After 17 months and 4 conferences canceled, RAG was finally able to take place in London at the end of September 2021. The location was the Sheraton Skyline Hotel just outside of Heathrow Airport, London, UK. The agenda was jam-packed with panels and presentations from industry experts; the attendance was 74 strong; the discussions were amazing; being back in person at a conference was priceless.

The conference started off with a brief introduction from Rachel Goodin and Anthony Sani, co-chairs of the event, and quickly went into back to back presentations and panels about Fraud, Spoofing, and Validation to Developments in Telecom Risk Management, The Demand for Online Services from RAG, and then Where Are You Now?: Regrouping and Refocusing on the Future of RA. The days continued with many more great topics and no matter what presentation, panel, or workshop you attended, both veterans and novices to the industry received a plethora of information to take back home.
The sentiment of fellow attendees is expressed by a leading UK operator by saying ‘[It was a] fantastic two days at the RAG Conference London. Excellent to re-engage with existing contacts and great to meet and connect with new ones. The content whether Fraud, Revenue Assurance or Cyber Security was excellent.”
Some members of LATRO were able to attend the conference this year and thoroughly enjoyed the change of pace from Teams chats to physical engaging conversation. Whether it was a personal sidebar after grabbing some coffee to talk about the latest panel on The Future of RA or learn more about the demands of Cybersecurity, the face-to-face information sharing was extremely beneficial for our team members. While the existing fraud cases mentioned frequently during the panels and presentations brought interest, the emerging trends and how we expect to see operators and RAFMS vendors adjusting to handle and prevent fraud were some of the conference’s highlights.

We thoroughly enjoyed the conference and agree with the words of Eric Priezkalns (Chief Executive of the Risk & Assurance Group) “The difference between RAG and some events that target the same audience is that those other events include a lot of talk about the idea of collaboration but provide no support to those who might turn ideas into reality.”

Check out the words from Eric Priezkalns as he talks about the hardship that COVID 19 has had on RAG in the past 18 months: https://commsrisk.com/the-sweet-return-of-rag-conferences/
The next RAG conference will be RAG Dubai, February 15-16 at Le Meridien Dubai Hotel & Conference Centre, next to Dubai’s international airport. We are excited to be speaking at this conference. Stay tuned for details!