MCAL At Cantillon Forum 2018

As a company, MCAL was delighted to attend this year’s Cantillon ‘Forum For Fresh Thinking’ hosted by IT Tralee, in association with Fexco. Neil Gibson , Chief Economist with EY, kicked off with a stimulating and engaging presentation titled, ‘Navigating through the future border(less) economic landscapes’ and brought into focus our need to make sure, as a nation, infrastructure spending is made in order to facilitate growth. Also in focus was the consideration of what our own company exposure to Brexit may be. Then a lively discussion ensued re personal and business data in focus via GDPR. What for instance, are the implications for any company where client data may be held in UK servers, under UK legislation, post-Brexit? The panel discussion with Jevan Neilan, Dr. Jerry Gallagher, Ogie Sheehy and Fexco’s Tony Sweeny covered most of the salient aspects of company responsibilities in GDPR and as one panel member remarked in terms of regulation and fines etc, ‘they really mean it this time’. Bringing GDPR into company reality, we were reminded of the burden of how our company must demonstrate compliance, at all times, what costs and protocols we need to have in place and how we have to maintain data breech records and be compliant with GDPR laws. The role of the Data Controller in every company was brought right into focus and this of course is where Regtech can help us, using new technologies to alleviate compliance burdens. Jevan Neilan delivered a sharp succinct guide to this area which was most informative and useful. The keynote address by Edel Creely, president of IBEC, gave us an insight to current thinking in IBEC, as to what areas we need to be concentrating on in a soft or perhaps hard Brexit scenario, mentioning in her address, the DEI’s ongoing study of the Skills needs for the workforce going forward. An engaging panel discussion followed, with Fexco’s Tony Sweeney giving us  us food for thought in all areas of data compliance in the geographical areas Fexco currently operates in. Moira Murrell put a defined Kerry CoCo perspective on things, giving an insight to current enterprise development planning and spending, which was itself informative. Patrick Redmond from Shannon Development made interesting comments re workforce skills in the aviation sector as he found them and Stephen O’Herlihy of PFH Technology Group gave us some useful insights into how we use and indeed should be thinking of using current and future technologies.