Former president of Taiwan Mah Ying-jeou said: “We have been waiting for 13 years. Please do not let us wait for another 13 years to achieve our dream.”
At the World Chinese Economic Summit, Ma, in delivering his speech entitled “The Prospects for Closer Relations between Taiwan and the Asean Economies”, he urged Asean to implement non-exclusion of regional trade agreement.
He said trade should be profit-oriented. A non-exclusion trade agreement would benefit all parties.
He said Asean regional trade agreements, such as free trade agreements, have initiated exclusion policies under the requirements of World Trade Organisation. Under political and diplomatic factors, Taiwan has encountered various obstacles.
“We are unable to participate |in all the main regional trade |agreements,” he said.
Ma added: “I sincerely hope all Southeast Asia counties can support the move of including Taiwan into your free trade agreements, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the Asia Pacific Free Trade Agreement. These collaboration would for sure benefit all people.
Taiwan is capable of playing a very important role in supply chain. We are also very advance in new technologies.”
He said when he was attending the East Asian Economic Forum organised by the World Economic Forum in Singapore, in his capacity as Taipei mayor in 2003, he gave a speech that touched on collaborations and integration with Asean economies and Taiwan’s wish to join.
During Ma’s eight years as Taiwan president, the country signed free trade agreements with China, Singapore and New Zealand.

Since the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, up to 189 countries have submitted national plans that target aggressive growth in climate solutions – including renewable energy, low-carbon cities, energy efficiency, sustainable forest management and climate-smart agriculture. These plans offer a clear roadmap for investments that will target climate-resilient infrastructure and offset higher up-front costs through efficiency gains and fuel savings.
IFC’s study, based on national climate-change commitments and underlying policies of 21 emerging-market economies, identifies sectors in each region where the potential for investment is greatest. This includes green buildings in East Asia and the Pacific – where China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam show a |climate-smart investment potential of $16 trillion.
Latin America and the Caribbean offer the next largest opportunity – particularly in sustainable transportation, where the potential for investment in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico is about $2.6 trillion. Opportunities in South Asia are mostly in climate-resilient infrastructure, where $2.5 trillion of opportunities exist in India and Bangladesh.
“There has never been a better time than now for climate-smart investing,” Philippe Le Hourou, IFC executive vice president, said. “This reflects the dramatic reduction in the price of clean technologies and the rise of smart policies that are driving businesses to invest. In this context, it is important to set ambitious goals – which is why IFC has pledged to increase our climate investments to a goal of $3.5 billion a year by 2020 and catalyse another $13 billion through other investors.”
Sub-Saharan Africa represents a $783 billion opportunity – particularly for clean energy in Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. In Eastern Europe, the biggest markets – Russia, Serbia, Turkey, and Ukraine – show a combined investment potential of $665 billion, mostly in energy efficiency and new green buildings. And in the Middle East and North Africa, the total climate-investment potential for Egypt, Jordan and Morocco is estimated at $265 billion, over a third of which is for renewable-energy generation, while 55 per cent ($146 billion) is for climate-smart buildings, transportation and waste solutions.
The report also finds that government action will be critical to unlock the full scale of investment potential. It recommends that governments integrate national climate commitments into their development strategies and budget processes, strengthen the investment climat8e for climate-smart industries and deploy public funds strategically to mobilise private capital, by reducing risk and providing project support, for example.

Most organisations have adopted a disaster-recovery (DRP) and business-continuity plan (BCP) to ensure that in the event of disasters, the organisation is able to continue operations with minimal downtime. Resilience to natural disasters or the ability to recover quickly despite a crippling disruption can in some cases save a company US$182,000 (Bt6.5 million) per hour of downtime. (footnote 1)
However, a DRP and a BCP are no longer sufficient in this age of digital transformation with organisations’ high dependency on technology as an enabler and information having no borders. No company, organisation or government is immune from cyberattacks. An example is the complete breach of Ashley Madison’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. (footnote 2)
Cybersecurity alone is insufficient for handling cyber-disasters because it does not indicate the ability or readiness of the affected organisation to contain the pandemonium that will follow. Besides, an organisation facing a cyber-disaster will have a multitude of split-second decisions it has to make in order to respond effectively to the consequences of the attack.
Are you ready? How do you prepare? 
Cyber-resiliency in action is about having detailed plans of response for all personnel and resources of the organisation – to be executed in the event of a breach. Building cyber-resiliency requires cooperation between the public and private sectors, but more than that, much greater awareness by everyone from business partners to front-line employees to those in the C-level suites.
Cyber-war gaming can help develop cyber-resiliency in an organisation by putting it through its paces with simulated cyber-scenarios in a controlled environment. This puts into practice the response plan of the organisation so team members can respond better in the advent of a crisis. This aims to achieve two outcomes for cyber-resiliency:
1. Assess and improve capabilities of personnel involved in cyber-resiliency efforts.
2. Assess and improve processes previously defined in the response plan for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Cyber-war gaming can be delivered via various exercises within a controlled environment. For instance, tabletop exercises that are focused on testing-defined processes, the participants’ familiarity with it and their thought processes during a crisis. A cyber-war game also tests technical capabilities and infrastructure readiness to deal with any scenario in a crisis.
The purpose of cyber-war gaming is really meant to strengthen incident response and crisis management capabilities. It aims to achieve an organised approach to addressing and managing the aftermath of a cybersecurity breach or attack.
It is also focused on the attribution of an attack, and its root causes for future preventive, detective and recovery methods. Other capabilities it aims to improve are around the processes developed to deal with sudden emergency situations, which involve the legal and communications team.
An example of good versus bad crisis management is the comparison between Home Depot and Target in the United States. Both had payment systems breached. Target was hit in December 2013 and Home Depot in September 2014. Target estimated 40 million credit- and debit-card details of customers were stolen and Home Depot estimated its breach to be about 56 million. The difference can be summed up below.
Target’s senior management did not handle the breach very well, which generated a lot of bad press. One of their biggest failures was that Target took about a week after learning of the potential breach to address consumers, while Home Depot acted within about a day of discovering the breach. (footnote 3)
Finally, when a cyber-disaster strikes, an organisation is bound to see a strong negative impact from loss of public trust and reputational damage to monetary loss. A simple way to determine cyber-resiliency is to measure how quickly an organisation can recover from a disaster and the duration the negative impacts or sentiments last from day zero.
Other measurements to determine the accuracy of cyber-resiliency efforts are the following.
Minimised impact to business, quickly resuming normal business functions.
Resiliency against the recurrences of a similar cyber-disaster.
How well do you think your organisation will handle a crisis?

Footnotes:
1 Duffy, Christopher, “A Resounding Yes! BCP and DR Can Bring Real Cost Savings”, Strategic BCP, February 17 2015, http://www.strategicbcp.com/ blog/business-continuity-cost-savings/, accessed October 6, 2016
2 Krebs, Brian, “Online Cheating Site Ashley Madison Hacked”, Krebs on Security, July 19 2015, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/07/online-cheating-site-ashleymadison-hacked/, accessed October 13, 2016
3 Hill, Catey, “Home Depot’s data breach is worse than Target’s, so where’s the outrage?”, MarketWatch, September 25 2014, http://www.marketwatch.com/story/yawn-who-cares-about-home-depots-data-breach-2014-09-24, accessed on October 18, 2016

PARICHART JIRAVACHARA is a partner/ risk advisory at Deloitte Thaiand 

The meeting of ministers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group preceded the Apec Economic Leaders’ meeting, which takes place today and tomorrow.
Alan Bollard, executive director of the Apec Secretariat, said in a statement: “The need for a new, progressive direction for globalisation and trade that opens up job creation, enhances social mobility and increases wages is up against a diminishing appetite for policies that could foster this outcome.”
Apec’s 21 economies are home to 3 billion people and account for half of global trade, and its push for freer trade has made the region more prosperous in recent decades.
But there is a sense that the prosperity is not evenly felt among some segments of the population – especially those left behind by disruptive technology. It has fuelled anti-globalisation sentiments and the rise of political leaders opposed to opening up trade, the most recent of whom is US President-elect Donald Trump.

The Trump shock is big, extending well beyond the US. For more than a week now, there has been a flood of commentaries discussing what the US president-elect’s Asian policy will look like and the probable winners and losers.
Lots of commentators said that as part of the Obama legacy, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an initiative the United States joined to lead in 2008, is a loser.
At the same time, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) — allegedly a China-led initiative — is described as a winner.
A forgotten fact is that neither of these free trade zone deals has really existed. The TPP was originally an agreement of four countries, Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, in 2005. It was not until 2008 that Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the US and Vietnam joined the discussion for a broader agreement.
The final proposal was signed by heads of state from the 12 countries in February this year in Auckland, New Zealand. A comprehensive 30-chapter agreement was awaiting ratification when the US presidential campaign started.
Candidates from both parties opposed the deal, Trump being the fiercer critic.
One salient feature of the TPP is its exclusion of China and India. And it does not include all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations — for instance, Indonesia and Thailand are left out.
Although no one said openly that China is not welcome, officials of the Obama administration took it at least in part as a political instrument, and repeatedly said (including Obama himself) that it would allow the US, not China, to write the rules for free trade.
But perhaps it is this added political purpose, chased by a government in haste (during the second term of the Obama administration), that will prove to be the TPP’s undoing.
After Trump’s election victory, the Obama administration announced it would no longer try to get the TPP approved by Congress.
An economic deal encumbered with excessive expectations can easily break. Too much unrelated significance attached to a deal can leave the dealmaker distracted and unready.

Considering capacity issues, the challenge posed by residential storage deployment and distributed generation like solar photovoltaics (PV), plus pressures from regulators after COP 21 – the climate accords signed in Paris last year – electricity distributors are under more pressure to change than ever before.
To put this into perspective, looking at load issues alone, because of continued implementation of energy-demand-disrupting technologies, Accenture research estimates that by 2025 utilities’ revenues could drop by up to $48 billion (Bt1.7 trillion) per year in the United States, and as much as 61 billion euros (Bt2.3 trillion) a year in Europe.
For utilities companies around the world, the need to adopt new distribution models is palpable. In fact, our recent research revealed that 45 per cent of utility executives worldwide found the traditional electricity-distribution model was no longer fit for purpose.
The question is: What is the model of the future?
To understand what industry models will be optimal going forward, it is helpful to look first at some of the strains facing the current one.
Historically, utilities have been remunerated by building systems that supported total demand for kilowatt-hours, despite the fact their costs are driven by peak load. The problem with this model is that it can be costly for utilities companies and customers alike, as distribution capacity must be built in to handle the peaks. Even with more “prosumers” generating their own energy, peak demand has proved decidedly more resilient than total demand.
Managing demand is always a challenge for electricity distributors, but it’s far from the only one. PV generation is becoming far more mainstream, and with tariff and net metering price incentives, more and more consumers are investing in “beyond-the-meter” storage. Peak pricing can also drive customer deployment of standalone storage, to manage electricity costs, as can falling up-front investments.
Given the looming challenges facing distribution businesses operating in the current industry model, adoption of a new model should aim to manage peak load effectively through demand-response tools. It should also incorporate investment in storage capacity “in front of the meter” to bring greater flexibility in managing the network.
This is already well underway – our research revealed that more than three-quarters of utilities executives were already investing or expecting to invest in storage within the next 10 years.
The most advanced and comprehensive model that has emerged to solve these issues is that of the distribution platform optimiser, whereby digitally enabled operators will handle all elements end-to-end – including data-analytics-powered demand response, dynamic storage, and sophisticated, responsive pricing – to produce an optimal outcome for the whole system.
These operators will work with prosumers who have adopted residential distributed generation and storage to ensure they’re used to increased grid reliability. All components will be carefully aligned and integrated to help reduce costs, ensure reliability and level-out peaks in demand.
Furthermore, it is believed that the most successful distribution platform optimisers will need a high degree of location awareness to ensure tightly directed and effective demand response programmes that support network optimisation. This requires a new regulatory model that places greater importance on performance over capital, working in tangent with a deeper understanding of the grid’s operations and controls that comes from deployment of a digitally enabled grid.
Ultimately, the platform optimiser model can advance grid performance, including better asset management, delivery, efficiency and utilisation of distributed energy sources, and has the potential to create new revenue.
As the industry undergoes a major transformation, companies need immediately to assess the distribution platform optimiser model’s relevance to their business, and create a road map for implementation.
How are you going to plan for the future?

Pakorn Suriyabhivadh is senior manager, Accenture Resources, Accenture in Thailand.

James Cronk, global director, Financial Services Industry, at US-based Cisco, said the banking and financial-services sectors were now “transferring their legacy environment into digital transformation to support digital payment”.
Around 4.5 per cent of Thai banking customers currently use digital payment, a proportion that will rise significantly in the next few years, driven by the development of information-technology infrastructure and security, he said.
Cisco’s comprehensive economic analysis estimates that digital innovation in retail banking will drive US$405 billion (Bt14.4 trillion) in value globally from 2015 to 2017.
Last year, financial services as a whole captured just 29 per cent or $117 billion of that opportunity.
Moreover, more than 90 per cent of the potential value is driven by key digital-use cases, including sales and services transformation, next-generation workers, video-based advice, mobile payment and connected ads, Cronk said.
Cisco has six platforms and solutions to support digital transformation in financial services – customer experience, workforce experience, agile IT-fast IT, analytics and insights, cyber security and liability, and risk compliance and management – the global director said.
Having a road map to digital value in retail banking means banks will be positioned “to enable IT agility and operational effectiveness, create differentiation in their business strategies from those of competitors, and define disruptive new digital-enabled business processes”, he explained.
Vatsun Thirapatarapong, managing director of Cisco in Thailand and Indochina, said the ratio of digital-banking users in Thailand would increase to 10 per cent of all banking users in the next three years, due to the popularity of using e-payment among generation-Z individuals, the usage of mobile first/cloud first, as well as start-ups developing fintech (financial technology) solutions to support digital payment.
Moreover, IDC has reported that consumers expect banks to deliver highly personalised hi-tech services coupled with the convenience of anytime, anywhere.
This group of consumers is growing and accounted for about 4.5 per cent of banking customers in the Asia-Pacific last year, according to the global IT market-intelligence firm, which expects the segment to grow to about 15 per cent by 2020.
Meanwhile, the Bank of Thailand has reported that there are currently around 12.9 million users of mobile banking in the Kingdom. The value of Thailand’s online retail market is expected to reach $10 billion-$15 billion by 2020, up from less than $2 billion last year, the central bank said.
The mobile penetration rate reached almost 87 per cent of the population, with smart-phone penetration at 50 per cent, while 50 per cent of all online transactions are done via mobile devices, it added. E-payments are expected to surge from Bt68.2 billion last year to Bt143 billion in 2020.
Moreover, Thailand is entering in the first stage of the government’s national e-payment policy and, when the e-payment system is fully operational next year, the estimated cost savings for banks and businesses will be around Bt75 billion per year, the Bank of Thailand said.
The Thai Bankers’ Association’s Payment System Office has agreed on a new fee structure, which will lower the cost of digital banking.