Can T&T af­ford not to part­ner to build and cre­ate busi­ness val­ue in the lo­cal in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) sec­tor? This was the ques­tion posed by Nigel Chi­napoo, chief in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer at Colo­nial Life (T&T) to chief ex­ec­u­tives of ICT com­pa­nies, ex­ec­u­tives of ma­jor com­mer­cial banks, for­eign ven­ture cap­i­tal com­pa­nies and heads of gov­ern­ment agen­cies that court en­tre­pre­neurs at the in­ter­na­tion­al ICT/fi­nance sym­po­sium, De­vel­op­ing Fi­nanc­ing So­lu­tions for the ICT Clus­ters, held last week at the Hilton Trinidad, St Ann's.

"Whilst many oth­er ini­tia­tives and events come to­geth­er to shape the ever chang­ing fab­ric of our so­ci­ety, the last two decades must have demon­strat­ed to us the unique role of in­for­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy, as a most sig­nif­i­cant change agent, the domi­no ef­fect of the In­ter­net has in­fil­trat­ed all spheres of our dai­ly lives in every cor­ner of the globe," Chi­napoo said. "I know we will here to­day make his­to­ry in the short-and medi­um-term growth of the ICT sec­tor, and, in par­tic­u­lar, the de­vel­op­ment of the sec­tor's sec­ond most im­por­tant re­source, fund­ing," he said. Chi­napoo spoke of the im­por­tance of busi­ness col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions and mem­bers of the ICT clus­ter com­pa­nies to help fi­nanciers fur­ther un­der­stand the needs of T&T tech­nol­o­gy firms, in­crease fi­nan­cial flows to such busi­ness­es, which will im­prove these com­pa­nies' abil­i­ty to fur­ther de­vel­op in­to glob­al­ly com­pet­i­tive con­glom­er­ates.

The sym­po­sium was host­ed by Evolv­ing Tec­knolo­gies and En­ter­prise Com­pa­ny De­vel­op­ment Ltd (e-TecK). E-TecK, in a state­ment, said the sym­po­sium rep­re­sent­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty for joint part­ner­ships be­tween an es­ti­mat­ed 40 of T&T's lead­ing lo­cal, pri­vate ICT firms and lo­cal­ly-based ed­u­ca­tion, re­search in­sti­tutes and as­so­ci­a­tions and e-TecK to en­hance lo­cal ICT firms' glob­al com­pet­i­tive­ness by ad­dress­ing the chal­lenges to the growth and ex­pan­sion of the in­dus­try as a whole. E-TecK has es­ti­mat­ed that ICT con­tributes about three per cent to gross na­tion­al prod­uct.