Podcast S7E6 | How Financial Industry Can Protect Children

TRANSCRIPT

Kimberley Cole 0:01
This is Risky Women Radio, a show that connects, celebrates and champions women in risk regulation and compliance. We’re here to share the insights on the biggest issues in our industry and hear inspiring journeys from our global members. Sign up to our newsletter at riskywomen.org. I’m Kimberley Cole, your Chief Risky Woman.

Kimberley Cole 0:23
Welcome to Risky Women Radio. I’m Kimberley Cole, and just before we start, I’ve got a few actions for you all. So what I’d like you to do is sign up and follow us Risky Women on all of our social channels. We’re on Instagram, X, and don’t forget to join our LinkedIn Group and make sure you go to Risky Women’s website, riskywomen.org to sign up for our Roar newsletter so you don’t miss everything that’s going on, including when we release the latest Risky Women Radio podcast. We’ve been really busy at Risky Women. We’ve added Rev-up sessions to our repertoire. We aim to have at least one new Rev-up session per month for members. These sessions are part of your membership. And Risky Women has many different elements, from live events to podcasts and of course, the Rev-up sessions which are aimed at building on your already amazing superpowers. We’ve already had media training by Chris Dobson, voice and gravitas with the amazing David Pope, storytelling with Sundari Mukherjee, how to write a book with Jennifer Geary and negotiating for more by the Black Isle dynamo Heather Lindhardt. And there’s plenty more to come.

But today, our risky women are Bindu Sharma and Taura Edgar. Today’s topic is a bit of a challenging one, but it’s an extremely important one, and we are lucky to be joined by Taura and Bindu to share this important work that they are doing to raise awareness, advocate and help individuals and our financial institutions take action to protect children. So let me give a brief introduction. Bindu Sharma is vice president at the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, otherwise known as ICMEC, leading its policy advocacy and research agenda in the Asia Pacific region. She chairs the US and the APEC Financial Coalition Against Child Sexual Exploitation, and serves on the board of the International Centre for Not-for-profit Law. Taura Edgar, who you may know as Risky Women’s digital marketing lead, founded TALK Hong Kong, an NGO, dedicated to preventing child sexual abuse. As a leading expert, she’s driving awareness, evidence based responses and systemic change to better protect children in Hong Kong. So without further ado, let me introduce our experts. So Bindu, can you share the key milestones in your career so far that have led you to your current role?

Bindu Sharma 3:16
Certainly Kimberley and thank you to you and to Taura for having me on the Risky Women podcast. Straight out of college in India, I landed a job in the private sector as a management associate in a finance department of a chemical company now which is part of the Jubilant Bhartia Group in India. Three years into that, I sought a career change and went back to school to get a Master’s in Public Policy and development at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. Since then, I’ve been in the development and policy space, first in the US, and in the last 20-25, years in the APAC region, I’ve now been with ICMEC it’ll be 15 years. I came to icmec through sheer serendipity when I was looking to get back into the workplace full time. After being with my girls at home for many years, I learned of the ICMEC opportunity. Reading up on ICMEC, my first reaction was, Wow, this is a grim issue, and nearly did not go for that first meeting. But well, 15 years later, here I am, and have been with icmec based out of Singapore for the last 15 years.

Kimberley Cole 4:23
Wow that’s an amazing journey. In your role at leading ICMEC’s policy advocacy and research agenda in the Asia Pacific region, how are you navigating the complex and ever growing landscape of financial crimes and child exploitation? Because we obviously are hearing more about those now in the press and other mediums.

Bindu Sharma 4:44
Good question Kimberley, ever growing or ever evolving is the key word here. The crime of child sexual abuse and exploitation, and the way it manifests itself in the online realm, has evolved and unfortunately expanded over the years, as you say, ever growing. When I first started, 15 years ago, 2009 we were dealing with just Child Sexual Abuse Material. The sale, we exchanged the dissemination of CSAM. However, today, the list is longer and growing from just still images, we now have video recording, the live streaming of abuse on demand, which is completely paid for. Enticement, grooming, coercion, phenomena which is now unfolding in the realm of financial extortion of victims with threats to share these images on social media, more commonly known as sextortion now in the financial crime community. And even more so now we have generative AI that adds to the risks and threats to children online, just using one statistic in 2023 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, our sister organization in the US that runs a hotline called the Cyber Tip Line, they received 36. 2 million reports of suspected child abuse, exploitation, grooming, solicitation in 2023 as against 17 million in 2019. So, as you can see, a staggering doubling in just over five years. And in the financial landscape too, payment methods have proliferated. When we first launched the Financial Coalition Against Child Sexual Exploitation, the program that I lead, it was the traditional banking and payment gateways that were at risk. Now we see the whole range, in addition to traditional banks with their digital banking options, money service businesses, payment platforms, mobile payments, e-wallets, digital currencies in app payments and more. So it is an ever evolving and ever growing landscape, and that’s one of the biggest challenges one faces in trying to counter this crime. However, I would like to put in a plug in now for the use of correct terminology. If you notice, I use Child Sexual Abuse Material and Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation, unfortunately, we often still hear the word child pornography. I do want to highlight that the Child Protection community has moved away from such terminology, even though world over legislation still uses the same. Child sexual exploitation and abuse correctly conveys the gravity and the severity of the crime. Yes, these are images of crime scene snapshots. The usage of the word child pornography normalizes the production and dissemination of such content, diminishes the gravity of, trivializing, or even legitimizing what is actually sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Kimberley Cole 8:03
Thank you so much. I mean a lot in there that you’ve just covered, and some really shocking statistics. You actually chair the US and APEC Financial Coalition Against Child Sexual Exploitations, as I mentioned in your bio. Can you tell us more about the importance of that coalition and and the impact it’s making in combating the crimes against children?

Bindu Sharma 8:29
Certainly Kimberley, as mentioned with the proliferation of FinTech, e and mobile payments, there is today an interlinked marketplace, as I like to call it, often, of payment options where no one payment vertical sees the full transaction footprint, and therein lies the challenge. As each individual payment option or vertical only sees a fraction of the crime unfolding. Financial institutions recognize that combating child sexual exploitation payments requires collective action, rather than independent efforts, where sharing information, trends and best practices across the industry is key. The Financial Coalition Against Child Exploitation Initiative is a facilitator, convener and catalyst for just that kind of industry interaction and engagement. With ICMEC, bringing in subject matter experts to enhance collective knowledge on the issue, enable industry to share insights and build capacity to better detect these transactions, and all the while safeguarding the confidentiality of information shared by participants. All our meetings are closed door by invitation only, and follow Chatham House rules. In addition to the plethora of payment systems, I mentioned the emergence of crypto currencies now poses an even more significant challenge. Blockchain technology has added to the complexity and challenges where often traditional methods of detection and reporting differ, and also, most recently, I’ve heard, you know from law enforcement reporting that they have actually found Child Sexual Abuse Material being distributed via the blockchain too. So not only on the payment side, Blockchain is now being abused and misused in the distribution and dissemination of it also. I think ICMEC’s key value add is to make the cross sector connections come to pass, often stakeholder feedback is I would not have known about this new trend or aspect of the crime if ICMEC had not brought this to our attention. I acknowledge that the denominations involved in this crime are minuscule compared to fraud, money laundering, scams and other FinTech crimes. Very often we see a $50 $100 transaction. So the underlying objective, my underlying objective, all these years, has been to keep this issue on the radar screen of the financial industry. And we do that via monthly and quarterly forums. Monthly forums in the US, where we bring in subject matter experts, or sometimes actually industry players themselves to share insights. And in the APAC region, just because it’s a wider and multi country effort, I do forums every four months.

Kimberley Cole 11:33
Amazing. It’s incredibly complex. All of the you know, technology involved as well now, making it so much more challenging, I guess, before I bring Taura into the conversation, just a quick one on what advice would you give to young professionals looking to make some kind of impact in the financial crime and child protection space?

Bindu Sharma 11:59
Thank you for asking that Kimberley. To those starting in the financial crime, risk compliance, intelligence space, I know it is an uncomfortable issue, often very confronting. In fact, confronting is a word I often hear from our members, attendees, participants at forums I host, the new incoming batch of risky women, as I would use the forum’s name, you need to move past that. I’ve often been told that coalition member knowledge about the issue is because of ICMEC’s work. Financial industry executives have often said to me that they cannot research this topic on office computers, as the search will not pass the firewalls, and similarly, people loathe to or hesitate to do the same research on personal devices. So our work in terms of the awareness and education is key. You know, fraud, scams, money laundering, trade based money laundering, modern day slavery and human trafficking, wildlife trafficking, all get a lot of attention, but child sexual exploitation is often a very small subset of the larger, especially human trafficking, modern day slavery, fincrime. Risk teams can also be the voice of children in the financial industry. Children often do not have a voice in international forums, but by engaging with ICMEC’s Financial Coalition efforts and other such efforts globally, I think the financial risk and compliance team are giving children a voice in policy making, policing and more, by kind of leaning in in child protection.

Kimberley Cole 13:52
That’s a really, really interesting perspective, and I guess that also shows the importance of those risk and compliance functions. So thank you for sharing that. We’d like to give you know, career ideas, advice and inspiration to our next generation of risk professionals. So that is very compelling.

Kimberley Cole 14:14
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Kimberley Cole 15:29
Taura, can I ask you now to join the conversation? What motivated you to work in child sexual abuse prevention?

Taura Edgar 15:38
So I come at it from the totally other end of the spectrum than Bindu does, and I’m an incest survivor myself, and I realized after some time that a) I really needed the support, but that I had the experience and determination to do something about child sexual abuse, and that really helped me a lot in order to use my trauma to do something good with it, and I also focus less on the online and more on intra family abuse, which is one of the most common types of child sexual abuse. But I think it’s a good segue from what Bindu was talking about, what’s going on in the financial world, what ICMEC is doing about transactions that have to do with child sexual abuse materials and exploitation, is to talk about the impact of that abuse. And that’s why there’s a great thing behind being a survivor myself is I can really speak to that, and I’ve now worked with hundreds of survivors here in Hong Kong, and the long term health, mental health, substance abuse, and all other kinds of things are huge. I think it’s worth remembering that it’s not just the moment of abuse, especially for online abuse, where there’s images involved that’s going to affect the person in a really raw way for the rest of their lives. So making some impact with the skills I’ve got.

Kimberley Cole 17:07
Fantastic! And then, what are some of the key challenges that you’ve encountered in that sort of journey, and how are you working to overcome those?

Taura Edgar 17:15
Look, I think one of the really big things I’ve noticed coming from our business background, is that a lot of things we take for granted in business, like data driven decision making and evidence based responses, were not really present in the child sexual abuse prevention area, just coming into child maltreatment, yes, but Child Sexual Abuse not yet in most jurisdictions, and definitely not in Hong Kong. So one of the first things that we did was to work on research, and that’s still a key pillar of the work that we do, because we think if you want to make decision makers of NGOs, of governments, et cetera, have a big shift in thinking you need to present some evidence around that.

Kimberley Cole 17:37
Yes, agree, yes, the old, what gets measured matters, absolutely applies. So can you describe some of the work that your organization is doing then to develop better systems and solutions to protect children from sexual abuse?

Taura Edgar 18:21
Yeah sure. Like I just mentioned, we’re very serious about that key pillar of research, and we’ve produced a groundbreaking research here in Hong Kong looking at what do we know and don’t know, and that all comes from the official data. And what we can see there are quite a few gaps in the data different departments using different definitions of abuse, even different ages for what a child is, because we have a very interesting legal structure here with regard to children in Hong Kong. But the next piece of research that we’re looking for funding on (hint, hint, to everyone out there!) is the cost of CSA. I think that’s going to be a really critical piece of research that will help motivate spending on prevention. And the cost of CSA means, what does it cost to our health system? What does it cost to our judicial system? What does it cost to employers when those survivors are adults taking time off of work for you know, issues that are those long term health, mental health and substance abuse difficulties that I mentioned before. I think being able to break those down is really meaningful, and it also means what it costs us, because that is all representing taxpayer money as well. We also do a lot of training for prevention. So primary prevention meaning, stop it before it starts. I think in general, most people in public spheres and some professionals, frankly, don’t know a lot about how abuse often happens, and they don’t really take the power because they don’t have the knowledge to prevent the children in their lives (sic being abused).

Kimberley Cole 20:03
Interesting, interesting, so lots of really good actions that you’re taking and developing there. And love the research based stuff. But obviously the education is key as well. And in the same kind of frame of giving ideas inspiration for career ideas and change. What advice would you give for others, sort of considering a career change and moving into something that’s more mission driven, like child protection? And what do you think that you bring to that from your entire previous you know, business career and incredible marketing skills that you have.

Taura Edgar 20:46
Well, you know, imposter syndrome is not unknown, right? And I, too, had the Oh, my God, am I the right person to do this thought at the beginning of this all. And in the end, in my particular situation, what I realized was there are not a bunch of experts working on this issue, and I do have, just from my own experience, some special skills. But I also have everything from bookkeeping to pitch decks, I have a lot of great experience in the business world that has helped me a lot to be an NGO leader, and I think that’s something that everybody should keep in mind, that all of the work you do in your career can be used in other spheres, and it may be something that you use later to change someone else’s life and even save their life.

Kimberley Cole 21:34
Fantastic. So let’s come back to the topic and get into some more details. Taura, you mentioned the studies that you’ve been doing. So what do we know about child sexual abuse that might surprise our listeners?

Taura Edgar 21:50
Sure, I’m going to give some Hong Kong statistics and some international statistics, but they’re fairly similar everywhere. In our study, we were looking at Child Sexual Abuse prevalence in Hong Kong, and here we are talking about mostly not online abuse, because it’s not well reported at all. It’s very hard to track. We estimate 12% of kids under 18 experience some kind of sexual abuse. But I just saw a report from Australia that, really recent 2024, 28% of their population experiences some kind of child sexual abuse. I also know recently, there was a survey of secondary kids in Hong Kong about their online experiences, and 40% of secondary students in Hong Kong have been exposed to some kind of unwelcome sexual content or requests. You know, whether that’s on Instagram or somewhere else. We can also tell in Hong Kong, it’s about 96% unreported, so the authorities never find out about it. 93% of abusers are boys and men. And I just hate to say it, but it seems to be the fact everywhere where research is being done, and it’s increasingly boys, so peer to peer abuse, I’m talking about. 72% of the known abused kids in Hong Kong knew their abuser, I think it will be even much higher than that if we could see more deeply into the statistics, which I hope we will be able to over time.

Kimberley Cole 23:30
Okay, that’s yeah, really sobering statistics there. So TALK provides sexual abuse prevention training, and why do you focus on training adults?

Taura Edgar 23:43
You know, it’s so funny. Usually, when I tell people what I do, they say, Oh, you work with kids. Can I say no, I definitely don’t work with kids, because adults are responsible for children. And I think a lot of the focus in the recent decades even has been on teaching kids how to say no. And while I’m not saying that shouldn’t happen, it absolutely should. It doesn’t seem to have any change to the incidence or the reporting levels unless it’s matched with parents in their lives also being educated and able to speak about keeping themselves safe.

Kimberley Cole 24:24
What are the main steps that adults can take to protect children?

Taura Edgar 24:29
Look, I think silence has really been a big obstacle, and it’s only helping offenders. It’s the fact that we don’t talk about it very much in any society. Definitely not here is the main issue. So learn the facts. Learn about what it is and how it usually happens. I tend to see a lot of Stranger Danger mentality when in fact, probably the most risky place is home and online, it’s not stranger in the park, and you can’t stop what you don’t know about. So the next thing is, once you know that minimize opportunity, you know whether it’s at home or school, and you don’t have to be a parent, this can also be your neighbors for example, there are ways you can minimize the opportunities for abuse and for the common person that might mean, if you send your kid to a tutorial class, make sure that kid is never alone with an adult when they can’t be observed, there has to be a window in the door for just a really simple example. And I think that for the financial industry in particular, it means acknowledging that they have a role to play in reducing the ability for online abuse to take place. I know Bindu said that the transactions themselves can be very small. When you add it all up and you think about the long term impact on such a epidemic proportion of human beings. It’s a huge cost. The other thing I think that you should do in that learning is learn how to react responsibly. This is, again, not necessarily in the financial world, but just on a human level. If a child discloses to you that might be the first time they’ve ever said it, and they will really look to you to see how you react, whether you are able to stay calm and believing and letting them tell you what they need to tell you. The more we talk about it, the better we’ll all become at it. And if we’re talking about these epidemic levels of incidence. It means you do know someone. So it is worth us all being prepared.

Kimberley Cole 26:48
Yeah. So basically, minimize the opportunity, talk about it and then react responsibly. Thank you. So Bindu, back to you. Can you tell us some more about the work that ICMEC has been doing in the financial industry in APAC over the past few years?

Bindu Sharma 27:07
Sure, Kimberley and just listening to Taura just reminds me of how compelling the work we’re doing and how necessary it is. In the region the ICMEC’s Financial coalition initiative, I would like to say, has put the role of the financial industry can play in countering Child Exploitation on the catalog of solutions. In addition to an APAC regional forum, as I said, we also have country specific forums in the Philippines and in New Zealand. And since 2022 we established an ICMEC Australia, a presence in Australia coming out of work being done in Australia since 2014 and the ICMEC Australia team is focused on collaborating with the financial institutions and is building data products that provide clues for suspected child sexual exploitation activities and transactions, as well as indicators in the access possession or distribution of child sexual abuse material. We hope these can then guide risk and AML teams to flag potential cases of child sexual abuse within their internal systems for reporting and actioning. I have also been managing both the US and the APAC efforts now for close to two years, and I’m working towards building greater synergy across our US APAC and country specific efforts, because I think there’s a lot of knowledge and insights that cuts across regions and FIs would benefit from seeing how this crime is manifesting itself in different regions. So the focus really has been not only just country specific and FI focused, but also trying to build out a global knowledge base and insights.

Kimberley Cole 28:59
That sounds difficult, but obviously could be an absolute game changer. So it’d be interesting to hear if there’s best practices that you’re already seeing. And I also wonder, are financial firms using or leveraging technology and data to help detect, prevent and respond to instances of online child sexual exploitation and abuse. I mean, it often feels like the criminals are leaping ahead with their use of technology. Are we keeping up from a financial firm perspective?

Bindu Sharma 29:33
You’re so right. Kimberley, the criminals are invariably a few steps ahead, but FIs are also now getting smarter and leveraging both technology and data risk and compliance teams. I’m sure you know coming from that background, historically used the traditional rules based transaction monitoring approach. FIs are, however, increasingly using an intelligence led data analytics approach. So most FIs now are using a combination of both the old, top down rules based approaches and the bottom up intelligence led data analytics approaches, and the intelligence led data analytics really spearheads from the public private partnerships FIs have been establishing both with NGOs like us, as well as with law enforcement partners to get better insights and trends and be in the know of how the crime is ever unfolding in real time. Open Source Intelligence is also slowly entering into the FI toolkit. Just recently, we had one of our stakeholders present their first time, putting together a team, an ____ team, internally, to do some due diligence around online Child Exploitation with some great results. So in terms of best practices, I think we still have some way to go because of the fast based changing landscape of both the crime and the payment ecosystem. FIs are trying out new things, and I hope in the next year or two, we can actually be able to put out some best practices around that.

Kimberley Cole 31:13
Excellent. And you’ve spoken a bit there about sort of industry wide collaborations and coalitions, like the APEC financial coalition against this issue. How can firms actually start to participate and contribute effectively?

Bindu Sharma 31:29
In my view, Kimberley coalitions and industry wide collaborative action helps in prevention by following the money we’re targeting the demand side of the equation. This is one issue, especially the online commercial child sexual exploitation, where most FIs will put aside market competition to collaborate and uplift industry wide response to counter child exploitation and abuse. You know, if we don’t work in this collaborative mindset, we’re just playing a game of Whack a Mole one FI de-risks by closing accounts they believe pose a regulatory or illegal or a risk or reputational risk to the institution. The offender just goes across the street, so to speak, and opens an account with another institution. So in this kind of a crime, I think we really need collaborative action, and the FIs certainly stepping up to that need. As Taura also said, prevention is key. Most often, governments and NGOs are responding post facto with resources being spent on victim rescue, rehab, healing and mental health aspect. But if we can make it hard for offenders to pay for either recorded content or live streaming or sextortion, we preempt the harm from happening in the first place. It’s often said, when we rescue the child, we save the adults, because, as Taura said, and I reiterate, because the long term harm that stays with you for life, prevention is hence far more desirable, and also, as Taura mentioned in the online realm, the victim lives with the trauma, not only of the physical abuse, but the fact that the images are circulating in perpetuity. So victim statements have often said what I went through is equally traumatic as what I know that my images are circulating and I have no way to be taking those off the internet. So how can firms participate and contribute effectively? I would put in a pitch here to say, reach out to us. We welcome newer players who can help strengthen the child protection efforts of ICMEC and other partner organizations.

Kimberley Cole 33:46
That’s, yeah, very, very interesting. And it’s interesting there you talk about that collaboration and sort of moving away from people giving up that competitive, commercial focus. From a risk and compliance perspective do you think there are other unique kind of cultural or maybe policy or regulatory areas or standpoints that could drive greater action by financial institutions to address some of this online child sexual exploitation?

Bindu Sharma 34:17
On the cultural side? I think it’s perhaps true globally, we need to provide the public with the vocabulary to talk about this uncomfortable and confronting issue, as Taura said, we need to have a discourse around it. It is an issue which is in essence, the betrayal of a profound trust a child bestows on the adult world, the adult abuser. And then, as Taura said, when abuse is disclosed, our response to it, and then if the adult looks away, that’s the hardest point, I think, in a child’s journey to disclosure. And as Taura said, again, you know the abuser is often a person. In a position of trust, starting unfortunately in the home, extended family, community, school system and neighborhood, and it’s also the reason why it is an extremely underreported crime. So on the cultural side, I think it’s important to just have a vocabulary to talk about it, not feel uncomfortable about it. On the policy front, I think it would help if financial regulators shone the spotlight on this issue in the region, AUSTRAC, the anti money laundering austrac in Australia, which is the financial regulator there, AMLC, the anti Money Laundering Council in the Philippines, which is the financial intelligence unit there the NZFIU in New Zealand, they have put out reports and analysis on suspicious matter reports or transaction reports that are coming in from the FI world. This, I think, will bring greater response by FIs in other countries, a level of peer pressure within the financial regulators in the region to kind of shine the spotlight here would really help. And the other really key point is around collaboration and information sharing. Currently, I feel data privacy under money laundering laws, tipping off and banking secrecy laws often hinder a level of cross industry, cross company partnering, you know, collaboration and sharing within the legislative and regulatory framework, we can provide financial industry some kind of a sandbox to try out a few innovative and out of the box ideas around tracking this crime and following the money. I think that would be a game changer.

Kimberley Cole 36:50
Yes, I think I have heard that as well in the modern day slavery agenda as well, that it’s very difficult because of some of the existing data privacy and other restrictions on sharing information. Last question, but how do you see the balance of the competing priorities while trying to develop some of these robust prevention and response measures?

Bindu Sharma 36:51
I think, in especially in the case of child exploitation, as Taura’s mentioned, and I’ve also said the long term impact. And as I said, and I repeat again, to save the child today, you’re protecting the future adult. So this is a trauma and an experience that lives with you. And as Taura said, they’re hoping to do research around the cost of child sexual abuse and the long term impact and cost of it. So I think that kind of research and putting that kind of data in front of industry would behoove them to prioritize equally on par with whether it’s fraud or money laundering or terror financing this issue too, and I hope that changes the game.

Kimberley Cole 37:16
Now, just to wrap up the conversation here, I’d like to ask a couple of maybe areas where we could end on a bit of a positive note. So Taura, if I can start with you, but I’ll ask the same questions to both of you, if you could change anything in our industry, what would that be?

Taura Edgar 38:21
Well, it sounds so simple, but it’s not really. It’s just to get adults to acknowledge that they are responsible for the safety of children, and that means all adults, men and women. What I definitely notice is that the vast majority of people who want to do training with us and work on this topic are women, and that’s interesting.

Kimberley Cole 38:43
Absolutely. And Bindu, so what would you change if you had the magic wand?

Bindu Sharma 38:49
Kimberley, what I learned recently is that not all countries define child sexual exploitation as a predicate crime. A lot of the countries that I’m working in do, but it’s certainly not a worldwide, global phenomena. So one to really kind of look at legislative frameworks and see where there may be gaps to strengthen that. And two, I will reiterate, as I said earlier, about the whole creating a enabling environment for industry to share and collaborate and partner meaningfully in providing them the guardrails or a sandbox in which they can test out some innovative solutions to the tracking of these transactions, I think that would be really have a great impact around child protection, excellent.

Kimberley Cole 39:46
And the final question, what’s the next innovation or the positive change that you see coming? So Taura, again, starting with you.

Taura Edgar 39:56
Yeah, and again, keeping it simple, it’s collaboration. I have noticed over the past five years and just recently, that there is now more ability to collaborate between NGOs, more ability to have public conversations, and more appetite for that, small but growing, and that is the thing that we need most. So it’s great to see it happening.

Kimberley Cole 40:21
And Bindu, what would be your positive change that you see coming?

Bindu Sharma 40:25
I agree with Taura. You know, 15 years ago, when I first started talking to industry, literally been a building the stakeholdership group, one on one. We now, across US and Asia, have over 50 companies or entity, government entities, regulators, law enforcement agencies that partner with us. But as I said, it’s taken us 15 years to get to a point where the entire stakeholder group sees the merits and benefits of coming together, putting our strengths together, sharing our challenges, so collaborative action, partnership and meaningful engagement and interaction is really the change that we need to see, and I think it’s coming. As I said, when I first started, it was one on one conversations, and often even governments saying, oh, what does this have to do with us? That stance has changed. So the mindset has changed too, in terms of their willingness to acknowledge the issue and then think through collective action.

Kimberley Cole 41:31
Well, thank you both for, number one, the work that you’re doing, which is highly important and just incredible, the focus and the approaches that you’re taking, Bindu, leading with financial institutions and Taura, obviously, the impact that you’re making, certainly in Hong Kong. I think we’ve all hopefully learnt a lot through this session. So thank you to everyone for listening to this, and please, I’m sure Bindu or Taura would be happy to speak with anyone who would like more information. So Taura, thank you, Bindu, thank you, to all of our listeners, and it’s been a very interesting session.

Kimberley Cole 42:15
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