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Economic threats continue to overshadow climate and cyber risks
Extreme weather events featured in the G20’s top five risks, as the...
India beats China in green investments; deals worth $2.4 bn completed in Q3
More than a dozen renewables and electric vehicle firms have...
Govt launches drive to on-board 8.68 lakh street vendors for digital payments
”The special drive aims to accelerate on-boarding of street vendors on the UPI QR code and handhold them to start accepting and making digital payment transactions. Five major aggregators including Paytm, Phone Pe, Bharat Pe, Mswipe and Aceware have agreed to participate in 45-day special drive for digitally onboarding the street vendors with BHIM-UPI QR code on pro-bono basis,” Ministry of Electronics and IT said in a statement.
IBM Watson launches new AI and automation features to help businesses transform customer service
“We believe industries in India such as BFSI, Retail, Telecom, e-commerce etc. will benefit from these features to seamlessly automate tasks by providing a superior customer and agent experience,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, Technology, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India / South Asia.
“One critical challenge facing nearly every business today is the need to better communicate with their customers and employees across all channels,” said Daniel Hernandez, General Manager of Data and AI, IBM. “We’re continuously delivering new innovations in natural language processing, automation and advancing responsible AI, and building a strong, open ecosystem with partners like IntelePeer to help businesses transform customer care with Watson Assistant.”
U.S. lawmakers seek $1 bln to fund FTC privacy probes
The proposal, which Democrats plan to include in a $3.5 trillion spending measure, would fund a new bureau over 10 years to address “unfair or deceptive acts or practices relating to privacy, data security, identity theft, data abuses, and related matters,” according to a summary released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The committee will meet on Monday to take up the wide-ranging spending proposal that includes $30 billion to remove lead pipes and $13.5 billion for zero emissions vehicle infrastructure buildout.
36% of call centre agents have been threatened with violence: Study
Three million Americans work as call centre agents and nearly one million in India. However, many face abuse daily from customers, so much that 1.2 million Americans leave the job each year, it said. As many as 51 per cent of agents, who received poor training, report being pessimistic about their careers which can lead to poor performance and burnout, it added.
Swiss Re sees growing demand for insurance protection, positive outlook for premiums
According to Swiss Re Institute, non-life insurance premiums are expected to be 10% higher than the pre-COVID-19 level by the end of 2021. Heightened risk trends will increase the need for insurance protection, but also require a greater focus on evaluating and modelling, and ensuring pricing is adequate for the risks taken.
India eyes turning 3-wheelers into EVs
Mahua Acharya, MD and CEO,Convergence Energy Services Ltd said there are 5.5 lakh electric three-wheelers (E3W) on the road.
”After accounting for central government subsidy, the price of E2W comes to Rs 55,000 to Rs 1.3 lakh. If states give subsidies, the prices will come down further. At this, price is very competitive (compared to fossil-fuel-based two-wheelers),” she said.
World’s largest plant capturing carbon from air starts in Iceland
Swiss start-up Climeworks AG, which specialises in capturing carbon dioxide directly from the air, has partnered with Icelandic carbon storage firm Carbfix to develop a plant that sucks out up to 4,000 tons of CO2 per year.
That’s the equivalent of the annual emissions from about 790 cars. Last year, global CO2-emissions totalled 31.5 billion tonnes, according to the International Energy Agency.
Direct air capture is one of the few technologies extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and is viewed by scientists as vital to limit global warming, blamed for causing more heatwaves, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.
Russia’s Yandex says it repelled biggest DDoS attack in history
The DDoS attack, in which hackers try to flood a network with unusually high volumes of data traffic in order to paralyse it when it can no longer cope with the scale of data requested, began in August and reached a record level on Sept. 5.
“Our experts did manage to repel a record attack of nearly 22 million requests per second (RPS). This is the biggest known attack in the history of the internet,” Yandex said in a statement.
IRDAI asks insurers to design innovative, tailor-made Cyber products for policyholders
The main objectives of new the guidance document on product structure for Cyber Insurance are;to enable insurers to evaluate new technologies posing heightened cyber risk, identify protection gaps in the existing products and address the changing needs of market,to facilitate insurers in developing stand-alone cyber insurance products, specifically designed to address the evolving cyber risks,to provide a set of recommendations on maximum possible coverages that could be included in the cyber insurance products, to encourage insurers to adopt best practices and provide additional covers in response to customer needs, to improve the development of the cyber insurance market with new products and enhance benefits for policyholders, explained the IRDAI.
HDI Global first partnership on autonomous vehicle segment
Meryem Seyyar, Head of Digital Solutions commented: “This is the perfect time for HDI Global to take a lead and increase its support for the development of the Autonomous Vehicle & Systems ecosystem. AV’s will undoubtedly be a significant part of everyone’s future and the sooner we can establish our expertise and process within the space, the better we will be able to serve our partners moving forward.”