Following the success of the 2016 RAG Summer Conference, our 2017 Spring Conference will see us return to the stunning auditorium of BT’s London headquarters, situated close to many historic sights, including St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Old Bailey, the London Museum and the remains of the Roman London Wall. The conference is scheduled for Wednesday 15th and Thursday 16th March, plus an optional pre-conference training session on the afternoon of Tuesday 14th March. As with all our events, attendance will be free, but be sure to book your place as soon as possible, because we will need to limit the number of seats per organisation in order to ensure a balanced and diverse audience.
Agenda
Our event will cover fraud management, revenue assurance, other kinds of business assurance, enterprise risk management, security and credit risk. You can view a downloadable brochure and agenda here, or use the following schedule which is updated as soon as we add extra speakers. Keep reading below for some description of the highlights on our agenda.
Click here to open the working agenda in a new window
Conference Day One: Wednesday, March 15th
- Bernice DeMarco, Director of BT Group Revenue Assurance, will be our host. Bernice will open the conference with a very special session where she and some of her team discuss the ways BT has extended its assurance remit, what work they should consider doing in future, and the potential for other telcos to follow their example.
- Atul Jain, the inspirational founder, Chairman and CEO of TEOCO, will explain how he built up a worldwide supplier of telco analytics and assurance solutions from an initial investment of just $2,000. He will talk about the need for new thinking in order to achieve breakthrough results.
- Senior consultants David Gandee and Per-Olof Ahlstrom will join Bernice DeMarco and Atul Jain on stage, for a brief panel discussing the need for change in telecoms risk and assurance, how we can encourage it, and what inhibits it.
- Commsrisk Editor Eric Priezkalns will moderate a panel about how to measure the benefits of preventing leakage before it occurs. The panellists will include Pedro Bravo of quad-play operator NOS and Andy Harper of Cartesian.
- Stuart Waton, RA Team Leader at Three, will talk about why he believes assurance teams need to have ‘many fingers in many pies’.
- Lee Scargall will present the results of his survey into the risk management and corporate governance practices of UK telcos. Lee will then be joined on stage by Peregrine Chard, who spent 7 years as Head of Strategic Programme Assurance at Vodafone.
- John Preston of Tesco Mobile will talk about how to apply assurance principles across the whole of the customer lifecycle.
- The day will close with a panel on how to extend the assurance mindset into other parts of the business. The discussion will cover how Bartek Bukowski applies assurance principles when dealing with Vodafone’s interconnect bills, how Nigel Smith assured the revenues generated by software licences, and why Guy Howie believes more emphasis must be placed on number range management.
Conference Day Two: Thursday, March 16th
- Adam Falus, Senior Head of Fraud Management for T-Mobile Czech Republic, will share a case study explaining how his business used the big data available from their Hadoop platform to upgrade the defence provided by their firewall.
- Simon Walsh of Telefónica UK, Dr. George Bolt, scientist and inventor, and Colin Marden, COO of Apply Mobile and formerly a cybersecurity advisor to the Financial Conduct Authority, a British financial services regulator, will contribute to a panel discussion about new technologies for fighting fraud and the impact they will have on fraud departments.
- Conference favourite Tony Poulos will be back to give a presentation about credit scoring for the unbanked.
- Dave Morrow will provide an update on his campaign to increase police confiscation of criminal profits.
- A panel will discuss the state of professional education in our field. The guests are Michael Lazarou, who regularly reviews online training courses for Commsrisk, and Marcus Bryant, senior consultant to MTN Group.
- BT’s Andreas Manolis will give a brief update about the progress he has made with developing a new model which evaluates susceptibility to leakages. Andreas intends to make the model publicly available by sharing it through RAG.
- Industry analyst Patrick Donegan will review recent security incidents that impacted telcos and ISPs around the world.
- Award-winning consultant Geoff Ibbett will talk about the innovation he would like to see from RAG.
- Our ‘wise heads’ panel of distinguished experts will return to close the event, reviewing the topics discussed over the two days and giving their views on the state of the industry. The wise heads will include Hugh Roberts, Mark Yelland, Geoff Ibbett and Hayley Daniels.
The biographies of all our confirmed speakers can be found here.
You can review the quality of some of our previous talks by playing clips from our video archive.
Pre-conference Risk Training for Telco Employees Only: Tuesday, March 14th
Alan Blaney of Focus Training will provide, free of charge, a half-day afternoon training seminar on risk management to the first 25 telco employees who sign up via the conference registration form. To control access, joining instructions will only be supplied to the lucky 25 attendees. Learn more about the seminar by looking here.
Location, Evening Entertainment and Hotels
The venue for our conference will be BT Centre. The prestigious headquarters of BT are situated right in the historic heart of London. Their address is:
BT Centre
81 Newgate St
London
EC1A 7AJ
The nearest London Underground station is St. Paul’s, a very short walk from BT Centre.
We have negotiated a discounted rate for a nearby hotel, Club Quarters St. Paul’s. To learn more about the hotel and how to receive the discount, see here.
The conference will be held in a stunning 170-seat auditorium. There is a dedicated breakout area alongside, with convenient cloakroom and toilet facilities. See here for more information and photographs of the auditorium.
As well as providing lunch and refreshments during each day, there will also be a free evening buffet and drinks at The Saint, a friendly restaurant-bar just a short walk from our conference venue. More details can be found here.
Register to Attend
Registration is now closed.
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