The Financial Services Authority (OJK) wants to encourage banks to improve information technology governance and risk management. This is in line with the banking industry’s migration from the old banking system to digital banking. Banking Supervision Deputy Commissioner, OJK as previously stated, banks must anticipate issues such as customer data protection and exchange, the risk of customer data leakage connected to fraud, probable incompatibility of technology investments with business strategy, and others.
“The risk of cyber-attacks is one of the main risks that banks need to watch out for and mitigate in the digital era, considering the development of banking digitalisation increases the emergence of cyber security risks for banks,” said the Commissioner.
OJK has released a roadmap for Indonesian banking development through 2025, which will serve as a guide for future regulations and agreements. This is to foresee national banking cyber security threats. “OJK will encourage banks to continue to strengthen related to IT (information technology) governance and risk management, adopt the latest technology, then cooperate with IT and implement advance digital banking,” he said.
Meanwhile, Retno Ponco Windarti, the Director of Bank Indonesia’s Payment System Policy Department, said that the department has its way of securing digital data for every customer with a national payment system, one of which is close collaboration with payment service providers (PJP) and payment system infrastructure providers (PIP). “We give a maximum of one hour from the time the incident must be reported. Then, we conduct discussions, audits to find out what the real cause is.”
In addition, they would impose consequences on PJP and PIP for failing to meet their responsibilities, so that digital security becomes one of the factors that the financial services business must emphasise.
In the banking industry, Bank DKI, as the Regional Bank, has taken precautions to protect itself from cyber-attacks, one of which is the IT Security Cyber Architecture method. Amirul Wicaksono, Director of Technology and Operations at Bank DKI, stated that the organisation is still safe from cyber threats due to bank laws. “Banks have regulations, such as regulations on risk management in the use of technology (MRTI). OJK also always audits the risk mitigation function and the function to ward off cyberattacks.”
OpenGov Asia reported, Indonesia, the country with the fourth-fastest growth in internet users in the world, faces both great opportunities and significant threats as digital technology and the internet advance. However, according to the Indonesian government’s cyber and crypto agency, Badan Siber dan Sandi Negara (BSSN), Indonesia is becoming a victim of an increasing number of cyber-attacks, with over 423 million recorded by the end of 2020. Without solid cybersecurity systems, the 150 million internet users in Indonesia are at risk of being caught up in a tragic cybersecurity issue.
Strengthening the legal and policy fundamentals of cybersecurity and cryptology is essential if Indonesia is to grow its digital economy, embrace the fourth industrial revolution, and protect critical infrastructure and information security assets.
To combat these attacks, Indonesia’s government had recently partnered with a leading cybersecurity solutions vendor to strengthen the country’s cybersecurity capabilities and fend off mounting threats. Badan Siber dan Sandi Negara recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to improve cybersecurity capacity development and institution building within the country’s government sector. Broadly, the MoU covers collaborating through knowledge-sharing, capacity-building, cybersecurity training, and joint programs to build cyber awareness in Indonesia.
The Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (IIT-Kharagpur) is accepting applications for a 12-week free online course called “Machine Learning for Soil and Crop Management”. The course is for undergraduate students in agricultural engineering, agriculture, and environmental science. It will help them understand and apply their knowledge of machine learning (ML), deep learning, digital soil mapping, image processing, and portable sensors to develop an integrated and advanced soil and crop management system.
The IIT-Kharagpur said it is essential to upgrade traditional farming practices and prepare for a technological revolution to develop eco-friendly systems to enhance crop productivity. The course aims to cover the various applications of machine learning and deep learning methods for better soil and crop management. It will be conducted by an Assistant Professor (Soil Science) in the Agricultural and Food Engineering Department at IIT-Kharagpur. Participants can also obtain certificates by paying for and clearing an examination. To pass, students need an average assignment score of 10 out of 25 and an average exam score of 30 out of 75. The course will be conducted on the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) platform. It is scheduled for 24 January to 15 April 2022, and enrolment is free. According to a news report, the course will cover:
Earlier this month, IIT-Kharagpur invited applications for another 12-week free online course on an Introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT). The course will be offered through the NPTEL platform. It will provide different aspects, principles, and tools to help build IoT products. Students will learn the fundamentals of the technology through IoT-based applications like innovative shopping systems, infrastructure management in urban and rural areas, remote health monitoring and emergency notification systems, and transportation systems.
As per a news report, the course will cover an introduction to IoT: sensing, actuation, and the basics of networking, communication protocols, sensor networks, and machine-to-machine communications. Students will learn interoperability in IoT and Python programming and Raspberry Pi and the implementation of IoT with Raspberry Pi. The course will also explore data handling and analytics, and cloud computing, sensor-cloud, and fog computing, smart cities, and smart homes. Also, connected vehicles, smart grids, and industrial IoT.
India has been heavily investing in developing AI/ML courses and solutions. In September, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (IISc) unveiled a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) centre at the IISc campus. Spread across approximately 140,000 square feet, the centre will offer bachelor’s, master’s, and short-term courses in areas like AI/ML, deep learning, fintech, reinforcement learning, image processing, and computer vision. The centre will also promote research and innovation in AI/ML and develop the talent pool from across the country to provide cutting-edge solutions to meet the industry’s emerging and future requirements.
The Philippines’ central bank, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), has refreshed its six-year-old National Strategy for Financial Inclusion (NSFI) to make it more current and to reflect the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and greater digitalisation of financial services. The BSP will launch an enhanced version of the current NSFI in January 2022. The Financial Inclusion Steering Committee (FISC), an interagency committee in charge of the NSFI and chaired by the BSP, agreed to alter and update the NSFI on November 9.
“The plan must evolve in tandem with the landscape,” BSP Governor Benjamin E. Diokno remarked. “This pushes the bank to reassess the initial strategic plan and ensure that the NSFI continues to be a flexible framework for promoting financial inclusion across the country.”
The National Survey on Financial Institutions (NSFI) was originally introduced in July 2015 and the most recent national survey on FI as an official report was in 2019. The BSP publishes quarterly FI data on its website, the most recent of which was in the fourth quarter of 2020. The objective of the NSFI is to promote and develop public-private collaboration and financial inclusion policies and programmes. The Financial Institutions Surveillance Commission (FISC) developed an inclusive financial system in 2015.
According to Diokno, there is still more work to be done to make formal financial services available to everybody, and the pandemic and rapid development of digital technology are bringing new opportunities as well as obstacles in the pursuit of financial inclusion.
The BSP said the new NSFI will encompass six years from 2022 to 2028, with strategies transformed into priority activities, key performance indicators, and targets. The bank emphasised that this is a shift from the present NSFI, which lays out the principles for achieving financial inclusion but does not include a timescale or goals.
To update the NSFI, the BSP and the Asian Development Bank are holding ongoing consultation workshops and actively requesting views from the banking and other sectors. According to Diokno, who spoke at the BSP’s recent “Financial Education Expo,” Filipinos’ financial behaviour has changed because of the pandemic.
“Some for the better (and) they are prioritising saving, availing health and life insurance, and preparing for retirement to provide better financial opportunities for themselves and their families during and beyond the pandemic,” he said. This was one of the updated information that the national FI survey aims to capture.
OpenGov Asia reported the issuance of the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) on broadening the provision of internet service through satellite services is seen by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) as further promoting financial inclusion and digital finance in the country. The IRR, issued in September by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) under Department Circular No. 002, Series of 2021, aims to promote the development of an inclusive and vibrant satellite industry by liberalising access to satellite systems.
Increased access to satellite services is expected to hasten the rollout of internet connectivity for the country’s unserved, underserved, geographically isolated, and disadvantaged areas. With the issuance of the IRR, banks, fintech companies, and other financial sector entities will be guided even further in their exploration of ways to use satellite technology for their operations, particularly in expanding presence in underserved communities.
As financial transactions and services shift to online platforms, internet connectivity is recognised as a critical enabler of financial and economic inclusion. Banks and other financial service providers (FSPs) will be able to better serve rural areas with more access points, such as automated teller machines and cash agent services that rely on internet connectivity, as internet service is expanded.
The Illinois office uses a cloud-based Cyber Range platform to create such live-fire scenarios to give security teams hands-on training to prepare them for real events. The training is critical because the number of attacks on the office has increased by 800% since 2019. The training came about as a way for the office to ensure the protection of the $52 billion in assets.
One of the challenges that I found is making sure that your teams who have to respond to this are trained and ready to go. We were looking for a platform that allowed our security folks to actually simulate being under attack. It’s super important because if you don’t train that way, you’re not going to be able to defend in the real world.
– Joe Daniels, CIO, Treasurer’s Office
Cyber Range serves as a cyber playground. At the centre is a virtual enterprise-grade network. That means when someone comes to train on the platform, they enter a live network, which consists of databases and servers and desktops and. The second component is a sophisticated attack machine. The research team detects real malware and reverse engineers it to use on the network. When they enter the playground, they are using their own tools in order to try to defend the network, meaning to detect the attack before they know what kind of attack it is, and then mitigate that. They are doing that in a real virtual environment.
Treasurer’s Office staff have trained on the platform weekly for the past 18 months, and the office also helps train local units of government involved in a round-the-clock full-service electronic program through twice-monthly sessions using another module of the platform. Using the labs, trainees experience the fundamentals of hands-on cybersecurity, while the CyYber Range provides a realistic live-fire exercise in which they must solve a complete attack vector.
The tools that they use in the lab, they’re real-world tools that most agencies have in place already. The lab-based training has a waitlist of six months. That shows you the need or the desire for people to understand and learn about this environment. I think the pandemic showed everyone how reliant on technology we really are,” Daniels said.
The onset of the COVID-19 crisis is when cyberthreats took off, especially because agencies’ technology footprint grew as employees worked from home. It is very different trying to protect assets with a remote workforce.
The approach to security focuses on people rather than technology because a shortage of cyber professionals is one of the biggest challenges the industry faces. As of November 17, there were almost 600,000 cybersecurity job openings in the United States – about 40,000 of them in the public sector. The team uses the platform to spot skills gaps and trains the existing workers to fill them.
The goal is to create a centre of excellence for cybersecurity around financial transactions, although there are plans to expand beyond that area starting in January 2022. Cybersecurity is going to continue to be critical.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, A joint advisory issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) has warned that an infamous ransomware group has targeted multiple organisations deemed critical infrastructure, including two organisations in the U.S. food and agriculture sector. The advisory includes technical details, analysis, and assessment of this cyber threat, as well as several mitigation actions that can be taken to reduce the risk to this ransomware.
CISA, FBI and NSA are unified in emphasising the value and importance for organisations to apply best practices to protect their networks, systems and data, such as (1) implement and enforce backup procedures; (2) Use strong, unique passwords; (3) Use multi-factor authentication; and (4) implement network segmentation and traversal monitoring. All organisations striving to protect their networks from a ransomware attack and ensure their systems are resilient should read the joint advisory for the full spectrum of recommended mitigations.
Around 85% of Vietnamese banking consumers are more likely to use online and digital banking services compared to 18 months ago, according to a recent report. Globally, nearly two-thirds (61%) of consumers have made greater use of digital banking services over the last 18 months. Two in five (41%) have started using digital banking services for the very first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Vietnam, these numbers are higher, at 70% and 54%, respectively. Approximately 90% of respondents use online and digital banking services mostly to pay bills, transfer money, and check account balances. These statistics will help banks understand customers habits and behaviours to create more effective online services.
The report surveyed 4,500 consumers globally, including Vietnamese consumers (accounting for 11%). It identifies five emerging financial “tribes” that banks need to know about in a post-pandemic world. These consumer groups include techcelerators, ethical bankers, convenience cravers, covidpreneurs and neo asset hoarders. Techcelerators are recent converts to the world of digital banking who have adopted digital services amid physical branch closures.
Vietnam was most likely to identify with techcelerators, with 33% of respondents showing the traits of this group. Ethical bankers are young, purpose-driven savers that want to make a positive impact in the world. Some 76% of Vietnamese consumers agreed that they are willing to pay a premium for financial services if a cut goes towards helping the environment or local communities.
Convenience cravers are one-stop shoppers who want all-in-one services at their fingertips, and no extra cost. Covidpreneurs are entrepreneurs who have set up their own business during the pandemic, in need of easy-to-use and reliable business banking services. 14% of Vietnamese respondents belong to this group. Neo asset hoarders are new asset owners who want to use financial services to buy, trade, and hold assets. This group is the smallest, but a rapidly growing tribe globally.
An industry expert explained that each tribe shows something significant about the way consumer behaviour is adapting and what banks must do to stay ahead of the curve. Traditional audience segmentation in financial services is broken. The one-size-fits-all model, in which customers are divided based on how much they earn, or simple demographics, is redundant in a world of open finance. If banks want to survive, they must think about how to affiliate themselves with the new groups within society and appeal to them with products and experiences that meet their shared values and user needs.
Digital transformation in banking has accelerated in Vietnam and the report shows that 87% of local banking customers agreed with the importance of online and digital banking services in a bank or financial institution. Over 80% of respondents prefer to save or invest rather than spend money – the highest rates of all surveyed markets, and more than 74% are willing to pay a premium for financial services that save their time and offer greater flexibility.
A report titled “China Tech Decoupled” examined how China is building up a self-reliant domestic IT infrastructure ecosystem with detailed analysis. How China’s tech sector evolves and potentially decouples from the global tech system is one of the most important factors shaping the future. The report sheds light on how China’s effort to build up key domestic substitute IT infrastructure is going and how it will impact the world’s tech landscape.
China realised that it depended heavily on foreign technology, particularly in a critical industry: semiconductors. Since then, a renewed national campaign to build up China’s self-reliant supply chains picked up pace significantly. A new industry suddenly became the centre of the spotlight for governments and private businesses. Referred to as Xin Chuang, or Information Technology Application Innovation Industry, this industry aims to build up a comprehensive, self-reliant Chinese domestic information technology industry from chips, operating systems, and applications.
Xin Chuang industry, which is expected to exceed US$ 52 billion in scale in 2023, while the overall market capacity will exceed RMB1 trillion Yuan (US$ 155 billion). The Xin Chuang industry consists of four parts: basic hardware, basic software, application software, and information security. Chips, computing devices, operating systems, databases, and middleware are some of the most important components of the sector.
In many other information technology segments, including servers, enterprise applications, public cloud, and big data platforms, the Chinese market is expected to experience rapid growth going forward. Beijing’s objective is to have Chinese companies grab a significant portion of this future growth and obtain significant domestic market share.
After years of development, leaders in each segment of the Xin Chuang industry have emerged. From operating systems, CPU platforms, databases, cyber security to applications, a wide range of Chinese companies offer domestic replacement options for foreign products in each market segment.
Despite strong policy support and China’s market scale advantage, there are several challenges in China’s efforts to beef up its Xin Chuang market. In semiconductors, for example, government support led to a boom in the industry. In 2020 alone, over 20,000 new semiconductor companies were established in China. There were 73,000 semiconductor companies operating in the country as of the end of 2020. This could lead to vast waste of resources, as previously happened in other sectors such as China’s solar panel market. Around 30% of China’s semiconductor companies were established within a year, and approximately 18.4% of them did not survive beyond one year.
Moreover, China currently does not have a comprehensive plan designed specifically to break the bottleneck areas. Chinese companies also lag global market leaders by two generations or more in manufacturing nodes in semiconductor manufacturing. Such a gap will take decades to close. Xin Chuang products also need to improve quality and build up relevant ecosystems. Regional fragmentation and lack of coordination also present another challenge. Currently, there are many small and regional competitors in the Xin Chuang industry, creating adaptability and interoperability issues.
Despite these challenges, China is likely to make reasonable progress in domestic replacement in the next decade in markets such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) O.S., cyber security, cloud computing, computing devices, and servers. These markets do not have as high technological barriers or long R&D cycles as chip manufacturing. As a greater share of these markets is captured by domestic companies, foreign companies will gradually lose market share and influence over the Chinese market.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, China has dedicated growing resources to basic research and original innovation in recent years. Their efforts aim to cultivate a driving force for economic growth and improve people’s living standards. Chinese researchers, hi-tech enterprises and local governments are together actively striving to strengthen original innovation.
The COVID-19 epidemic in 2020 slashed global vehicle sales and led to a shrinkage of the industry to US$ 6,261 million. Yet as the epidemic gets under control, sales have started to rise significantly. Moreover, the growing penetration of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) in new energy vehicles will favour sustained growth in the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) industry, projected to pass US$ 12 billion in 2026.
At present, Taiwan is one of the leading countries in the PCB industry. According to Taipei Printed Circuit Association (TPCA), Taiwan’s Printed Circuit Board industry has temporarily led the global market with a 33.9% market share. Taiwan can maintain its technological lead for 3-5 years if the government sets up a global hub of advanced PCB fabrication and pursue autonomy in the supply of PCB materials.
Observations in terms of the performance of various PCB products by Taiwanese manufacturers show that the IC substrate and HDI with the most brilliant performance were the stars in 2020. Benefiting from chips and high-speed memory, the IC substrate demand increased up to 16%. Despite the decline in the overall mobile market, the demand for high-standard baseboards from smartphones also boosted HDI growth by 9.6%.
The demand for FPCB also increased by up to 6% due to the launch delay and hot sales of US mobiles. Thanks to the business opportunities from work from home, distance learning, and videoconferencing that boosted the demand for laptops and the gradual recovery of automotive sales, the sales of multilayer boards also increased by 2% at the rebound in the second half of the year after a slump in the first half of the year.
Regarding the rigid-flex board, the only PCB product that experienced a decline in 2020, manufacturers needed to find a new market outlet through product reform due to the battery demand fall after the global smartphone decline. Taiwan’s PCB industry’s overall performance showed a surprise with a brilliant overall performance.
Despite the continuation of the pandemic, the launch of vaccines for COVID-19, the upheavals in the global situation, the transition from 4G to 5G telecommunication technology in 2021 will bring an overall growth to major PCB products. These include PCBs for smartphones, laptops, wearables, servers, self-driving cars, and network equipment, where the strong momentum of wearables, self-driving cars, and network equipment will even lead to the growth of the entire electronics industrial chain.
While Taiwanese PCB manufacturers still capture strengths in technology and quality, and alongside Taiwan’s world-leading semiconductor and ICT industries, besides enjoying the geographic advantages, Taiwan’s PCB industry can take advantage of Taiwan as the world-leading IC substrate production base. Therefore, Taiwan’s PCB industry must upgrade to advance processes to catch the tremendous business opportunities alongside Taiwan’s semiconductor industry’s evolution.
As reported by OpenGov Asia, Semiconductor manufacturers moving into the 2 nm process are facing challenges in accurately measuring the dimensions of key components, such as transistor structure, size and film thickness. The Department of Industrial Technology (DoIT) under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) has coordinated with the British Office Taipei in jointly promoting cooperation between Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and a leading UK manufacturing company.
According to statistics, the size of the market for semiconductor measurement and testing equipment in 2020 was US$4.1647 billion, and it is expected to reach US$5.3734 billion by 2026. The DoIT stressed that based on Taiwan’s cutting edge in its complete semiconductor industry chain and 2 nm manufacturing technology, the constitutes a milestone in the advanced measurement of semiconductors and will accelerate the development of inspection technologies.
Amid the ever-changing development of semiconductor technology, advanced measurement technology will be seen as a key to success in semiconductor manufacturing. It will highlight the role of measurement technology in system integration and cross-field innovation, further assisting the industry in transition and upgrading.
Many deep learning models struggle to see the world in which there are objects and the relationships between them. Most models do not understand the entangled relationships between individual objects. Without knowledge of these relationships, a robot designed to assist someone in a kitchen would have difficulty following commands such as “grab the spatula on the left side of the stove and place it on the cutting board.”
In an effort to solve this problem, MIT researchers have developed a model that understands the underlying relationships between objects in a scene. Their model depicts individual relationships one by one and combines these representations to describe the overall scene. This allows the model to generate more accurate images from text descriptions, even when the scene contains multiple objects arranged in different relationships to each other.
This work can be applied in situations where industrial robots need to perform complex, multi-step manipulation tasks, such as stacking items in a warehouse or assembling devices. It also brings the field one step closer to enabling machines that can learn from and interact with their environment more like humans do.
When I look at a table, I cannot tell there is an object in the XYZ location. Our minds do not work that way. In our minds, when we understand a scene, we really understand it based on the relationships between the objects. We think that by building a system that can understand the relationships between objects, we can use that system to more effectively manipulate and change our environments.
– Yilun Du, PhD Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory & Co-Lead Author
The framework the researchers developed can generate an image of a scene based on a text description of objects and their relationships, such as ‘A wooden table to the left of a blue stool. A red bench to the right of a blue stool.”
Their system would break these sentences into two smaller pieces describing each individual relationship, then model each part individually. Those pieces are then combined through an optimisation process that generates an image of the scene.
The researchers used a machine learning technique called energy-based models to represent the individual object relationships in a scene description. This technique allows them to use one energy-based model to encode each relational description, then assemble them in a way that infers all objects and relationships.
The system also works in reverse: with an image, it can find text descriptions that correspond to the relationships between objects in the scene. In addition, their model can be used to edit an image by rearranging the objects in the scene to match a new description.
The researchers compared their model with other deep learning methods that were given text descriptions and tasked with generating images showing the associated objects and their relationships. In any case, their model outperformed the baselines.
They also asked people to evaluate whether the images generated matched the original scene description. In the most complex examples, where descriptions included three relationships, 91% of participants concluded that the new model performed better.
While these initial results are encouraging, the researchers would like to see how their model performs on more complex real-world images, with noisy backgrounds and objects blocking each other. They are also interested in eventually incorporating their model into robotic systems, allowing a robot to derive object relationships from videos and then apply this knowledge to manipulate objects in the world.
