Under the banner slogan ‘Giving the Digital Industry a Voice’, the Spanish Association of Electronics, Digital Contents and ICT Companies (Asociación de Empresas de Electrónica, Tecnologías de la Información, Telecomunicaciones y Contenidos Digitales: AMETIC) has put on the 32^nd Digital Economy Encounter with the collaboration of Banco Santander. For three days the main digital industries came together with the shared aim of championing the digital industry’s role in society’s digitalization process and analyzing the main thrusts of the digital transformation and the business opportunities it presents.

GMV was one of the standout participants, taking part in several sessions to look at the challenges posed by digitalization from various viewpoints, such as digital healthcare and cybersecurity as an essential component of innovation and a crucial factor in the autonomous and connected vehicle.

Carlos Royo, Healthcare Strategy Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector, took part in the digital healthcare debating panel under the title “The role of technology in the sustainability of the national health system and the management of healthcare”. Royo acknowledged that “the healthcare sector is overhauling its traditional services towards a model that guarantees the sustainability of the whole system on the basis of more collaborative and connected systems ". Itemizing some of the technologies that are going to have the heaviest impact on healthcare, Royo stressed big data, which he qualified as “a boon of humankind for physicians”, blockchain, augmented reality, 3D, the Internet of Things and robotics, all of which will help to usher in 5P medicine: Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, Participatory, and Purpose-Driven.

GMV then addressed the issue of cybersecurity as a chance to innovate. Javier Zubieta, Marketing and Communication Manager of GMV’s Secure e-Solutions sector, boasting over 20 years of cybersecurity expertise, shared the debating panel with Alberto Hernández, Director General of Spain’s National Institute of Communication Technologies (Instituto Nacional de Ciberseguridad de España: INCIBE), Fernando Sánchez, Director of the National Critical Infrastructure Protection Center (Centro Nacional de Protección de Infraestructuras Críticas: CNPIC) and José de la Peña, Editor of the specialized trade review SIC.

The session came up with an upbeat message. Alberto Hernández stressed the talent and high level of Spain’s companies in this sector, chalking up between them a 2017 turnover of about 1.2 billion euros, a growth rate of 13%. This places them one percentage point above the European mean but still well short of the worldwide turnover of 80 billion euros. INCIBE’s director urged Spain’s firms to take on this world market, even though fighting against a price disadvantage with local firms; the answer, he argued, is to concentrate on quality, offering more groundbreaking products and services.

For his part, CNPIC’s Director Fernando Sánchez warned of the need to find out what happens when the systems don’t work properly. “The flipside of this coin is important not only to ensure the system works smoothly but also offer a competitive edge at commercial level”.

This debating panel wound up with the participation of Javier Zubieta, who underlined the importance of investing in innovation, pointing out that GMV systematically plows back 10% of its own turnover into innovation. One of the best examples of GMV’s ongoing R&D effort is its inhouse product now protecting over 150,000 ATMs in 34 different countries from malware attacks.

The third session GMV participated in was the panel dealing with the cybersecurity of the autonomous and connected car. Sara Gutiérrez, Manager of the Automotive Business Unit, brought out both the upside and downside of this development. “We all know the connected vehicle has a huge potential in terms of improving road safety and increasing energy efficiency". She went on, however, to warn that “it’s possible to hack into a vehicle’s electric network”. To prevent this Gutiérrez argued that we need to make sure “that our cybersecurity approach is robust, complete and complementary to other areas of vehicle engineering”.