On day one of the Tech Hub Is­land Sum­mit Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion at the Hy­att Re­gency on Thurs­day, Min­is­ter of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion, Has­sel Bac­chus, ad­mit­ted his min­istry had a bit of a co­nun­drum.

It was not that his min­istry had not made progress in its goals to fur­ther dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, in­deed he was able to list some the strides made at the event.

“We have been track­ing e-ser­vices across Gov­ern­ment. We are cur­rent­ly fol­low­ing some 180 e-ser­vices and more will come on stream in the months ahead. In fact, through a new­ly launched ini­tia­tive, the De­vel­op­er’s Hub, we will be con­vert­ing many of these ser­vices to a suite of full end-to-end ser­vices that can be ini­ti­at­ed and com­plet­ed by our cus­tomers from a lo­ca­tion and at a time most con­ve­nient to them,” said Bac­chus, re­fer­ring to the De­vel­op­er’s Hub launch which took place ex­act­ly a week ear­li­er.

But the min­is­ter not­ed that all these signs of progress were moot if the in­tend­ed users did not feel like they could, or rather should, use those plat­forms.

“If your cus­tomers don’t have the re­quired skills to use these things and that in turn de­vel­ops trust, they won’t use it. You build these re­al­ly great things and they don’t trust it and they won’t use it,” said the min­is­ter, who ex­plained that this dilem­ma drew him to have a con­ver­sa­tion with Dig­i­cel’s CEO Abra­ham Smith about dig­i­tal adop­tion.

“I have had that con­ver­sa­tion re­cent­ly with Abra­ham and we were talk­ing about it and what they found—and Dig­i­cel op­er­ates across the is­land chain and oth­er places in South Amer­i­ca—is vary­ing pieces of ac­cep­tance of what we are do­ing and the core piece of that is trust,” said Bac­chus.

He said there were peo­ple sit­ting in the room at the Hy­att who would buy any­thing on eBay and who buy things on Ama­zon and pay for it.

“But they would not use any of the pay­ment meth­ods that we have to pay an elec­tric­i­ty bill or a wa­ter rate and that has noth­ing to do with elec­tron­ic IQ, it has to do with trust,” said Bac­chus.

The min­is­ter said this had prompt­ed his team to push a dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy pro­gramme, which he said, “is re­al­ly to get peo­ple to trust tech­nol­o­gy even more.”

But he ac­knowl­edged in his speech that many were not ea­ger to adopt dig­i­tal at the mo­ment.

“I must em­pha­sise that we do not en­vi­sion that e-ser­vices will re­place the more tra­di­tion­al in-per­son chan­nels of ser­vice de­liv­ery. We are ful­ly aware that our cit­i­zens are at vary­ing stages of dig­i­tal readi­ness. Our ap­proach to ser­vice de­liv­ery is to lever­age tech­nol­o­gy to of­fer our cit­i­zens choice, and not to force them to ac­cept un­fa­mil­iar new so­lu­tions which they do not yet trust,” he said.

The min­is­ter’s com­ments were amus­ing to Ki­ki De Valle, Mas­ter­card’s ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent, Mar­ket De­vel­op­ment- Latin Amer­i­ca & Caribbean.

Dur­ing her pre­sen­ta­tion in the seg­ment “It’s a Lead­er­ship Is­sue,” she too ac­knowl­edged that trust and cor­po­rate im­age guid­ed the pub­lic adop­tion or ac­cep­tance of dig­i­tal op­tions of­fered by com­pa­nies.

“Mas­ter­card did a study just re­cent­ly. The biggest ques­tion we were try­ing to solve was re­al­ly the cor­re­la­tion be­tween dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and tech­nol­o­gy and the adap­ta­tion or the adop­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, with trust. And trust came up in the con­ver­sa­tion al­so this morn­ing, which I thought was quite in­ter­est­ing,” she said.

De Valle con­tin­ued, “We found was that to­day 75 per cent of con­sumers don’t make a pur­chase or sign up for a prod­uct or a ser­vice, un­less they ac­tu­al­ly trust the or­gan­i­sa­tion. You find con­sumers re­al­ly more and more hold­ing com­pa­ny ac­count­able for the ac­tions that they’re tak­ing.”

She ex­plained this went be­yond sim­ply se­cu­ri­ty and in­fra­struc­ture but al­so cor­po­rate im­age and so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty in some cas­es.

“Con­sumers are wor­ried, in par­tic­u­lar, about da­ta. What is hap­pen­ing usu­al­ly with my da­ta, how is this com­pa­ny treat­ing my in­for­ma­tion? The sec­ond one that they’re pri­ori­tis­ing is well­be­ing and safe­ty for the con­sumer. And then the last thing is that they have a per­cep­tion about trans­paren­cy of the pub­lic per­sona of that com­pa­ny,” she said.

De Valle said there were sev­er­al ques­tions lead­ers should fol­low when putting to­geth­er their dig­i­tal poli­cies and agen­das so that their cus­tomer base would have a clear pic­ture of the goal of the dig­i­tal space be­ing cre­at­ed.

She, how­ev­er, not­ed that coun­tries that have been able to de­vel­op a dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture have seen clear ad­van­tages in the re­cov­ery pe­ri­od fol­low­ing the on­set of COVID-19 as they were able utilise dig­i­tal plat­forms to dis­trib­ute so­cial grants and oth­er funds aimed to­wards sta­bil­is­ing their cit­i­zens.

T&T does have such in­fra­struc­ture, but as Min­is­ter Bac­chus point­ed out, there is a re­luc­tance to utilise some of the pay­ment op­tions in place.

There has been ev­i­dence for some time that T&T has been slow in adopt­ing e-pay­ment sys­tems in par­tic­u­lar.

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic’s clo­sure of phys­i­cal banks prompt­ed a surge in on­line bank­ing adop­tion in this coun­try, a point not­ed by the Re­pub­lic Bank Vice Pres­i­dent Richard Sam­my in his spon­sor’s re­marks.

“We record­ed for ex­am­ple an over 350 per cent in­crease in ac­cep­tance of our e-com­merce so­lu­tion and 94 per cent in­crease in sign-ups for our cor­po­rate on­line bank­ing so­lu­tion to date, as both busi­ness­es and in­di­vid­u­als nav­i­gat­ed around lock­down mea­sures and ac­com­pa­ny­ing re­stric­tions with dig­i­tal pref­er­ences con­tin­u­ing in­to the post-pan­dem­ic pe­ri­od,” said Sam­my.

How­ev­er, his col­league at Re­pub­lic Bank gen­er­al man­ag­er, Group Mar­ket­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Karen Tom Yew not­ed that Re­pub­lic Bank’s End­Cash had seen slug­gish growth since it was launched as T&T’s first dig­i­tal wal­let in March 2021.

The trend she not­ed has on­ly start­ed to shift slight­ly as the dig­i­tal wal­let has been adopt­ed by more and more promi­nent busi­ness­es