The first season of The Communications Risk Show proved to be more successful than anticipated and a lot of fun to make. My hope was that one of the episodes might exceed 1,000 viewers; we have actually averaged over 2,300 viewers per episode. It has been a pleasure to talk with co-presenters Ed and Lee on a weekly basis, and my guess is that viewers enjoyed our conversations too. However, we now need to take a break, with yesterday’s show being the last episode before various members of the cast and crew take their Summer holidays. After such a good season, it was inevitable we would all want to return with another season later this year. The show will be back with a 15-week run from August 23, returning in the same slot of Wednesdays at 4pm UK time, and I have already begun to approach prospective guests. Make sure you have every show of the new season added to your diary, including details of the guests and themes for each show, by subscribing to our broadcast schedule.
We bowed out yesterday with two separate interviews about issues of great importance to risk managers working in the comms sector. It is easy to use the words ‘know your customer’ but hard to verify who your customers are, especially if you never meet them in person. Sarah Delphey (pictured, right) has plenty of experience of tackling that problem from the time she worked at Bandwidth. She told us about the KYC policy guide she recently donated to the industry and about the reasons why comms providers have often failed to adequately verify the identity of customers. But rather than focusing solely on the negatives, Sarah explained how our industry should ideally work by talking about the expectations she would set for telcos if she were absolute ruler of the hypothetical island nation of Delpheyvania.
The second interview was with Andrew Wong, COO of SORAMITSU, the fintech business that has made a million-dollar investment in developing the RAG Fraud Blockchain. Andrew explained the reasons why SORAMITSU wanted to translate the experience they had gained with decentralized systems for financial services into protecting phone users and comms providers from scams. Whilst the two interviews were superficially about different topics, it soon became evident that there are many connections between the goal of positively proving the identity of a good customer and the goal of negatively preventing scammers from abusing networks and ordinary phone users.
If you missed any live shows then the recordings will remain available at tv.commsrisk.com, and yesterday’s show can also be watched below. I look forward to seeing you again when our next season begins in August.
