Belize Secures Funding for Cybersecurity Upgrade in BPO Sector

Other news coming out of the BPO industry is the recent approval of funding that will see Belize upgrade in its cybersecurity capabilities.  The Director of Policy and Investment, Lincoln Blake, explains that this is crucial since the clients of the BPO sector need to have that security when doing business using quasi-money such as credit cards.

Lincoln Blake, Director of Policy and Investment: “We recently joined up with the BPO Association which is a cluster of BPO’s that got together and said you know what, we need to make sure that we help develop a recommendation for policy change so that the industry continues growing. So they joined up and together with them we submitted a project concept to the IDB. They had a program, a regional program that they’re offering funding for policy development and for pilot projects. And we submitted a project under the name of to move up the global digital service to higher tier services, which means a higher value and Belize got the funding. It was about 111 submissions out of 111 submissions Belize was one of the countries that got. approval. So that’s just one of the activities that we’re doing. The other one is that we’re working on a global digital services strategy and policy document because there are significant policy changes that we need to do, not only in education but also in cyber security, because you have issues the higher you go up the value chain you have to make sure you protect the customers because they’re dealing more with quasi money with credit cards and other type of payments. And of course data, data has to be protected. So those things have to be looked at and that will need some experts to come in and definitely look at our system, do a diagnostic to find ways of how we could improve. I mean other countries are doing it like Jamaica. Jamaica has a strategy for the global digital services and we’re looking towards that.”

The funding for this pilot project is an estimated one hundred and fifty thousand US dollars.  Love News understands that the Ministry of Investment is in discussion with several International Financial Institutions to fund a larger project to do a full diagnostic of the BPO sector  and develop a policy and strategy to grow into Global Digital Services.