The presidents of Telefónica, Jose Maria Alvarez-Pallete; and CaixaBank, Jose Ignacio Goirigolzarri have admitted during their intervention in a debate within the framework of the Reunió Cercle d’Economia in Barcelona that the globalization it has been called into question, especially after the war in Ukraine; and the changes that the different crises that have been linked have accelerated.
Álvarez Pallete has demanded that people be able to know the value of the data that they create in their daily activity on the net: “We have to be told the value of our data, if not, it is digital vassalage”. He has assured that the current technological revolution “has created a new factor of production, which is data”, and whose value the population does not know. The top manager of Telefónica has underlined that the data created by each person is their property and that “They cannot be expropriated without compensation, and the counterpart cannot be a free product”.
He has also lamented that social networks are being used to viralize news, “sometimes intentionally”, and that there are rights in the analog world that do not exist in the network; for example, knowing if you are talking to a person or a bot, or if you are consuming advertising.
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Álvarez-Pallete has stated that new technologies will create 400,000 new jobs in five years in Spain, but has pointed out the need to “train the population to face this new job”. And he has given his company as an example, where training programs are applied to 23,000 people.
For his part, the president of CaixaBank has defended that the new players in the financial system operate with the same rules as traditional banking. “It is an issue that must be addressed and the regulators have to do it and the sooner the better,” he said. Goirigolzarri explained that the financial sector has experienced in recent years the entry of new players such as startups and fintech companies that “legitimately” want to break the “status quo” of the sector, thus increasing competition. Although he has defended competition, he has demanded that all the actors operate with the same rules of the game, because regulatory arbitrariness is a “seed of instability.”