a thousand cities across the U.S and the UK we operate a little over 400 micro fulfillments centers we actually own over 400 liquor licenses so there's a heavy infrastructure component to the business between the buildings that we manage the liquor licenses that we own the technology that we've built when we started as you mentioned we pioneered this instant Commerce space there was no off-the-shelf Tech in terms of receiving product picking and packing and then routing and dispatching in this like micro or hyper local environment so we think what we've built is is what the rails for the future of Commerce will look like as consumers shift from the two-day and two hour delivery to this concept of instant procurement of the goods that they want and that is on a very high level something that you guys both have in common you are making a deliverable your case making and your case delivering things and you have fulfillment centers and Manufacturing facilities r d all that stuff do you think that that era the platform generation of companies that we saw it's only six seven eight years ago is that dead or is it lived out outlived its usefulness and the companies that were creating that era and they're still around are the ones they're going to survive and maybe won't see so many new ones that Tony I don't know if you have thoughts on that I mean I think there are similarities and they're both very capability and so even though I agree it's better to go deep there's still a lot of opportunities to be looking at that platform play so for us it's about you know can we use the same back end in the same infrastructure support women at different life stages different problems so I don't think that the platform plays kind of yeah in that sense is it more a platform to link them to your products rather than just the platform in and of itself yeah I don't know for you Daniel yeah I mean look I would think about it a little bit differently personally I think the way that platform has been described or defined over the last 10 years has been very asset light I think there's this company that many people may have heard of called Amazon that invested you know 20 billion dollars in infrastructure um of AWS yeah yeah a few people have heard of them uh but they've invested tens of billions of dollars over the last two decades into infrastructure to build the largest global platform I think we've come to know right um and if you remember back in the like late 90s early 2000s the Amazon eBay debate was a was a hotly debated topic and everyone was asking you know the Amazon team why they were not going to this third party Marketplace model right how many people still use eBay so I think the idea of investing in infrastructure up front in a very heavy way that infrastructure pays back fairly quickly and it's a one-time investment and if you can manage that you can avoid or endure a lot of things that are out of the control of many companies that like an asset like Marketplace that owns nothing can't can't endure and what you can then do which I think Amazon's kind of created a blueprint for this is you can then take that infrastructure and open it up to enable whatever Services you're you know uniquely positioned to provide for other types of companies and Brands and so I think to Tanya's Point like this is it's just an evolution of what a platform means and I think companies who are betting on infrastructure early are the ones that will win long term and I would agree with Daniel I mean in terms of profitability on on the the value chain but the problem is often investors right particularly those campus investors they they get very put off if there's asset heavy right yeah have you found that as well or and it particularly what's with what's going on right with cash and and so on yeah I mean look in the beginning and I'm sure you guys went through something similar but in the beginning trying to explain to investors that we own inventory and had buildings like you would watch their eyes pop out and their heads explode like in the conversation um and it was the investors that you know we were fortunate enough to bring on who have been great supporters who bet on us early and now you look at the tides have turned especially with this like whatever you want to call it an economic downturn recessionary environment depending on who's speaking uh you know companies that own infrastructure and manage you know the end-to-end or deep down the value chain are the ones that can survive what's going on and the ones that that and if you don't own anything how do you make money right like we joke that I'm sure you guys are similar like we buy products and we sell it for more than we buy it right like that's the core model that's why the business works then we found unique ways to actually deliver those goods and do things differently and so the investment Community We Believe has come around because we've shown that this model works but in the beginning it was it was definitely a challenge that I did you know buying something more cheaply than you you sell it for clearly you guys were a big beneficiary in terms of demand I assume at least from the lockdowns that uh this is when we saw the explosions of not just you guys but in the UK we have get here and gorillas and and plenty more besides that was a very competitive time but there was also a lot of demand were you still selling stuff for more than you paid for it or were you just saying we're going to stomach a whole bunch of losses right now and yeah and gain share so I'd say two things one uh we never believed in uh raising Venture Capital dollars and then subsidizing acquisition costs that's never been our model uh in fact the percent of Revenue that we spend on marketing is like astronomically low and you'd be most people would be very surprised when you see that when you look at some of the other companies out there that's an approach that a lot of other companies in our space took and I think we can see that that's not worked for them the second thing is anybody can sell a dollar for 99 cents that's not hard uh we don't do that we think pricing is important we think promotion is important but within reason uh and ultimately like we want to provide a service for consumers that is a good value purchase for them especially now more than ever the pandemic itself yes it drove demand in the broader delivery landscape because people couldn't leave their homes but really what it did for us was it accelerated um the exposure to the breadth of our assortment for consumers so we carry like there's no other platform in the world that you can get fresh pizza beer baby products cleaning supplies and Home Essentials in one basket for one delivery fee uh besides us right and that's what it exposed to consumers during the pandemic and so that's really where we were able to continue to expand categories so yes it was demand but it was really more exposure to like you can get all of these things delivered in one basket and that that's really where we saw success there was also on the other side and I'm going to come to your lockdown experience in a second but real estate presumably was easier to get at a cheaper price than might otherwise be the case were you able to lock in some long-term deals or is that going to start correcting soon I mean look we've always been very prudent with how we approach the deal making side of things whether it's real estate Acquisitions fundraising Etc and we're always looking for the right deal the benefit of the way that the business is structured is the majority of our markets if they're not the success are not predicated on um you know grade a real estate right we need real estate that puts us with close proximity to Consumers but effectively we build networks in every city you know in London for example we have 21 micro fulfillment centers covering the breadth of the city so we're designing these networks very thoughtfully to make sure that we can get Goods to people wherever they are wherever they need it and it doesn't have to necessarily be you know Prime real estate certain exceptions in major cities it's going to be more expensive but that's never been kind of like an issue for us so the pandemic you know it was we were focused very much much on get your goods in stock make sure they're there when consumers need it and deliver as fast and we were the only company that was able to maintain our delivery etas or slas for consumers during that time you guys were clearly at the heart and I assume we're at the Hard end of some of the supply chain crunches you're an electronics business like can you talk me through when you first started to ex like realize that was happening and then how you adapted yes it didn't so we were growing really quickly but then it was last May I think the the first component the microcontroller obviously the brains of our products um you know even with Hardware it's always about forensic forecasting right but even if you get it right even if you get the demand panning rights what you can't predict is obviously when suddenly there's this frenzy around component shortages so even if you've you know we've talked the component manufacturer and they're like sorry guys we love you we love LV but there's this multi-billion dollar tech company that's kind of been our customer for years and jumping to the front of the queue so it was really difficult essentially we were inventory controlled last year how do we keep the products on the line um I think anybody working in electronics last year had a really hard time and then that was sort of compounded by the fact that then the retailers our customers started also panicking because they were out of stock and and sort of Behaving quite irrationally I was saying look we need all your pumps or we're going to de-list you and so on and then they started placing and we've seen this I think across the sector this is more Q4 last year really high purchase orders and so on which then is sort of artificially affected all the forecasts um and then what we we kind of knew was happening but obviously all the Asian manufacturers in q1 have now ramped up the supply of all these components so we've seen that sort of 180 degree turn from a complete crunch on the supply chains now actually a glut on various components um and also hit obviously by consumer confidence so it's been a to keep using the word headwinds is a bit of an understatement I feel like we're what does that do for your pricing so if you you know presume you can't deliver as many as you might have wanted were you then able to charge more to your channels or were you do you keep the same price and you just take a hit on the margin and then now and then it clearly evolves in different direction now I mean at the aftermath of the pandemic has just been brutal for margins across for most companies but also as well as obviously the supply chain issue Freight you know Air Freight and and even power outages in China and so on uh like many companies we had to make decision to actually increase our prices um which is a which is a sort of natural obvious response to inflation but it's you know this this the more midterm thing we need to do is obviously be looking at our product mix making sure that we're able to offer products and services at a slightly lower price point when the lockdowns ease what was the sort of impact you saw on on demand is because I guess to begin with you have a sort of return to almost solid state economics and this is how the Market should be hopefully but then that rapidly changes with inflation the inflation story like how what you know how long did that happy period last and then how did it change afterwards I don't know if we've had a happy whenever you're lost making high growth you know we're growing 80 year and year there's that analogy of a car driving 100 miles an hour and every part is changing on the inside so as soon as we start getting the margins right and then something else has been sort of hitting us but um I think what's happened this year which is a big learning obviously is because you know any loss making consumer tech company as well an existential issue is your your investors and to what extent you can secure funding from them and and because that has also shifted the attitude towards consumer Tech and so on um it's pushed us all to pull forward on terms of profitability so we were planning to become profitable in Q4 next year now we're going to become profitable in January which is quite a big change but really quite exciting as well before I pose you a similar question we did actually have a um a Twitter poll which I hope we can bring up where we ask and clearly it's Twitter poll so don't afford it too much Imperial empiricism where we ask people what habit that they adopted during lockdowns have they retained or maintained since then and grocery food delivery comes up and perhaps no surprise video conferencing up top of the list but all of the above is about 20 so we can infer perhaps that 45 percent have kept Grocery and food delivery I don't know if we then also infer that 55 have not what does that you know when you guys came out of the uh of the lockdowns was there a bit of a course correct and you know where would what were the meetings like where you first started to see some data points that said perhaps we need to change things yeah well first I think the important thing to note about a survey like that is that 55 probably hasn't tried grocery delivery especially in Arkansas I said have you retained oh have you look it's a Twitter poll we did not that's the question the validity it's more what I was saying is that the uh the adoption rate in our category is still super low right um there's still so many people it's still less than like 10 percent uh on on in the US at least I mean some of the some other countries have seen faster adoption in Asia and things like that um but like grocery convenience alcohol these are slow uh slow adopting categories uh to delivery in terms of like the adoption rate during pandemic post-pandemic like I said what we really saw was the cross-category pollenization of the consumer behavior and one of the stats that like we've spent a lot of time focusing on is we see that consumers who are shopping eight or more categories on our platform are 22 times as value I'm going to bring you back to the question no problem so did you start to see a Slowdown in demand or was it a Slowdown of growth what was the actual Behavior we're seeing a shift in behavior and so what you're seeing is that consumers are shopping more frequently spending less and this was a behavior we were starting to kind of sniff out going into this recessionary environment where that 150 200 grocery trip is starting to go away because there's a lot of waste component to it and consumers are now buying what they need when they need it and so that's really the shift in behavior that we're starting to see more frequent trips uh you know less spend on a per trip basis and what does that mean for you guys is that how does that pick at the your model essentially I mean look the model is the models the impetus of the model was to get people Goods in 30 minutes or less right so if people are shopping us on an ad needed basis that speaks to our initial thesis nine years ago that consumers wanted to have these things like at the access to these Goods at their fingertips in which they didn't have it before um so I think the model is built for that this hyper local Logistics model and I think that's we expect that behavior to actually accelerate over the next you know 18 months and it's funny because we're completely different businesses we've had exactly the same behavior change and with consumers since May so yeah so we're still number one in breast pumps in the US but women are just spending less that category has really shrunk you alluded to the need to bring forward profitability and it gets a question I was Keen to tackle which is just the the what the capsule environment is like at the moment and whether it's you know if you I don't think either of you I don't know but if you needed to raise Capital right now how do you think it would be and what sort of feedback are you generally getting from your existing investors can you maybe I'll start we did actually unfortunately have to have to it's like many startups in the UK over the last six seven years it's just been incredibly easy to raise money and um it's been a very easy process and this year yeah everything literally changed overnight right so from having Venture debt providers who are like desperate to give us term sheets and then suddenly they're like nah don't take it personally but we're not doing anything in the consumer space anything with discretionary spend and particularly anything um which is loss making so we have seen that real shift in the UK I didn't know what it's like in the US but absolute laser focus on profitability first at LV I think the fact we've managed to bring that forward and to your point about the assets because we've got the underlying unit economics right that we can actually get there within a couple of months has really helped but I would yeah my general advice to anybody um would be just to try not to raise money in this environment you're seeing a lot more downside protection you know terms which we haven't seen on term sheets for a long time around uh you know liquidation preferences and so on what does that mean for hiring you know does it have an effect of people going well actually my options or my my if they have an extra peace not worth as much as maybe we thought they were going to be yeah we haven't done [Music] a number of times my board members keep mentioning klana to me we're not clano we don't need much more complexity in that one but I mean I think you're the same for you guys don't need to raise money but I think with the last round there's valued you guys at 15 billion yeah I guess maybe the hiring thing is perhaps pertinent for you guys as well because do you have to come up with new valuation internally so when you're telling people how much their options and things are worth like how do you negotiate that element well look I mean I think we're fortunate to be well capitalized and not have to go to the market I think it's not a good time to raise money and probably won't be for a while um the fortunate thing for us is we expanded a lot over the last two years both infrastructurally and from a Personnel perspective so we're not in a position where you know we're hiring hundreds of people right now we feel like you know we've gone through some major cost cutting exercises over the past few months because similar to what Tanya said it's fortifying the balance sheet today and putting yourself on a self-funded plan to achieve profitability we're doing the same thing but we have a a really talented and big team so we're not in the market looking for a ton of rules with maybe the exception of our technical side of the business um and we still believe there's a ton of upside on the business we haven't had real challenges on that front and we were just talking about this earlier right because you've had to withdraw from Spain I think that's public and we've withdrawn from China so I think it's just the environment at the moment it's just you focus much more in the short term rather than the more mid to long-term strategic objectives are there also some opportunities you know created by this perhaps you know weeding out some of the companies that perhaps don't have as resilient a business model or or is that wishful thinking from you know that you would be fetching to your own investors yeah it creates a burning platform right so you know similar to to gay 've grown so quickly right and then things slow down slightly it's actually this Burning platform makes you it forces you to be more agile like how can we how can we fix our product mix how can we diversify faster and also even on the business model so how can we move away from discretionary spend so our breast pumps for example can can be subsidized on on health insurance in the US they're trying to look for more predictable income such as that I realize I failed you as an audience by failing to ask if you wanted to submit questions we've got about two minutes left so if you have any questions please race to import them this is entirely my bad I apologize I'm going to pose the same question to you how are you finding the competitive landscape is shaping up you know given the new headwinds yeah I think look we had the experience of a very unique competitive landscape over the last few years I mean in the UK alone there are a dozen companies exactly for six years we had no competition uh and then I think about 18 months ago you probably had 30 instant Commerce players globally today there's like four or five left right we're seeing consolidation we're seeing a lot of businesses go under the infrastructure wasn't built properly by a lot of companies because it was done too fast and they were using the dollars incorrectly in our opinion and so we think the consolidation will continue and we think it's a huge opportunity if you if you manage a Better Business and Tanya's Point you're forced to think differently about the businesses in this environment we think it puts us in a position coming out in a few years as the global leader in the space you know undeniably if if there needs to be a roll-up would you guys have the capsule would you need to go and find money as well we feel really good about the business that we've built I don't think we see a need to expand by acquiring competitors right although that is what you've done historically but historically but that was entering a market and that was before this like wave of these players so we were actually one of the first to make that kind of move and it was before some of the irrational evaluations we saw in this piece and I would say it's the same so femtech Women's Health Tech unit has been a lot of a plethora of you know early stage startups what you're seeing here in the UK is particularly the ones that not Revenue generating they're the ones who are being punished the most in terms of the investor climate so unfortunately quite a few are going bankrupt so simply there's definitely a lot of opportunity for consolidation I think also there's increasing amounts of funding to your point exactly for doing that kind of that mop up um we do have a question I'm going to slightly paraphrase it the question is how would you describe the impact of the pandemic on consumer Tech what I'm actually interested to not ask is whether it benefited your company and whether it benefited your industry I'll start with the attorney a simple answer no okay um well I think the the impact was early adopters became the norm right like that's what we saw in a lot of space I think undoubtedly it impacted in a positive way both our industry and and our company well thank you both for joining us on stage Tony Ebola and uh Daniel folkman from gopuff and LV respectively and I hope that you enjoy the rest of the panels this afternoon thank you very much [Applause] [Music] please welcome to the stage Tom Pay CEO and founder of waymap and Bloomberg's Amy Thompson foreign [Music] thank you very much for joining us today um I have the CEO of waymat tompei with me so the idea for the app originally was to help the visually impaired navigate places like the Subway or the underground how are you positioning the company now well when I um founded waymap I was really inspired by something that Steve Jobs said when he was um trying to get the iPhone through at that but he said if we can make this work for blind people that would work for everybody um and pretty much that's fight um we're doing with Weymouth we've designed something that started with solving a real problem for blind people like myself but actually is something that's really needed in many verticals so it's a very commercial product and it is one that's going to be extremely profitable so how does the technology work because you say it doesn't rely on GPS which is how most uh mapping apps uh you'd expect them to to work so what what technology does it rely on well basically because we we um we use the principles of inclusive design so we started out trying to design for the most difficult user and we took um advanced technology that was available that was being used in the military space and in in asset location space and we turned that into something that really converted your mobile phone into a a very accurate navigation device um and really what it does is it takes the sensors on the phone they're not very reliable they're not very accurate but they um they give you a reading of the direction you're going in that if you're going up or you're going down and and so on and by also um measuring the step length by knowing your step length but we we created an algorithm that when we put it against Maps it will can predict your next step to within one meter so in other words we we can keep you within one meter accuracy and 10 degree heading accuracy all of the time and because all of the maps are on your phone and because the software is on your phone if your your mobile phone company loses you or you don't have what access to Wi-Fi then you don't need it it works now if if it's there of course we use it and it helps us out but we also put in many other things into the phone that that allows it to um to help people and we disabilities we just simply then stack on top of the um the basic device all of the extra features that they say the different forms of disabled people need but actually most of those are really cool for um for the ordinary persons such as you know like I use a mobile phone everybody uses a mobile phone because it's accessible for for disabled people just some really cool features in it so so like what are some of these features well um so in terms of um the for blind paper for instance the most important thing is that you get a uh an instruction on time and that the instruction is clear and that the instruction makes sense to you right so when I'm being trained to use a white cane to use a guide dog I learned um certain tricks about how to get around what we do is we harness that and we create mental Maps so that you know simply by saying Straight Ahead rails on your left right it creates a mental map of where I am and what I need to do and it allows me if I have if I'm for instance so the Washington metropolitan police for instance have asked us if we can develop a product to help them to find older adults who get lost and the answer is yes we can but in fact we can put into the system something that will prevent people from getting lost in the first instance such as being able to off-ramp being able to identify markers around you you know having very simple age within the phone that allows you to solve simple problems but if you take it then for say um you know for me one of the offered things was that I used to always have to ask my wife to take me to the supermarket to buy stuff and so what we've we've done is we've developed the system because we know where you are to within one meter and we know the way you're looking through the intense 10 degrees we know if you're in the wine aisle or in the coffee aisle and we know if you're looking at the white wine or the red wine and so on yeah um and for me that's always a great problem but actually for retailers we are finding that they're really excited about this because it gives them greater opportunity to do proximity marketing so the uh the app is free for users so these retailers and municipalities Etc these are these are your paying customers yes absolutely so it is the service provider or as we call it the venue owner that um that pays for it um it is relatively inexpensive in in terms of marketing budgets um and the um and at this present moment in time we are rolling it out across the entire um greater Washington metropolitan area so that's you know the tri-state area in DC and DC will become the the first city in the world to have a really inclusive transportation system that can be used by the 10 million visitors that come to DC every year so for instance you know the mayor's office I mean you can imagine the the bureaucracy in in DC and the security and so on but um the emerge offers and all of the tourism people are really really excited about this but even more importantly we can now take this into the area of social care we can get people who have dementia people who have learning difficulties and so on so we take something that would work for everybody that that increases the experience and we um we have in their features that allow people like me to be able to enjoy the city the same as everyone else well great well that was uh that's all of our time unfortunately thank you so much for joining us thank you [Applause] [Music] please welcome to the stage Catherine ainley the CEO of Ericsson UK and Ireland [Music] hi everyone thank you and it's great to be here today at the end of quite a remarkable summer I think um if ever it brought home about climate change the sort of 40 degrees that we saw in London for the first time really made us realize how urgent and important everything is so I'm here today to talk to you about connectivity and climate change and a little bit about Ericsson both in terms of what we're doing but also what we're doing with customers and and hopefully inspire you on what some of that connectivity can do more broadly as well so before I start because not everybody knows who Erickson is actually we don't make mobile phones which is what I get quite a lot not anymore but what we do do is um create develop manufacture lots of the infrastructure and software that powers particularly the mobile network so in the UK for example we're working with all the four big operators to roll out 5G so we're going to spend quite a lot of time unashamedly talking about 5G and connectivity and what that can enable so yeah a little bit I'm going to take this from two angles the first is sort of what Erickson is doing internally to sort of share a little bit there uh what and what we're doing with our customers so kind of the direct impact that connectivity is having on climate change but also more excitingly what that connectivity can do and how it can Inspire and innovate and really help to tackle some of the bigger issues in the world around us so if I start with Ericsson as a whole um we are well on our way to our Net Zero journey and by 2030 we'll we'll halve our net zero emissions and our Target is to be Net Zero throughout that value Chain by 2040. um and if I sort of talk through a couple of practical examples to bring that to life and one of the things we've just done is we developed our Factory in the US to reduce our energy costs by 24 to our energy usage by 24 um costs um but that's also gone to 100 renewable energy and how we've done that is we've automated the factory we've introduced lots of connectivity lots of autonomous activities and using our own technology to really drive that um sustainability piece but it also means that we can produce more quickly and you know manufacturing is one of the areas that you can really see the benefit but if I move on a little bit more from our technology um one of the other places we can have an impact and that's really critical to us that we spend a lot of time thinking about is what we call breaking the energy curve so if you look at 2D 3G 4G and now 5G each one has increased the amount of connectivity that we've had and it's increased the amount of data and we've all done more and more with this technology but also what's generally happened is the energy usage has increased kind of on on a level so we've gone from 2G to 3G to 4G and if we carry on with 5G actually the amount of energy that that's going to use for all these fantastic new applications that I'm going to talk about could just carry on increasing so what the other thing as well as what are we doing internally we also spending lots of time with our customers on how can they reduce their energy usage and bring that to life for you a little bit um we have co-develops a radio so as well as sort of how we produce that radio we've worked with Vodafone in the UK to produce uh radio so a radio for those of you who are a little bit less technical is the thing that you you see when you think of a mobile phone Master radios on top of it and uh that uses a 42 less energy within 5G uh for Vodafone and up to 55 less energy so we're constantly looking for how can we get that better connectivity and that better Speed without just using more and more energy and in fact we're targeting having um 5G being 10 times more efficient than 4G by the end of the year within our products so you can see actually this is a really important thing that we are driving forward um however what I get really excited about is um what can 5G and connectivity do for the world around us so I think lots of people think about ICT as using uploads of energy it's um you know drives missions but actually it's responsible for only 1.4 of global greenhouse gases say only still 1.4 but what it can do is it has the potential to enable a 15 reduction now that is enormous so if we Embrace connectivity and and and all the benefits that come with it actually we can have a really disproportionate impact on the world around us and again if I try and bring that to life for all of you um things that we get excited about the type of projects that we're working on um how can you work in a factory so we're working with companies to work in a virtual reality world but from different locations so they can work together on a manufacturing activity um such as hyperbat which is an electric car battery manufacturer that we work with and they can work on the same piece in a virtual reality world but from different locations so there without having to travel it's much more efficient you get the business benefit but you also get a massive sustainability benefit as well secondly if you think of some of the jobs that we do at the moment that require lots of travel that perhaps are quite dangerous things like driving trucks uh managing cranes as another really good example you know you can see a world where either they'll be autonomous or you'll be able to manage those from a control center using 5G and connectivity without actually having to travel and and all the um emissions that go with that so loads and loads of opportunity and we're we're starting to do that we are working with companies to do it but what we want to do is do more and more of it and we think this connectivity is really at the heart of how we can transform our society moving forwards and how we can get that sustainability benefit and I talk loads about business because actually I think 5G is about business and Enterprise um as as importantly as consumers so I think people often think of the consumer use cases first and there's loads but I think business and Enterprise is really important however if we look at the consumer side of it you know the consumers are also crying out for this connectivity you know they're telling us this is a study that we did and they're telling us the 46 believe that that future Technology Innovation will be crucial to solving many of those challenges that we've got and 36 are actively kind of going I want those devices to come and help me solve some of these challenges so the business benefit is there and you can see that not only can we reduce energy usage improve our sustainability but you can also help create you know you can create a really good business case there but the consumers are also really seeing the benefits of what they can do so we've got that link I guess one of the questions that we get asked is how are we doing on 5G um I get asked that all the time uh and and the reality is you know us and Asia are ahead they are really powering on on this Europe is lagging behind and and one of the big calls that Erickson has is you know we really want to go faster on 5G and connectivity because that's what will enable all of this change and enable um this sustainability and we really risk missing out um our estimates suggest that in North America and Northeast Asia they'll be at 95 population coverage by 2027. we expect Europe to be at about 80 so that gives you a sense of kind of how much we want to see Europe pushing on on this to catch up with North America and Asia because otherwise we risk missing out on not just the business benefits and the consumer benefits but also most you know really importantly on their sustainability benefits that we can get from that as well so if I then um just what would I leave you with I would say you know we're really really Keen to make sure that we get that connectivity rolled out uh if I do you know you can't get the benefits if we haven't got the network so please make sure that that rolls out we'd love to see governments really Embrace 5G and connectivity across all departments and not just about the department in charge of connectivity but actually you know how can we build in sustainability targets and more efficient working across all government departments and most importantly my ask for all of you in the room is you know how can we use this how can we create Innovation better ways of working and that real step change so that our connectivity will make a massive change so thank you very much foreign [Music] Moller head of Europe at Watershed and Bloomberg's Nate Langston [Music] hello everybody uh thank you for uh for sticking around here we're going to have a very interesting conversation about how Tech or how Tech how green is Tech really and I'm going to be um I'm going to break with Convention of the day ever so slightly before we have a conversation because I'd like to show you the results of a rather loud and uh definitive Twitter poll results which we're going to pull up I wanted to ask a question um Do You Believe most tech companies are as green as they say they are the answer is 93.5 no which is a pretty definitive response pretty loud um I do usually find it's a good experiment on social media when you need advice is to ask what the very loudest people think you should do and then do the opposite um so on this occasion I'd like to run the poll again with everyone in here and who's watching online just to see if your opinion on this answer differs so it's the same um okay it's a slightly different question but uh it's still a yes or no answer so if you fancy voting on this we'll talk about it but in the short term um Ellen and Sophie it's great to have you here um I just wondered if first you could give us a a sense of um what your companies do and then your initial thought uh reactions to the rather clear answer that our Twitter users uh gave us so Ellen would stop if we do happy to um I leave the European business for Watershed which is a technology company that helps medium and large businesses run their end-to-end climate program everything through understanding where their missions lie to acting on those missions reducing those emissions and then ultimately reporting and being transparent about that as well um happy to happy to give kind of a quick take on that and then I'll hand it over to Sophie as well I think I would say maybe to the tech question inherently Tech like many other Industries has very non-green elements of it and one size it's not created equal across All Tech businesses as well I should say there are choices within every business on how green they want to be and I'd say transparency is really important to Consumers to stakeholders to help them understand that example of that is let's say data centers for example most tech companies have big data center Footprints there's a lot of choices they can make on whether it's on-prem or Colo or in the cloud where the grid is and a lot of that can actually impact actually how green that part of their emissions are or actually how they run their processing so that's just one example of many but it really depends and I'll say it's very business to business and we encourage a lot of transparency around that such that as a consumer you'd have a better sense of how to answer that question for that very reason Sophie would echosia yeah yeah so um acosia lots of you might know Cozier is a search engine that plants trees we do quite a lot more than than that at this point now kind of 12 13 years on down that path um and no doubt we'll kind of cover those things during this session but um I I run the UK um for a cozia and also the policy piece which involves Tech and climate policy uh given that we're a search engine and we plant trees anyway we'll come to that um to this to this question I mean I I'm not surprised um and and as as Ellen was saying I mean essentially um every company no matter which business you're in which which sector you're in has a responsibility to be as as green um as as possible um every company has the values that the company sets and uh I kind of say you know everyone has their course in context right so you if you're in the tech sector like we are you're inherently involved in ICT sector we just were looking at hearing about the kind of the carbon emissions of that sector and therefore we have a responsibility to engage with that responsibly to take the right steps to to mitigate the carbon from that and we have been and we're 200 energy renewable at this point so we're carbon negative and have been for a long time so we've we've taken that as part of the kind of the values that drive the company uh kind of very seriously early on um and and yeah so I think that that's important for companies to consider um but then on top of that obviously there's regulation that can help with that right that number's pretty high it's I think it's 93 so I think there's clearly a bit of a gap in terms of expectations of what employers or employees are looking for from their employer and what actually the employer is delivering well let's have a look at the result of our live poll um so this is a slightly less uh extreme uh answer but it's still a pretty resounding no uh you do not believe your employer or business does enough to combat uh to control environmental impact so it's a very similar set of answers from both of those um both of those questions um before we get into the nitty-gritty then um Sophie can you just explain to me when I'm searching on ecosia my user how exactly are all my searches translating into trees going in the ground like how do you do that and compete with Google which is pretty big right I mean it's very hard to to compete with with Google I mean Google um owns 96 of the European search market right so that's a tough tough one to crack but we're doing pretty well we have 20 million users across Europe and the US largely but elsewhere too um and in terms of kind of those users why they're using a cozy I mean they fundamentally are very concerned about climate change so in terms of competing with Google I mean we have a value proposition which um you know really speaks to people who are who are worried and also looking for a way of making a a difference it's free it's accessible you just need internet access so that speaks to a lot of people who are desperate to do something and we see that number rise as unfortunately um you know climate disasters increase unfortunately we see people you know coming to a Cozier more and more which is which is good for us but obviously it reflects a wide a problem so in terms of how how ecosia works I mean transparency is incredibly important for us so um if anyone and I would encourage anyone who doesn't use ecosia to quickly go on on the App Store and download and you can see as I'm talking what I'm talking about but we have a large number which now sits at over 157 million trees which goes up as more and more users use a Cozier and click on ads and it's an imperfect system that we've built a Cozier on right the idea of clicking on ads and consuming um but that is the challenge of the search markets space right so we can talk a bit more about those challenges obviously but ecosia was created to basically create a scalable Revenue stream so that we could contribute to reforesting the planet so we sit upon the Bing infrastructure and all of the money that is generated through ads goes into fighting climate change 80 has always been signposted for reforestation uh projects so with one of the largest reforestation organizations in the world which is great and and the remaining 20 goes into other exciting initiatives like Renewables like regenerative agriculture Investments and a few other different fund projects that we're involved in but the idea is that we are using a business model a search engine uh and and kind of putting all of that Revenue into um all the profits into fighting climate change so yeah instead of keeping the ad money the ad money is going towards planting trees absolutely yeah okay um Ellen you come from the from the other side of this um in terms of working with companies that have maybe not uh put climate and green credentials at the heart of their business um but want to and help them figure out where those emissions are and how to offset them or get rid of them completely could you just talk us through a little bit about what the average process there there looks like and and where some of the stumbling blocks are with some of the businesses you work with yeah I'll say it sort of it starts the data it all comes on date at the end it's that's the kind of critical piece to understanding where your missions lie and so when we begin working with a business across many different types of Industries what we first do is work with them on actually ingesting that data taking it from primary sources where we can so we're really getting back to kind of where it's where it's most raw and where it's most accurate and then using that to actually identify where what that means in terms of their total emissions and so we have a climate science team internally and that's all the methodology that we use we make that methodology very transparent to our customers they can follow along on that journey and then it's ultimately giving them a picture of what those missions look like and where they lie and once you have that that's when you can start taking action we often find the customers come to us thinking their missions are going to lie in one place and being quite surprised actually where there are hot spots of emissions within their business an example of that we work with monzo here in the UK they weren't thinking about payment processing as a place that actually housed a lot of their missions as a business but once they were able to figure that out they were then able to do something about that and that can look like engaging with different vendors working with them directly to reduce those emissions or get them to get a program in place or in some cases looking at removals as an option or avoidance credits as well and so I think once you can follow that data which is really where we start with businesses that's where the action can come and then once that's done as well it's an ongoing basis I should say you can then start to report on that and produce that kind of transparency effort that we spoke about earlier and that's interesting because in the in the first the first slide we saw the the 90 odd percent of people who who think companies aren't as green as they say they are it may not be because those companies are lying they might just be wrong and they actually think well we thought we were doing a good job and they come to a company like Watershed and you say well no you are completely wrong because this is where it's all coming from do you find that is consistently the case that companies are completely wrong about where the problem lies not always I think they're we work with wonderful sustainability teams and companies who've been thinking about this for a while and and have been thinking deeply about the data but there are often surprises and also as a business grows there's going to be changes in the business that are going to impact their missions as well so whether that be an acquisition or a new business line or a country expansion and navigating emissions that way can be challenging unless you've got sort of support behind you and understanding grid factors and downstream supply chain elements that can actually contribute to that so I'd say it's an ongoing effort and that's why it can't just be a sort of look at this once a year and then get Off to the Races it needs to be something that is very much integrated into the everyday practices of business now you mentioned uh transparency earlier Sophie and one of the things that intrigued me when we were speaking ahead of this panel is you said the most popular piece of content that ecosia publishes every month is a pretty granular breakdown of how much money you've made and where you're spending it um in a very different way to you know a quarterly or annual report that a public company would have to do why do you think that is and and and what is it about the transparency there that keeps people wanting to read that yeah um I mean our users are incredibly engaged with with the product um and when you you're talking about the little tree count that you get at the top um for lots of people they really consider those to be their trees like I think um you know if you have kind of upwards of 100 200 whatever trees you know people love to see the number go up and they want to know where those trees are actually being planted so storytelling and helping to bring people along with the journey is really fundamental to Cozy it also makes us very different to other kind of tech companies I would say in terms of kind of we're very um you see a lot of the the characters in terms of the people who actually planting the trees uh employees Etc on the on the kind of content that we put out so we're very much kind of a personable kind of company um and in terms of the monthly reports we've been doing them really from the offset so we really wanted to ensure that transparency wasn't ingrained within the business model um and it is it is amazing to see that that is consistently still despite all the the kind of the videos that we put out all of the you know stuff on social media that is the thing that people are interested in and they're also interested to see that you know we as much as our tree number goes up it also goes down sometimes we're really kind of for us the tree survival rate is one of the most important things right we're not just planting trees the trees need to survive and as the science changes as well we are there making adjustments and making sure that it's accurate and reflective of what's happening on the ground so we have a tree team which goes out and kind of looks at all the projects and checks what's happened check you know that everything on the ground is is correct and then we adjust the tree counter accordingly so so for us Integrity transparency knowing that things are a moving Target we're planting lots of trees but they need to survive we're kind of reflecting that in our storytelling also it helps with accountability as well Keeps Us true to our mission and it keeps users along with us as well so that's probably why it's one of the most kind of red pieces for us but yeah users really enjoy uh interacting with that content and seeing where the money's going which tree planting projects the the money's going into yeah I mean definitely with it with the trees it's it's quite nice for me to know that you know the heavy metal drummers of the early 90s using the searches about them that I've made have gone some way to solving deforestation but the um the other side of this is is as you say is this accountability and this keeping the um uh sort of the the impetus up and you must um Ellen give companies reports or give them the the tools to make reports about how they're improving or if they're improving do you have conversations with them about whether or not they should be publishing those um perhaps in a similar way to to ecosia not in a way that violates any you know regulatory issue they might have but is that a conversation you have and if so how does that go absolutely and I would just say it's kind of to build on that I think what you say on the engagement you see from your community and I think this is true for companies needing to report for investors or their customers as well that kind of Engagement we're seeing only continued increase and we very much encourage our customers to report and to be transparent on that reporting now there's kind of a a lot of companies today that are starting to do this on a voluntary basis and there are voluntary disclosure schemes that many of our customers choose to report to for that reason and also we see the kind of incoming policy that is going to be requiring this for many businesses as well I think both both those forces are important and they are beneficial and we tell our customers report as much as possible be as transparent as possible be clear on the methodology let us arm you with how we got to these numbers with you because exactly as you say the science year and year is going to evolve and it's important to just be transparent on how that's ending impacting ultimately your business as well and you want to be up to date with the near the newest methodology and that's a lot of the role that we play with our climate science team with our customers and so I'd say it doesn't stop at just kind of doing things internally it also is something to engage investors it engages employees it engages prospective employees as well and so it's absolutely sort of a big Focus for us as we work with customers and how is the regulatory the change if you like in the regulatory landscape over the last 10 15 years affect to how you talk to companies in terms of reporting like has it made it easier for you to convince them to publish knowing that maybe it'll help with I don't know tender proposals or or whatever or whatever else [Music] in a very different way and so we are optimistic that some of these disclosure schemes are starting to unify around certain standards that's going to be very helpful if we're comparing Apples to Apples across companies and today that's still very very challenging for the average person really for anyone to be able to compare across businesses so I think that is a very helpful mechanism that is that is definitely coming into effect okay um Sophie tell me what I mean you how long has it cozy been around now 12 13 years something something like that yeah doing something right because you're competing with Google and you're still in business and you're still doing good things what is what you've done so far allowing you to now think about doing over the next few years next three five years that's that's a really good question um so yeah I mean lots of people will know us as the search engine that plants trees but we are also many other things um we're the largest European search engine we're the largest non-profit search engine we're also we also now have a um a tech a climate Tech VC which has become the largest in in Europe the world fund which is fantastic and so I spoke about the kind of the 80 always going into reforestation projects which makes us one of the largest reforestation movements in the world which is awesome um the remaining 20 um has been used for a number of different things we've got a regenerative agriculture fund one of the largest as you'll know one of the largest uh causes of deforestation which is incredibly important to us right there's no point in US planting trees and other people are kind of ripping them out with the other hand and so um so commercial agriculture is something we're really interested in kind of moving the system towards a regenerative agriculture so we're doing a number of different things and one of the other areas that we we work a lot on in terms of kind of also as a ICT company looking at our own carbon footprint is the uh the renewable sector so the um we've been using solar for a long time um in Germany um we've built a number of plants there which is great and we've built we've we've spent seven million on that which um as a startup initially um was quite a big investment for us and then we have invested a further 30 million when Russia invaded Ukraine into um solar energy in Germany to help to try to drive that green energy transition in Germany away from fossil fuel dependency and also in the UK um we we are now going to be announcing as well further investments in the renewable sector here so we're looking to invest um about a quarter of a million euros in the renewable sector here in in um in the UK which is fantastic so we're really excited about that and we want other companies to come along with us right I mean echosia has planted a lot of trees and it's having a bit of an impact which is great but we can't do this by ourselves we've spoken others have spoken about kind of the need to have others join and and come along with us on that Journey so Partnerships are really important with other organizations who feel also compelled to do something to to invest in that transition so we'd love to to work with other organizations who also want to invest in renewable energy um across the UK and elsewhere as well so so there's a few different projects and and we're definitely trying to fight climate change on a number of different fronts well we've had a couple of questions that came in um we've got another five minutes or so to talk one of them that I can I can see here that I'm going to put to can consumerism and population growth ever be positively reconciled with environmentalism and that's an easy question for four minutes in a tech uh conference to answer but can it yes no I'm I I mean that's a really difficult one I mean there's a lot of things in there it's quite a loaded question I mean I think you know I mean as I said earlier right our um business model unfortunately does require people to buy things right and then with that we're we're being we're doing something which is good for the environment I mean the current system needs to move away from extractive capitalism I would say right we need to move towards something which is much more inclusive we need to just transition we need to make sure that everyone comes along with us on this journey um so so fundamentally I mean there's a lot in there but but we need to move towards something which is much more sustainable and inclusive yeah okay um sorry Ellen did you have a comment on that no I think it is obviously a big question I think that there are choices in how consumerism operates and also I think as you're using funding to invest in technologies that are going to be critical for this transition I think as of course is doing whereas we've seen other tech companies the likes of kind of what stripe and others have done on investing heavily and kind of forward buying and carbon removals you know that's coming from an error making revenue on consumerism but it's investing in Technologies and so seeing more companies actually start to invest there I think is encouraging but the outcome of that question I think well there's a lot there and a lot remains to be seen yeah so one thing I wanted to to get to is um is to figure out how you maintain that inertia I mean obviously um Sophie you mentioned that you you tend to get an uptick when there have been natural disasters people um obviously concerned about environmental impact want to do something it causes you know one of the choices that they make to sort of make a difference bit by bit um and and Ellen in your conversations with companies sometimes the data show that yes you need to do this this and this and in the first instance it might be easy enough to get those conversations going but how do you keep people engaged and actually wanting to continue making a difference and not just being a box ticking exercise is there a lesson that you can teach us yeah I'll be happy happy to start there I think the the big piece on this I think is also helping companies frame this not just as a box sticking exercise or even just an altruistic thing but they're actually being some real Roi some real return on investment from investing in strong sustainability strong climate programs I mean this can help with things like Logistics optimization that can actually help the bottom line or helping on kind of travel optimization that can that can improve the bottom line we see investors wanting to pay premiums for companies that actually have really strong programs in this place so it can really help with getting funding in certain cases as well then there's sort of this less quantifiable around Employee Engagement and attraction that I mentioned earlier and so it's going to look slightly different for every business but it is not just a box checking exercise and if anything we actually see a huge amount of value coming from any of the businesses that end up engaging quite deeply here and being able to show that data over time I think is going to be a critical component and that's where things like software and pulling that actually into everyday business practices not just sitting in a little corner of a business is going to be really critical for that Sophie how do you how do you maintain that interest how do you how do you keep people coming back once they've discovered that they can use you yeah I mean for us it's not a lack of concern around the environment right I mean we're a b2c company um we go straight to the consumers the the users of the internet um are concerned about the environment and they come to us um and I mean in in some ways it's almost the opposite um a lot of our users are kind of under the age of 40 45 and are incredibly worried to the point that they have you know climate anxiety and um uh and and we do a lot of content to try to help people through that right because this is a marathon it's not a Sprint so it's more like how do you prevent the overwhelm and how do you make sustainable choices um uh which are integrated within your life um you know to to which align with your values and for a lot of people echosa is a way of doing that without making too much of a change um so I think yeah we always have the kind of opposite problem right how do we how do we look after our users how do we make sure that they're getting the information they need and that they feel empowered a to make Greener choices so we have Greener kind of products and ways that you can when you use a Cozier kind of differentiate between uh different things that you might be shopping for ETC um and also just making sure that they have the information about how to perhaps direct their climate action as well well Alan uh Sophie it's been absolutely fascinating we are sadly out of time um but thank you for joining us today and thank you everybody for for attending all for watching online thank you both foreign [Music] ER senior director for the digital markets unit at the competition and markets Authority and Bloomberg's bradstone [Music] all right welcome will thank you very much I know what they're all thinking right now finally the regulator is here exactly no but it's so great you're here I mean understanding the power of big tech companies and if necessary addressing it controlling it is so important you're the senior director for the digital markets unit dmu at the competition Market Authority CMA so you're an acronym nestled within an acronym I'm afraid I think maybe we should start out by ex you explaining what the dmu is and what your mandate is sure I mean perhaps just briefly on the CMA as a whole so our job as a whole is to make markets work for consumers businesses and the economy and we do that through a whole range of things consumer law enforcement competition law enforcement I mean with the equivalent in the USB the FTC somewhere between the FTC and the doj or the combination okay and so within that the digital markets unit has been set up uh to prepare for a new framework that the government's planning to legislate for to consider their Market power of the very the very most powerful firms particularly in platform markets and uh work out how to to open up some of those markets to more to more Innovation and more competition and I want to come back to the to the phrase use planning planning the legislate but first I was I was sort of curious what our audience how much they knew about the dmu and the CMA so we we designed a live poll so we could maybe throw that up on the screen um just sort of uh asking about current impressions of the CMA it might reveal something of the political leanings but but while we while we wait for results so earlier in the year there was a statutory commitment from the government that sort of empowered to give statutory powers to the dmu formalizing the role strengthening your enforcement abilities that's still pending so give us an update and and tell us what it means that this law hasn't yet been passed so the government has uh stated in the in the Queen's speech in May that it plans to publish a draft bill this session of parliament which will create this this new framework uh and we're working with the government on the underlying policy and preparing to implement that when it when it comes in but we're we're on a bit of a twin track approach because while we're doing that and we think that's important to be able to really tackle some of these issues most fully meanwhile we have our existing powers and so we're using those to the best of our ability again to try and tackle some of the problems we see deriving from from Market power in some of these sectors I feel like you're you're like a superhero without the cape right now so what what is it how far what are the limits without this this law being passed and what you can what you can do to follow through on some of the investigations you've conducted yeah so the the the traditional tools have been around for a long time uh they were all set up potentially before digital was a thing and uh they yeah were they still effective for certain things but they are they are we think not quite sufficient to to deal with some of the challenges here and that's to do with uh enforcement action in particular being backward looking having to be quite uh narrowly targeted to a specific issue it being quite difficult to design remedies that will actually be effective in the market so what's needed is a bit of a shift to being able to set some of the rules up front in a in fact in a more collaborative way with the company's concerned than it is really can really work under that enforcement framework so that we can get better results more quickly in the market and again open it up to open those markets up to um uh Stronger competition more Innovation create more of a Level Playing Field for businesses other than the really the the very biggest ones to compete fairly right now one aspect of the Mandate is to help the CMA review mergers and now you've warned me that that you have to be careful in addressing specific cases so let me try to be suitably oblique um well one one um you know thing that the the CMA has um and Outsiders have wished for is more action on so-called killer Acquisitions these deals by big tech companies to buy smaller firms and maybe Park them or kill them entirely uh so I I guess I wonder like do do Regulators have the necessary very tools right now to stop these kinds of deals so we I mean the the the work of looking at mergers is is uh it takes a similar approach across across sectors we are always focused on the evidence always trying to understand what's going on uh whatever industry that's in what we said particularly in relation to the to the moves of digital is that we need to be able to think harder about uh the prospects for future competition and that's partly uh as a result of us and others around the world having a look back at past Acquisitions and thought perhaps we should have asked some tougher questions about where that might be going at the time and so we've been we've been doing that uh in in these sectors well that's really interesting so the key is is looking how it impacts future competition so not evaluating where a market is and how a deal that seems small might impact things now but looking ahead and saying well can this lead to anti-competitive outcomes exactly by Nature merger control is always forward-looking because you're saying there are two companies wanting to merge what's the effect on competition likely to be in the future so you we always need to try and think about Dynamic competition what this but here I think in particular we're trying to think about what this might mean for innovation in the future uh in in these markets whereas we know Innovation is so critical right so now let me have a go at one specific case so uh you guys had some success with the Facebook giphy acquisition you you largely won in court on most of the counts although it's remanded to you uh to for one individual account um the the CMA is also I think had some success with the gene editing companies Grail and alumina and so I guess I wonder is there anything of a turning point here in the UK or in Europe in general in stopping these kinds of deals between big companies that could potentially squash competition I mean I'd hesitate to describe some sweeping Trend uh again we we go through a clearly set out process on any merger we look at we have this two-stage process where we do an initial investigation where we have to work out if there is a realistic Prospect of a reduction in competition subject to that we can then take it to the second stage where we have to work out whether it's more likely than not that there'll be a reduction in competition and uh at that second stage a an independent panel is appointed it's nothing to do with the CMA board or the CMA staff and they have to take the decision so that's that's what happened on The Meta giphy acquisition and Microsoft Activision has now gone to that to that second stage as well so as I said it's a it's an independent evidence-driven process uh that those points I described about future competition Innovation those are if you like about the the questions we try to ask ourselves as we go through the work but it always has to come back to the evidence well let me ask it this way on Microsoft Activision I mean that's the biggest deal in Microsoft history I believe it's the biggest deal in the history of the video game industry is it getting a more vigorous review right now in the UK than it would have gotten before the dmu is formed you know maybe five years ago in a different regulatory climate five years ago would have been rather different anyway because uh this deal like any big Global deal would have resided the responsibility for that would have resided in Brussels so now we have to think about that in London too it's a really big acquisition it's hard to think that five years ago that we might that we would have just somehow glossed over it uh it still looks like a big significant deal I think almost whatever lens you put on uh put on the market but I mean just to just to underline um there are other other deals in tech for example Facebook customer time and Microsoft Nuance that we looked at and then cleared and indeed Norton um Norton have asked we looked at it phase one thought that would be a problem came to phase two and actually we switched the decision and cleared it okay well let me take a step back so the dmu has conducted some 10 investigations uh looking into mobile platforms online advertising Amazon when you kind of consider the body of this work and step back what conclusions can you draw about the state the health of competition in the UK when it comes to Tech are Tech markets healthy in the UK right now so I think that's that's probably too big a question to answer simply up as you as you know but uh we certainly worry about Tendencies to walk towards Market power and the the prospects for that market power being being competed away if you like naturally and so that's what lies behind uh what we think is the need for a new approach that the idea being that we would need to pass it would be a very high bar but we would be saying there are certain companies do in particular markets where that have such a an entrenched position of Market power that they need essentially an element of special special treatment uh and without that we're in this position where we we can go in with specific cases here and there but it's it can be difficult to really go after the the really the real underlying source of the market power but it all comes down to the specifics and I you know I would say uh if we had to describe us a sort of USP for ourselves among authorities like us it's really on uh really understanding the business models and really doing the work to understand the market in the round try to work out what's going on what the risks might be also what the course of what the many benefits are from these markets yeah so we've done that in most depth on uh digital advertising so particularly Google thinking about Google in Search and Facebook and social media and we've just completed this study on the mobile sector and so there we can really build what we think is a really good understanding of those markets and then work out what might be the right action to take well let me ask about that because this is an incredibly concentrated Market two major players complete consolidation lots of gatekeeping power in terms of what apps make it under phones and what don't they take a toll of every piece of commercial Revenue that passes through our phone so you've conducted you know one of the most in-depth studies of that market what is intervention or remedy look like yeah so exactly we as you say we've just spent 800 Pages essentially explaining what you've just what you've just summarized um and what does the last page say summer at hand and uh so we the answer to that is we've got a a set of of things which we are either doing already or considering doing immediately with our current Powers so those are we had two competition cases in relation to Google and apples you know requirement to use their own in-app payments Services uh we have consulted on a a market investigation specifically into web browser restrictions and and cloud gaming which are all about um the worry that the rules that those Gatekeepers are setting are essentially shutting off competition from smaller smaller firms so for example the the web developer who might want to develop a sophisticated web app and can't get that to the iPhone because because of the way that the browser software is configured so these are that the precise remedies are you know quite specific and you know we've got a list if you like of sort of 10 to 15 concerns across those those two mobile ecosystems and the approaches needed for each one can be quite can be quite have to be quite specific as well right now Apple has its reasons for exerting such control over the iOS ecosystem right it it wants to preserve order on the ecosystem it doesn't want third parties to create redundant stores beyond the the you know its own payment mechanism has it been receptive to your suggestions and and do you find its justifications for exerting control over over uh the iPhone ecosystem to be disingenuous or self-serving uh so that that is exactly the job answering those questions is exactly the job of these kinds of Investigations so on the payments ones those are in flight so uh depends on what we find through the course of those on the uh on the on the browsers thing for example we've we have had lots of Engagement as you might imagine from apple and a lot of that is about the um the importance of privacy and security for users which you know as a general principle we've heard that we wouldn't sound scared it's hard to dispute that but the question that we we are uh so if you like working out whether to ask ourselves through this proposed investigation is whether the whether those um arguments if you like uh whether they stack up whether it's whether it's really necessary to put such rigid controls uh as we see in place in order to achieve those benefits or whether it's possible to achieve the benefits while actually still allowing uh somewhat greater competition I mean these are exactly the right questions but it just strikes me that we've been asking them for a long time and not the dmu but in the US for example the uh the investigation of online ad networks has been ongoing in the US forever and you know as someone who writes about big Tech and is somewhat sensitive of the concerns of smaller players who complain about the big tech companies I just wonder why does it take so long what about the process here I don't know the political process or the regulatory process is drawing out what appears to be a consensus about about resolving consolidation and Tech yeah so the processes in the US are different to the ones here and it's more um it's more litigation driven through the courts and so that has its own um requirements uh you know that one does need to take a decent amount of time to as I said to really think through and understand these issues but I think you can I mean I mean there are some well-known if you like case studies of how difficult it is to really um get to useful results through the traditional enforcement tools probably the most obvious one is often quoted as Google shopping in Europe where the complaint was back in 2011 and that's sort of still rumbling on and um I don't think anyone in that case and I'm not I don't think it's still alive well I'm not I'm not sort of um casting aspersions on anyone which I think it's fairly obvious to say that they didn't think it would take a deck well the complaint probably isn't that happy other participants in the market probably aren't that happy consumer bodies probably aren't that happy and I'm pretty sure Google might not be happy either just because it's it's a very long drawn out process and a very difficult I remember the plaintiffs aren't even around in it those companies don't exist as far as I know yeah it takes a long time again things can move very fast in these markets hence the need for a structure that's able to move faster faster with that if we really able to make any any useful Headway right well one of the investigations that you've conducted that I'm the most interested in is is the Amazon one and you've been I think since the summer talking to sellers in the UK about the Amazon platform what can you tell us about you know what you've heard and Amazon's response is it too early to give us a little determination as to whether there might be some anti-competitive effects in the way Amazon administers its Marketplace I'm afraid it is too early okay well what can you tell us about that that case that it started and that we're Gathering evidence talking to all the people you'd expect us to be talking to and again he's we need to let that run its course to really to really work out what's going on uh those those investigations have a have a you know a clear set of processes where we actually have to get the information in and consult carefully on any on any outcomes I mean these big tech companies you know with tears streaming down their faces hold up the small and medium-sized business as like you know their their constituency like you know in the way in which they help them is so important to them and yet here cases examining whether it's a double-edged sword right whether the the big platforms actually hurt as much as help sellers I guess I'm wondering you know is it um well let me just turn it around is there something legitimate in the way in which these few powerful Tech platforms allow small businesses in the case of Amazon sellers to scale instantly and to build strong businesses so I'll talk in general generalities rather than the bams and but but yes absolutely there are big benefits from these markets we absolutely don't dispute that and for precisely those reasons I mean not just access to a large Market maybe even Global in some cases but you know entire new business models didn't exist however long ago um and that's wonderful but if if if power builds to the extent that uh you know those companies are uh almost impossible to dislodge then that can result in problems both if you're a competitor to those companies directly or if you're a you know a firm that relies on that as a platform on which to do business and so we yeah we think that we need to make sure that the terms the terms of those that those platforms are offering a reasonable and that they're they are they aren't shutting down routes to potential competition which again are some of the issues that we we've been looking at in the mobile space where where we're concerned that on for example on the browser's piece those restrictions put in place by Apple we think look as if they are likely to cut off roots to competitors to Apple's benefit but again to be to be determined through the full process of these these investigations interesting so we're running out of time so let me hit a few more quick issues in the U.S we've seen antitrust bills seemingly bipartisan support emerge from committee ready to go completely founder under the weight of acrimony among politicians um what have you learned about using the legislative process to address some of these competitive issues is it is it the futile considering the climate today maybe different in the UK than the us so I I find that the US much more mysterious more familiar with the UK obviously um I mean we are we are independent from government so what happens in legislation is not it's not our job essentially that's for the government to work out we are here to do the job that we get given through statute we have a certain job at the moment as I said the expectation is that that job will get added to through this new framework um we think it's quite important as I said to to create some sharper tools if you like to be able to tackle some of these issues more quickly and more effectively and yes that does in this instance require require legitation you're not an expert on U.S politics I am not an expert on UK politics but I led to believe that you have a new boss now a new prime minister um who as as far as I can tell is maybe more likely than a predecessor to be a pro-free market anti-regulation do you have any idea how the administration of Liz Trust might affect the work of the CMA uh generally speaking no as I said we're independent from government and we are carefully apolitical um and I said we'll do the job we're given uh given through Parliament and another would say I mean you talk about free markets and regulation one thing that's important to keep in mind I think is that what we're talking about in this dmu framework is not you know red tape regulation across thousands of companies we're talking about a handful of companies at most where there is that very specific entrenched Market power and actually if you're if you're someone that really worries about free markets I would argue that right now these markets are not free because uh they are at the behest of these uh these big Platforms in many cases so what what I think we can all agree probably we want is for competition to be effective and people to be able to have a fair crack at the crack of the whip and when you've got this huge entrenched Market power there's a risk that can't happen well when you make that case to the new prime minister we look forward to hearing how it goes thank you will Hader thanks very much Brad [Music] please welcome to the stage Howard bovill Head of cloud platform at IBM Windows Snyder founder and CEO of thistle Technologies Renault file founder and CEO of synhactiv and Morton kiasgaard CEO of Heimdall security with Bloomberg's Jordan Robertson [Music] foreign [Music] thanks everybody for being here today we've got some great guests on this panel about cyber security uh just to introduce kind of the topic a little bit you know here at Bloomberg we've done a lot of reporting over the last few years about supply chain security supply chain cyber security and you know on stage with us we have some of the world's experts in certain aspects of this this topic so what we wanted to talk about today was specifically software supply chain security now you might see some statistics we'll throw on the uh the board about how cyber security spending is as high as it's ever been it's growing at a really fast rate it's one of the fastest growing areas of Technology but one of the things we've learned through our reporting is that there's an area of cyber security which is supply chain security which is one of the hardest problems to solve and we have on stage with us folks who are are trying to solve that really hard problem so I think we'll kick it off with uh with windows so window is a former senior security officer with some of the biggest Tech names that we've all heard of apple and Microsoft and Intel and Mozilla and others Wendell you and I were talking earlier about how the security landscape has changed in you know the last 20 years since you've been kind of in the industry and a really big problem as you see it now that you're trying to start with thistle Technologies why don't you give the audience a sense of the Arc of that you know the evolution of software development and specifically secure software development where we were at then where we're at now and then we kind of open up the panel absolutely I honestly feel like I've been trying to solve the same security problem for decades like almost my entire career and um early on we saw let's say when in the early uh in the early odds when Microsoft was having a lot of problems with malware and viruses that um one of the things I did in my role there was bring a lot of security mitigations into the platform that would mitigate broad categories of vulnerability and um those were already present in other os's like open BSD and Linux but what we saw was that there were general purpose operating systems that over the the course of 20 years built a degree of security resilience that um was more and more robust and uh you know this is true for for phone os's as well but as I in my work at Intel is the the chief software security officer in my in my roles with Device security companies I was exposed to these lower level Technologies and I started to realize that they didn't have the the degree of security resilience that I had come to expect from general purpose operating systems the work that we've been doing for decades in uh these these these larger platforms very little of it was actually being scaled down or made available to device manufacturers and so we see things like a lack of separation of privilege we see a a a real death of the security protections that we see some from today's Journal purpose operating systems so um the problem that we're trying to solve at fissile Technologies is the fact that for the development environments that are trying to build these security mechanisms into these devices they end up Reinventing the wheel in all these different places and you know to two different degrees of security resilience which is inappropriate for the threats that they're up against today and really insufficient for the kinds of threats they're going to be faced with over the course of their lifespan because these devices persist in place for 10 20 years even more if it's a car it's going to be on the road for probably 20 plus years if it's in industrial manufacturing that component could be in place for for decades as well so uh really seeing that it it's it's it's we're not going to be able to catch up we don't have 20 years to catch up against these the threats that we're dealing with today let alone what we need to be resilient against for the future so what I'm doing is taking the security work that we've done for general purpose operating systems and making it available to to the software developers who are working on these devices so they don't have to reinvent the wheel in every different development environment and they can kind of LeapFrog into a modern security posture by incorporating these kinds of Technologies into their into their product and you'd mentioned it's kind of like going what's interesting to me is it's kind of like going back to the the future in some ways which is the phones that we use the laptops we use they're all much more secure now than they were let's say 20 years ago but now we have these really powerful computers coming onto networks whether they're smart watch whether they are industrial machine whether it's a surgical robot that don't that are essentially kind of at the level of security that our operating systems were 20 years ago and you know I wanted to go to to Renault so Renault is founder and CEO of a company called synactive which is a French offensive security company so his job and he can explain it better than I can is companies hire his firm to hack into their devices to look for security vulnerabilities and you know Reno and I were having a conversation earlier where you know sometimes they will go in to a device and they will hack the device and they'll look for vulnerabilities to fix them and you know the um the number of times that you'll go in and the software that's in there is almost exclusively not made by that vendor can you talk about this one percent and 99 issue because this gets us to this issue of supply chain security open source software which everybody uses I think it's used a lot more than we might expect and Renault has some good statistics about what does that look like when you're actually you're ripping apart these devices you're hacking them to figure out the vulnerabilities how much of it actually comes from places that are not from the actual device maker yes thank you Jordan and so the job of my company is actually to assess the cyber security of networks and systems and so we are in a quite unique position to actually look under the hood and to understand actually how it is built and what is in there and on which systems and libraries and software and Frameworks it relies and what what we have noticed over the last 20 years is that of course the technology the it system have become more and more complex it may look obvious but probably many people have missed that because the user interface and the configuration panels are getting easier and easier all the complexities actually being hidden from the user and from the user perspective everything is getting easier but under the hood it's actually getting more and more complex so now everyone is just building on top of layers of layers and layers of frame Frameworks proprietary or open source softwares and sometimes you don't even know where it come from anymore the the open source project is quite abundant but it's still used somewhere and it happens more and more often than the customer is actually asking us to review the the security of its products and we when you look at this code base you may have maybe yeah one percent of the code base which is actually written by the customers and 99 is in a way supply chain it's it's a library it's code written by someone else and of course it's very difficult for them to to to ensure that these 99 percent are secure it is their responsibility but it's get quite complex to understand the code written by someone else and to actually make sure it's secure um of course don't get me wrong it's still the responsibility and the main focus to to focus on the one percent that you're actually doing because most of the time the 99 percent are more secure that the code you are just creating it but in a world where the attackers are getting more and more skilled their playground it's not your one percent it's the one hundred percent of your code and the 99 of code and system and everything you're using that you haven't built yourself which is part of your supply chain and and today it's actually where we find a lot of the vulnerabilities that we use to compromise the security of the the system of our customers and a very recent example my team actually took part in a competition which is called bone to own which is organized every year and we succeed to hack the Tesla the Tesla car via the Wi-Fi mechanism the Wi-Fi connection um I can't talk too much about the details of the vulnerability but it will be released actually in October during a security conference and the vulnerability was actually located in in a Wi-Fi monitoring uh open source Library written by Intel and I'm pretty sure that the Tesla security team which is quite good had a look at these devices had a look at the code but still it wasn't in their code the vulnerability it was actually in a providers in the supply chain open source system they are using and no it's great and they actually won that competition which is a very famous hacking competition called pona own and Howard so before he Howard was at IBM he was Chief technology officer for Bank of America and you know another aspect of this problem that you know we discussed earlier which is you know you were describing to me and I'm hoping you can relay this to the audience the the number of small fintech companies that will be involved in what would otherwise be an ordinary transaction online like transferring money from a bank to a bank you click a button you expect it to go through what's happening behind the scenes to get to this idea of software supply chain and security and Howard can speak to this is you know you'll have dozens and dozens of tiny companies running Small Checks on that transaction let's call it anti-money laundering let's call it um you know verification of credit scores things like that so why don't you talk a little bit about the complexity of a very simple transaction like transferring money and how many potential points of failure there are within that software supply chain because it's a lot of them the and and what I would absolutely say is this is not related to Bank of America Merrill Lynch this is kind of a general observation as to what's happening with software so as Renault has mentioned 99 of code base actually is taken from libraries of Open Source and embedded into the functions that you're doing because many business processes are very similar so therefore why write new lines of code but increase as I.T professionals within organizations as you think about your business process transformation you're no longer in the business of having hordes of developers write lines of code that then you have to maintain you will embed small software companies if it's in financial services it will be fintechs but there's many other similar types of companies that orbit around other Industries to service that so if you then think about a business process like account opening credit scores and so on and so forth your ecosystem of third parties is very very large now in a digital context is sometimes difficult to conceptualize that but a good analogy would be to Simply think of a machine with a series of cogs and if one of those cogs is corrupted no matter how small it can actually corrupt the whole business process and cause problems now at times that can happen because when you run it environments there are three lock golden laws of I.T environments which is Hardware will fail software will have bugs within it and technicians will press casing that you rather they didn't but there's also a fourth dimension which is then when a bad actor causes an issue with that component and as window mentioned this has been a theme that's been around for some time but with the Advent of a thing called software as a service which is probably around 10 years old in terms of gathering ahead of steam and in that context think of companies like Salesforce and so on you have software that is piped to you as a company and you consume it through a screen but what you don't have is the same degree of controls in terms of how that software is written and the platforms on which it runs and this is the notion of third and fourth party risk there was a recent discussion documents distributed by the treasury in the United Kingdom on this piece and papers by The Regulators around the world third party being the software vendor that's delivering capability you and fourth party being the infrastructure on which it sits which very often can be opaque to the consumer of that and that's different from the old model where you would buy software you would stole it into your data centers and it would have the control Frameworks to ensure that you felt comfortable that you're in the right level of adherence so we've moved to a situation we've got a very fragmented supply chain and moral opacity it's more difficult to actually peer into these environments to understand where your risk is but the important Point within this is to not go too far on the risk side it's important to also understand how you can continue to embrace Innovation but be very eyes wide open because the issue with risk is as a species we will suffer more in our imaginations than we will in reality and therefore we can come up with a lot more demons exist and do exist in reality but the issue is that if a cyber security issue arises then it can be a catastrophic event to any Enterprise or actual industry so getting that balance right in terms of the controls and the actual Innovation is really important and that's what led me from Financial Services to IBM because we have built a platform that has those control rules built in from the outset we could see these issues around third and fourth party risk risk before white papers have been written and so on and we feel it's the obligation of the platform owner to take those risks away and to the previous speaker we'll here to then create environments that small companies that couldn't actually manage it themselves be able to actually prosper in these marketplaces as opposed to actually diminish and one of the things that can happen to Tower's point is if one of those software is as a service providers let's say gets ransomware and their Network goes down and you depend on them to do something like anti-money laundering checks on a transaction to use that example you know you have to have something in place like that becomes a risk to your business and that is absolutely a supply chain risk because now what do you do you need this function maybe that stops working maybe it's credit reports or credit scores on home mortgage applications say that those scores stop coming in because the mortgage the Home Mortgage provider gets ransomware um you know and like in in renault's example you know if you're able to hack into a Tesla's infotainment system through a Bluetooth vulnerability or Wi-Fi vulnerability there are a lot of bad things you can do to the car so all of these are examples of kind of supply chain risks and in interesting ways that these risks can present themselves um Beyond kind of typical I.T risk and so Morton is is head of a Danish security company called Heimdall security cyber security software uh endpoint security software and one of the things Martin I was hoping you could talk about is one of the hardest areas of supply chain to manage is software updates window can can certainly speak to this as well because her technology addresses this too it's you accept you expect that the update that's coming from a legitimate source is itself legitimate how much work would would you reasonably expect a customer to do to inspect it and pull it apart to see as in the case of solar winds the attack from last year where a legitimate technology companies update was compromised and malware was inserted in it how much work should you actually expect it to do to see if there's malware in there can you talk a little bit about the scanning of updates your technology does a little bit of this and kind of what is considered reasonable uh in terms of opening an update letting it run to see if it does something bad you can't do that for very long otherwise your customers will Revolt what's considered reasonable to inspect an update and see if there's something bad happening in there yeah that's a great question Jordan and thanks for the intro I think Renault introduced a really interesting topic before as well and but you talk about embedded trust so with that you're flagging out there and we can make a very nascent example in here I see lots of people on the laptops or mobile phones and you trust the updates automatically coming there so your iOS device will get automatically updated so you have embedded trust that apple is doing it correctly but if they're not you have a serious problem so to to Jordan's point of what we do I'm not just on an advertisement but we do check and those embedded updates coming out as well to to customers that they are coherent and safe and the way we work with that is also we try to teach the customer on how to do it too so if you're a customer or you're working these Supply chains just like I don't know and how it also flagged out you need to order your vendors you need to go to in this case example Microsoft or apple and check do they have kind of compliance certificates are they isae 3000 certified are they ISO 27 27001 certified um so when you choose your vendors you make sure you do that older than compliance process correctly um and I think renault's pointless an excellent example of the kind of when you do the hacking in the in the process there's always loads of this stuff I mean what we see when we unpack some of these softwares coming out the we have the CC Cleaner I think people in here or some some people in here might remember this is a cleaner example from a couple of years back and the solarwinds as you flush out yes yeah it's a supply chain breach and the way the way we check that is you know we go in we actually check what is happening in there we'll leave it in the Box for for three to four hours just to make sure you let it run to see if it does exactly yeah exactly but you can't expect customers to do that it's Way Beyond I mean anybody in here managing a Windows environment I see I see some nodding down there um it's it's way beyond that you I mean you'll have for a thousand seat business you'll have hundreds of updates coming through a month just on the Windows platform and then for maybe third-party software you'll have Adobe Apple there's loads of vendors you need to check it's Way Beyond your grad as we as we talked about before there are after the solarwinds incident happened which was a hacking attack last year was a supply chain compromise um we had discussions with experts about let's say you want to unpack a software update and let it run to see if it does something bad what is the what's the limitation on that because you have to kind of wait out the Hacker's bad activity and we were talking about like you might be able to look at an update for a few hours before you have to push that to your customers it's not a lot of time that's still a lot of like there's a lot of room in there if you wait but say five or six hours if you're the hacker you can still get bad stuff through I mean window from your perspective you know you guys are working on technology also that looks to secure the software update mechanism one of the hardest things I have to get my my head around is again this idea if a software update comes from the place I'm expecting it to and it's signed it's cryptographically signed by the place I'm expecting it to come from how do we prevent malware from being inserted into that like at some point customers are just going to say I have to just click the update because like I've done all the checks I'm supposed to what's your what's your view how do you how do you think we should approach thinking about that problem you have to design your infrastructure and your devices with the expectation that there is going to be compromise and so and if a if a attacker inserts malware into one into an update process and it's legitimately signed in a way that the device recognizes as coming from the the appropriate source then that device is going to be compromised but the real question is what does it mean for the rest of your organization is this installed on every single device in the organization and when and and for the types of the devices do they have access to everything do they have access to a limited um uh rain in your in your in your infrastructure what kind of data does a compromise are you able to figure that out quickly are you able to get back to a known good State quickly right you have to design all of your mechanisms with the expectation that any one of them can be compromised and so compartmentalization and high confidence segregation are are strategies that have worked in security context from the very beginning and these are the kinds of mechanisms that you can actually develop a high degree of confidence in additionally knowing that you have a plan in place for how to evaluate the full extent of a compromise for having a a plan in place in terms of how to communicate it to the people who are impacted whether that's your customers your partners your employees the the folks whose personal data data you may be holding and I hope you're holding less of it um day than you were maybe a few years ago knowing that compromise is a real possibility for your infrastructure and that if you have less data then you have less exposure in terms of the work that you're supposed to be a custodian of so all of these strategies help you respond better when you when you expect the worst case scenario the the growing complexity is is something that we we can't we can't easily constrain so if you are accepting that we're going to incorporate more Technologies into our environment and those Technologies are going to come with a bunch of Technologies along with them and the supply chain is going to be very difficult to fully understand in your environment then you have to operate with the expectation that any one of those components can fail what does it mean for the rest of the infrastructure and design everything that you're Building Systems networks applications data stores all of them the expectation that there is a component in there that may be compromised and it should not be it should not mean that everything in your environment goes along for the ride Howard you're mentioning this this earlier in our conversation as well like what is kind of considered best practice for you've got a large customer they come to you and they say they describe the problem we talked about before you've got 50 organizations feeding data into a process let's use a bank process for example one of them gets ransomware they can no longer transmit that data they can no longer receive data in ransomware of course is one of the biggest problems now in security what's considered best practice for mitigating that supply chain problem do you stop processing the transaction or so there's a number of things first and foremost you kind of got to go back to kind of um all principles of good architecture so you need to be clear in terms of the business processes that you're architecting for and then the components associated with that if you take these third parties as the components and say just choose any number so there's 10 different third parties in a process that you have you then got to do a risk posture assessment on how you're going to protect against what that component is because in certain areas it may not be a high risk of the Rarities it may be very high risk so you put then the controls around that the the panelists have talked about here but you've also got a plan for the worst as well so what happens in the event that there is a catastrophic failure with a release where it's got malware in or equally I've experienced situations where vendors are giving me software releases that have had bugs in that have actually caused catastrophic failures you then have to have a plan in terms of how you actually run that process in the knowledge that you've lost that critical component and it may be a cold environment that you bring up because actually you wanted to ensure that you've got and mute what's known as a mutable storage that storage couldn't have been compromised by any malware insertion you've got to keep that's not good copies of your data which is the fuel for any business process so you have to kind of plan for the worst but plan for the worst and not a way that you can't execute or whether you can execute in certain industries that is absolutely obligated upon you in financial services there is an obligation irrespective of the regulatory jurisdiction that you operate within that you can demonstrably operate in the event of a catastrophic failure because if there's an issue in terms of supply chain and financial services it will introduce systemic risk into the financial system and if we've learned we've learned many things through the virus the real virus of kovid and the current circumstances we find ourselves in is that supply chain issues massively impact the global economy we live in an inflationary situation now not because of demand side issues but because of supply side issues supply chain issues is it related to the will getting back to delivering goods and services and then the geopolitical issues associated with energy and the same applies to your own environment and therefore you have to kind of work through what happens when things go wrong and how can you run your business thereafter yeah I just really wanted to jump in there because I might get completely under Fire here by both uh Howard and the rest of the panel I just thinking it's very reactive in my view if you take the the Russia example of Russia Ukraine would we have been in this situation had there been forces in Ukraine before they were invaded so I'm just trying to turn around saying should you work more proactively against it but yes I agree you need to have a fallback plan absolutely but I'm not hearing a lot of proactive measure going into sorry without without without doubt you have to put all of the controls the architectural controls based upon the risk posture that I talked about to prevent something from happening but you also have to put the same degree of diligence and rigor into something happening because there is all there are far more black swans than anybody imagines that happens in life having experienced many of those so absolutely all of the controls around zero trust workplace work uh work Workforce and actually a workload or Hardware if it's Hardware you're working through but also you have have to have plans that are executable should something go wrong here is I'm really thinking what actually kick-started for me was the the point about the data and the data volume I see is actually exponentially increasing it's not declining so they're just getting more and more data transactions are accelerating uh and the control you can put in place is kind of getting under undermined a little bit by the the speed of which things are moving in my point it'd be we then take different responses with data so certain data you'll encrypt uh rest in use and also in transit and then it opens up another topic for perhaps a different panel you've got to think about post Quantum encryption um the the US federal government has just issued I was moving fedramp into law which is a control around that but it's also obligating all federal agencies to be post Quantum encrypted relative to the four standards that this has just approved so there's evidence that actually there is a very real and present danger now along with better encryption we also need to consider deletion deletion is incredibly inexpensive compared to re-architecting how you want to store your data but at the point in time where you are creating a mechanism to decide what data to collect you should also be designing a mechanism that decides when to delete it that there's a business case for why we're collecting this data when that business case is satisfied we get rid of that data or we abstract it so that it's no longer as as potentially risky if it's exposed do we need to know that this happened at you know 321 and 33 seconds on you know on this date or is it sufficient to know that it happened and it's part of a monthly profile there's ways to reduce granularity so when the information is compromised it's less of an exposure so in addition to all this other work we also need to be more intentional about how we collect the data that we're collecting for a specific business purpose that when the business purpose is satisfied that we delete it and the mechanism for deleting it is created at the same time as the mechanism for collecting it now one of the other yeah I strongly advice for your suggestion to delete data it's probably one of the best security mechanism ever and to add on what you were saying hold I think that with everyone Outsourcing its ID everywhere sometimes I feel like some good principle of security I.T security architecture are being forgotten they're meant it outsourced yeah foreign but the problem is that actually you have you have a trade-off between availability and confidentiality when you try to architecture your data if you want to make sure your data are available you need to put them at several places um so that for example if you have three providers you need the three providers to fail at the same time in order to lose access to your system the problem is that if you want to protect the confidentiality of your data you just need one provider to fail to actually have your data leakage so that's one of the few examples where confidentiality and availability can be a different can be a hard choice for management just if the world wasn't complicated enough the the policies of the community around dead or sovereignty as well so there's a lot of legislation that's going through around the world which requires data on a Thursday to be processed in the nation state secondly the employees to be from the nation state and then the third element which takes it into the political demand is that it it is a legal entity owned by the nation state for that data to be there the reason for mentioning that is as you think through the logic of the different logic gates you have to go through there there's more and more logic you have to think through there are good reasons why these policies that we put in place but the solutions if you built it purely from a technical perspective you could find in 12 months time you have regulatory issues that you go into face and this isn't just for regulated Industries it's for all Industries consuming from different providers so there are other considerations to put into any of the architectures you're putting together one of the things I was hoping the panel could address is any of you followed cyber security news in the recent months you've seen that there have been a wave of attacks against really big tech companies you know Twitter and and others where they've been compromised through what's essentially a very basic mechanism is often really young kids calling customer support and convincing a customer support agent some of which are very highly trained to not fall for fraud to allow them access to a network they leak data there's a couple of cases here in the UK where that's happened so I mean anybody can jump in on this but how should we understand how some of the richest most you know best protected tech companies on the planet can continually get compromised we've talked about very kind of sophisticated supply chain and really kind of high level stuff here but what we've seen in the news like the last six months and we actually got a chance to listen to one of these phone calls for some of our reporting and it's like you know the the woman who was targeted was really smart she was a customer service rep she was very well trained she tried to deflect this guy's questions but his his question was hey I'm from the I.T organization we understand you have a problem with your VPN we've got to fix your problem with the VPN we've got to log into the site she was smart said no no no no no like I don't have a problem eventually to get this guy off the phone he's fine I'll log into the VPN I'll show you there's no problem and that was the hack how should we how should we make sense of the fact that more money is being spent on Cyber than ever before but yet some of the biggest hacks to make the news are involve what is essentially kind of a human factor and teenagers yeah but that is really rights control that you need to impose there is you need Rights Management internally what and how can people expose passwords and and then how often do you rotate passwords and what kind of controls you have in place to spot password breaches and abuse of passwords in other locations than just inside the business so to this example to make it very concrete for the for the audience I mean if somebody leverages your password in a non-working location it can also typically see that if they have the controls in place so that's a that's a good way to make it very tangible that but you I agree the regardless of the enormous amount of spend uh how can you then trust that they actually do it correctly that's that's a very different uh hard topic to answer I would say but there is a fundamental problem is that the attacker have the edge they have the advantage by Advantage I mean that it's much cheaper to attack a company that it is to protect them to protect it actually uh it doesn't take a big budget to actually compromise and attack a company it takes a large budget to actually try to protect and fix every vulnerability and that's a very boring issue and we have seen in the recent time for example ransomware gangs no some of them it's about 50 100 people so it's still quite a good team sometimes much bigger than the I.T crew of a standard company so it's very boring and so we are now asking people to which are in a difficult situation to actually put even more budget to protect them against attacker who keeps on putting themselves more budget and people to attack them it's it's not a good situation to be in yeah yeah it's basically a marketing machine you're up against yeah yeah but it is it's a set business model for threat actors around this where they will get a smaller group that will give the sophisticated attack software other groups that are lower in the hierarchy 100 people 200 people that will do the threat and to give you an idea as to kind of how kind of indiscriminate it is very often when a hacker breaks into a computer they don't even know which com which company they've got into they then actually get lateral movement and try and extract some data to figure out where they are once they've figured out which company they've hacked into they then know who they can send the ransom note to and get the Bitcoin transfer so it is a business entity it's a business machine to actually do this to extract ransomware from companies and it's operating at that scale because of the monies that can be retrieved um so the the key elements in addition to when things go wrong is how you prevent as well and the human Dimension is always a key threat um because the basic humanine is the help and if somebody's asking for help you lean into that so it's how you train people and the point of window mentioned is really important is how you actually segment your environment so that if there is a point of insertion that insertion is only in a small Enclave as opposed to Across the entire environment yeah and like the last pass heck well luckily they didn't get the password but it's a good example that if you kind of narrow down the environment you can at least control the the the damage limitation one last topic I wanted to address before we run out of time and again anybody can kind of jump in we've talked a lot about how much money is being spent on cyber security it's good for everybody on this panel that that number is very very high right now and only growing um but also what we've talked about is like there's some really big problems that are hard to fix that are just starting to be fixed supply chain is is kind of one of them anybody can jump in but where do you think we're at on the Arc of becoming more cyber secure like we've talked about we've kind of reverted back to where we began with some of these iot devices in other areas we've you know done a lot better and laptops are more secure phones are more secure what's the takeaway like are we in the middle of this game are we kind of starting all over again it's um yeah personally I think the number of problems are evolving faster than the than the spend is and the number of solutions that's that's just my take I don't know it's not an arc because that presumes that actually yeah never resin bar okay so you get ahead and then super smart people get a bit ahead of you and then you get ahead the good thing about cyber security however as a as a business is a community everyone collaborates because everyone wants to keep the bad guys out so there's a sharing of intelligence which everyone should take a lot of confidence from in terms of sharing information to help prevent bad things from happening I will add to that that the security research space things that used to take you know minutes for security researchers take days take teams take a longer time we don't see we do see that some systems are much more resilient than they used to be um so we're getting better at it but doesn't mean that it's going to be sufficient to the threats because you know they have an independent number of resources in an infinite amount of time and we in the on the defender side of things have to defend everything all the time 100 which is impossible we're out of time thank you all so much for coming and being on this panel it's a really interesting topic for uh for us hopefully it's interesting you as well and uh we appreciate everybody being here appreciate you listening thank you thank you Jordan [Applause] [Music] please welcome back to the stage Brad Stone author and Senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg okay I want to thank all of my Bloomberg colleagues for uh moderating the panels today all of our wonderful speakers who made the day so informative and interesting I want to thank you guys for being such an Engaged audience and one more time for posterity our sponsors today Erickson IBM MasterCard autonomous and the Zurich Insurance Group the bar is open please join me in my Bloomberg colleagues at the networking reception outside thank you [Applause] doesn't work well keep it dancing [Music] [Music] ain't looking ain't looking foreign [Music] [Music] you know today [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign foreign foreign

Channel: Bloomberg Live

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Id: 67lGfeaLeqY

Length: 219min 20sec (13160 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022