WHEN Lafayette A. Lim joined the family business armed with a computer science degree, he was eager to put his education into action.

LOWERING the hurdles for opening a bank account and collaborating with other agencies to increase online connectivity are the key first steps identified by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) on the road to what it hopes will be a cash-lite economy.

FOR much of history, banking was done in branch offices, but beginning in the late 20^th Century, digitization began to creep in, allowing account holders ever more banking convenience without needing to leave their homes or offices. With tech revolutionizing banking, how will financial institutions keep their networks relevant?

YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR Walt Steven Young was on one of his trips observation when he had a peculiar observation. It was Black Friday, when shops in the United States offer huge sales right after the Thanksgiving celebration. The streets, however, were not as packed with shoppers as they usually were.

ONE OF THE MOST celebrated advantages of the growing e-commerce industry is how it allows shoppers to feed their itch for browsing and purchasing products at any time of the day. The rising penetration of smart phones and the growing number of Filipinos with access to the Internet make it easier to morph a mall into the tiny screens of digital devices.

FAIR-SKINNED, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, Ai-Da speaks with an English accent. She wears a white long-sleeved blouse and black trousers. Since April, she has been studying her subjects and sketching them using her bionic arm in a company in Cornwall, England.

THE PHILIPPINES is on track towards the full integration of e-government systems by 2022 as key agencies push to become more digital.

THE judiciary is still facing age-old problems that are creating some of the most insurmountable bottlenecks in government -- the court caseload -- and while brute-force methods like more judges and more courtrooms are playing a key role in solving the problem, the Supreme Court believes information technology will play an increasingly larger role.

ONE of the fastest-rising sectors in the Philippines, the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) industry has reaped the rewards of growing demand for IT and other services. With business process outsourcing (BPO) thriving, the industry has also provided jobs to many Filipinos as the population transitions to become more technologically-savvy.

WE SHOULD BE in the robot future by now, but persistent economic and cultural factors keep pulling us back. The availability of cheap labor discourages investment. The attractiveness of foreign labor markets leaves us content with sending away our low-skill workers instead of investing in their training. These are some of the occupations that are holding on despite the availability of alternatives that, in theory, ought to be freeing us up to do higher-value work.

THE ARGUMENT for adopting new technology often comes with many utopian promises like flying cars, nuclear power without consequences, social media that brings people together instead of tearing them apart, and so on. Here’s an update in 2019: Self-driving cars, the highest point in the technology’s evolution so far, keep crashing. Nuclear power plants sometimes blow up, while the fuel becomes a target for terrorists or is otherwise difficult to dispose of safely. And, needless to say, have you been reading about Brexit lately?

ACCORDING to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) 2019 World Investment Report, released in June, global investment flows in 2018 fell 13% to $1.3 trillion, marking the third consecutive year that global flows have fallen.