The region fares poorly when it comes to overall digital well-being, with only Singapore making the top ten, challenging financial industry employees at work – and home. 

Our digital selves seem to need some «me» time too, or so it seems. But if powering down and switching off is the cure, it means many in the financial industry are burning the candle at both ends, so to speak.

They face unending hours staring at a screen at work, squinting at figures or information on some spreadsheet while trying to tacitly avoid having anything to do with the latest passive-aggressive email sent to a politically attuned mass of Ccs: sprinkled with vaguely threatening names and levels of seniority.

Make-Work Request

That is then followed up at home and during commutes with generous servings of tablets, smartphones, and TVs until a needless, last-minute make-work request from some higher-up forces them to tackle a dicey remote access routine on an aging bank laptop.

This is not a good thing. In the Asia Pacific, the situation is even dire, given that the region fared poorly in the 2023 digital well-being rankings based on data mapped out last week by Surfshark, a featured creator for online publisher «Visual Capitalist».

Assigned Scores

Singapore was the only city or country to make the top ten in a ranking that looked at five evenly weighted cyber well-being factors (internet affordability and quality, electronic infrastructure, security, and government) and then assigned scores for each to create a country rating.

The big surprise? Europe made the first nine spots in the digital well-being ranking, with the list looking like a roster of new and old EU members with the exception, of course, of Switzerland, which came in ninth.

Connection Issues

The even bigger surprise? France was first. Clearly, the reporters have not dealt with stuttering off and on ADSL connections in the deep, not-quite-yet fiberoptic-ed-up countryside or infuriatingly long, non-changeable Livebox passwords.

It also sounds like they haven’t tried to change anything on a government website or app without having the correct seven-figure-long number parked, inconspicuous and minute, at the bottom of some long-lost mailing.

First in Affordability

Anyway, c’est la vie. Without the skepticism that real, first-hand personal anecdotes afford, they maintain that the French rank first in affordability, and fifth in quality while making the top 20 in infrastructure, security, and government.

Overall, the authors were at pains to stress the importance of digital well-being given that the average person spends seven hours a day looking at screens, something that highlights «how digital human life has become».

High-Level Assessments

They also made some higher-level assessments of this year’s ranking, the fifth they have conducted, saying that wealthier nations generally had higher levels of digital well-being as they had the money to spend on improving the key metrics.

As part of that, they also found 22 countries that exceeded expectations for digital well-being based on their per capita GDP.

Better Prospects

Here the situation looked more positive for the region, with the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and China making the list.

They also found that improving scores for electronic government had the «strongest correlation» with a better digital quality of life while internet affordability had the lowest correlation.

«This underscores the outsized role in providing other services through the internet, as opposed to just improving the internet itself,» they suggest.

Scrambled Screens

But all of this is unlikely to help the hapless bank employee scrambling from screen to screen, whether private or professional.

In many banks, the operational risk functions require employees to spend two consecutive weeks on compulsory leave logged out of all internal systems, as a fraud mitigation measure, as the Mayer Brown law firm recently indicated.

Total Disconnection

In the future, the human resources department may find itself compelled to do the same with screen time, requiring employees to spend time completely disconnected from all screens, electronic devices – even social media, as a way of salvaging whatever shreds of sanity they may still have.