The Risk & Assurance Group (RAG) will run a virtual conference on September 15th and 16th; the event will take the place of the Denver conference which has been postponed until 2021 due to the recent rise in coronavirus cases across the USA. The virtual event will be called RAG Americas Online, and will follow the same format as the online conference that RAG held in May, which saw two full days of live-streamed presentations and panels being watched by over 2,000 people across 93 different countries.
Over 20 speakers (some of whom are pictured above) have already been confirmed for RAG Americas Online, including:
- Legendry US revenue assurance pioneer Kathy Romano, who now advises Discovery after three decades in executive roles at Verizon
- Anurag Aggarwal, Director of Messaging Services at Tata Communications, board member at the Mobile Ecosystem Forum, and head of the i3forum’s new working group for messaging fraud
- Gina Pesheva, Senior Manager for Business Assurance and Billing at Deutsche Telekom Group, and one of the foremost champions of business assurance worldwide
- Parthiban Balasubramanian, who leads the delivery of TELUS’ in-house data analytics services to internal customers within the Canadian telco
- Sebastian Milczanowski, Head of Margin Assurance at Vodafone Group
- Katia Gonzalez Gutierrez, Head of Fraud and Security at BICS, and long-serving leader of the i3forum’s voice fraud team
- Security governance expert Clodagh Durkan, an experienced and well-traveled CISO who spent many years managing security for Vodafone operations in Germany, Italy, Ghana and Ireland
- Veteran RAFM consultant Lionel Dawson, who has spent the last decade giving advice to Ericsson’s customers in the USA after previously setting up a number of greenfield RAFM departments
Biographies of all the confirmed speakers can be found here.
Diversity will be a major theme of the conference. A special panel moderated by Nixon Wampamba will reflect upon the continuing obstacles to career progression faced by risk managers who are women or people of color, despite the increasing demands for equality across society. The panel will seek to articulate concrete proposals for change, with the live audience encouraged to engage in the debate and to support the resolutions that come out of it. The conference agenda will also bolster their objectives by highlighting a globally diverse range of experts.
Other hot topics in risk management will be covered by the agenda, including:
- The cost savings and the security risks for telcos wanting to run key business applications, such as billing, in the public cloud
- How the escalating problem of CLI spoofing and associated frauds has spawned a worldwide competition between rival call validation solutions
- The strategic risk environment for telcos, including the challenge of monetizing 5G, the rapid progress towards broadband networks delivered by low orbit satellites, and the beginning of a second Cold War between the USA and China
- Maintaining the relevance of revenue assurance as telcos manage tectonic shifts in the sources of their income
- Assuring the cost of content as telcos diversify from being agnostic communications providers and become stakeholders in the media sector
All sessions will be streamed worldwide to the internet, with each day of the conference beginning at 8am and concluding at 5pm Eastern time (2pm to 11pm Central Europe). There is no charge to watch, no need to register, and everyone will be able to submit questions for speakers anonymously. Visit the RAG Americas Online webpage for more information.
