The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

kemp@tribunemedia.net

Technology providers say the digital economy will reduce "experimentation costs" and enable Bahamian companies to more rapidly trial products and services with global consumers.

Robin Glinton, Salesforce's vice president of data science applications, speaking during a panel discussion at the Bahamas Business Outlook conference, said digitisation will have a “huge impact” on productivity because it will enable Bahamian companies to attain “global reach".

He added: “The pandemic has shown a lot of folks in business that you can really run a business from anywhere and reach customers all over the world. Digitisation also makes business experimentation cheaper. It makes it possible to quickly try out new ideas, new products and services, and better value creating.”

Peter Bridgewater, Open Systems Technologies's president, said that when he first started his business in 1999, he read a report from the World Bank that said “good governance” requires a focus on four pillars.

These included “an equitable judicial system, an sound accounting and financial system, and also enforceable civil rights.” He added that the primary focus of this study was relying on the fourth pillar, which was “record keeping for the effective rule of law".

Mr Bridgewater said: “This drove me to look at how digitisation can be used to digitise records in different government and private sector organisations, because it highlighted that the lack of records is directly linked to corruption and fraud, and how the poorest in our community suffer because of the loss in the control of records.”

He added that these principles are still just as relevant and important today, and The Bahamas must continue to match technology and digitisation with the needs of its citizens.

John Farmer, Custom Computers' owner/operator, said: “I think there are obviously opportunities and challenges with digitisation in this country. One of the benefits of digitisation, from the viewpoint of an entrepreneur, is that allows a much lower cost of entry to a business than has traditionally been available.

"I look at the concept of going online as being very alluring. Of course, especially now we are in this pandemic, online is fine, but it's only part of a solution. People often want to come in and feel, touch and experiment before buying, and have the kind of experience that isn't available online.

“Going online does provide you with access to a much broader market. But sometimes you just simply want to get out of the house and go and shop, and that is a reality.”

Mr Farmer continued: “The second challenge I see is integration of digital payments with existing methods of point of sale.

“We can go back a couple of decades when someone came in with a credit card, we put it on this metal base, we stock up paper forms on top and we rolled the roller back and forth to improve the credit card on the form.

“Of course we've gone from that to dial-up credit card payments to wired, to Internet-wired and now wireless ones, and it's a very efficient payment method. If you consider credit card processing, they deal with millions of transactions a second. Challenges with digital currencies, for example, are to be enabled to provide that execution speed.”