Stephen Topliss - Tackling cybercrime

In this episode, YS Chi talks to Stephen Topliss about cybercrime. They discuss how online fraud has evolved and how modern technology is now helping to combat it. They explore the need to balance convenience with safety to protect younger generations, and take a look at Stephen's inspiring journey which has included stops as a linguist and a space physicist.

Stephen Topliss is the VP of Market Planning for Global Fraud & Identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

This podcast is brought to you by RELX.

Transcript

YS Chi: 0:00

The Unique Contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting RELX.com.

Stephen Topliss: 0:09

Nowadays cyber crime has evolved into a massive industry. It's like a business. We have to assume now that all of us, our names, our addresses, our emails, some of our passwords are all out there.

YS Chi: 0:40

Hello, and welcome to Unique Contributions, a RELX Podcast, where we bring you closer to some of the most interesting people from around our business. I'm YS Chi, and I'll be exploring with my guests, some of the big issues that matter to society, how they are making a difference, and what brought them to where they are today. Today, we're talking about cybercrime. The digitalization of physical services is happening at an unprecedented pace, and across almost every sector. What does this mean for the threat of cybercrime? And what are we doing to prevent it? To explore these issues with me today is Stephen Topliss, VP of market planning for global fraud and identity at LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Stephen, welcome. Great to have you and thank you for joining the podcast.

Stephen Topliss: 1:29

Thanks YS, nice to meet you and glad to be here.

YS Chi: 1:32

You are based near Amsterdam, I guess the Hague in the Netherlands. How have things been there for you over the last few months?

Stephen Topliss: 1:39

Yeah, that's right. I am in the Hague. It's been an interesting time, I think for everyone. For me personally, I'm actually very used to working from home. I travel a lot in the role I have and when I'm not travelling, I tend to be at home a lot. So I think that transition to working from home was easier for me than most. I think what has been interesting has been having the whole family around me as I work. So over the last few months, I've spent a lot more time than I ever have doing homework with my three children. I know a lot more about history, geography and physics now than I have done for 20 or 30 years.

YS Chi: 2:21

I doubt that with a PhD, I'm sure this has been quite easy for you.

Stephen Topliss: 2:28

It's interesting how much you forget. But it's been very enjoyable. It's been enjoyable spending time with them. Yeah, yeah.

YS Chi: 2:36

Well, speaking of PhD, I'm really curious. You went from having a master in French, and then a PhD in space physics. Now to cybersecurity space. Love to know more about your journey to this point.

Stephen Topliss: 2:53

Yeah, absolutely. So when I finished school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I was inspired by my physics teacher at school and I also really liked to travel and I liked languages. So I went to university thinking, let's try and do something combined with Physics and French. I studied in Manchester. I had a year out studying physics in France and in the end, I still didn't really know exactly what I wanted to do. I had been enjoying physics, and so as I went into the PhD, had a few different options that appeared there. One was to do a PhD in space plasma physics. I'd never really been that fascinated by space, I have to admit, but it was still it was intriguing and it was definitely the most interesting of the options I had. So I spent three years doing my PhD in that, thoroughly enjoyable. But I think what I did learn from that was a couple of things. First of all, as I kind of already alluded to, my passions probably lie elsewhere and so I felt, maybe this wasn't a career I wanted to commit to. I simply didn't have quite the passion for space that some people do have. The other thing that I learned was, in the space industry, projects take an incredibly long time. So, generally as we were doing research there, we would we would come up with a research project. The work I did was based on analysing data from instruments on satellites flying in space. To plan a research project like that. First you have to define, you know, what is the question you're trying to answer, then you have to develop the instrument that's going to get you the data for it. That instrument then needs to be aligned with a satellite and then the satellite needs to be aligned with a rocket launch, and that takes you know, probably a five to 10 year process to get to the stage of launch. You then launch it and then once the satellites flying, you start getting data back, and then you have several years of analysing that data. So these projects can be, you know, 15 years of your life. I also had the misfortune I guess, of seeing one or two of these rockets, unfortunately exploding shortly after takeoff. So not only are those long term projects that you commit to, but there is a fairly high element of risk involved there as well. So I think what it did was it changed my perspective quite a lot. So once I completed my PhD, I went into the consulting world, which was really the other extreme.

YS Chi: 5:44

From the long term to short term.

Stephen Topliss: 5:46

Exactly, exactly. And so consulting I hought was just a very, very nteresting. I got experience in lot of different organisations ery quickly. I got exposed to rganisations within Silicon alley. For me that, there was he click, because there was the echnical excitement, the ntrepreneurialship there. And o I started working on projects ith tech companies in the US ho were then expanding into urope. And eventually, in 2010, was looking kind of for the ext opportunity there and here's a few different firms hat were making this expansion nto Europe, and one of them was hreatMetrix. And really, it was no brainer once I kind of nderstood what was was going on here. ThreatMetrix had really ool technology. It was in this raud prevention space which I idn't know a lot about, but I ealised that this was a sector hat I could really get assionate about. So not only as it an exciting tech company, hey were offering to bring me n as the first person on the round in Europe and build the usiness. And the sector was was eally meaningful.

YS Chi: 7:01

Yeah, great timing.

Stephen Topliss: 7:02

Yeah. So the ThreatMetrix product basically enables clients to prevent fraud. So we're providing fraud prevention techniques for the likes of online banking, ecommerce sites, media streaming sites, and any company that provides services to an end user base.

YS Chi: 7:23

You say there was no brainer, but I must not have any brain because at that point in 2010, it would have gone right over my head, and I would not have seen the potential that you did, but I'm glad you did, and then I'm glad that ThreatMetrix found you. You sound like a real true renaissance man. From humanities, to science, to engineering, everything in between. So like our other guests that have been here and have done so well. I think this session is going to be a great lesson. Can you please start by painting a picture of what's going on out there in the dark web, and how cybercrime has evolved in the last few years?

Stephen Topliss: 8:06

Yeah, I think that the best way to do that is to go back a little bit to the start, and in particular, the start of commerce moving online, moving on to the Internet, and starting to give you that ability to buy things online. What happened very, very early on was that second marketplace started opening up and that secondary marketplace was selling stolen information and in particular, stolen credit card details. It was a natural progression for criminals. If they had the ability to use stolen credit cards, literally stolen in shops, why not use that information when you try to buy things online as well. So when I kind of got into the sector the first time, ecommerce was really trying to battle that problem. And it wasn't just there, there were other new services emerging online. So the online dating industry for example, was also quite an early adopter of the digital space. They had a very different problem, they were focused on scams. The kind of scams we still see today in the social networking space, where people create accounts on there, pretend to be other people, try to build a relationship with you, and ultimately try to ask you for money. So those were problems, you know, early on and the problem was, obviously, it had an impact for customers that were actually involved in that fraud. They would find that their cards had been used to buy a purchase, and it would often be quite difficult to get that money back. Similarly on the dating site example, if you've ended up paying money somewhere, chances are you were never going to get that back. So a real impact to individual people like ourselves, as well as then, impacts to the organisations as well. Whether they were ecommerce or then later on, online banks. And if you look at the kind of the sophistication of cybercrime and how you fought it in the early days, it was actually really quite easy. Most of the time, if you could identify the IP address where fraud was coming from, you could block it, you could just ignore it. But the complexity started to occur, as fraudsters started to understand how to change their IP addresses, or how they could hide behind things like a proxy server, so that you couldn't identify where they were coming from. And at the time as I was joining, what was interesting with ThreatMetrix was that they had this novel idea of being able to try to gather digital intelligence. So, to be able to identify if these proxies were being used to hide the fraudsters. So they thought if the IP address isn't the key anymore, maybe we can have an identifier for a device. So if this fraudster is using this computer, and we can identify it, then we can block the computer. So that was a little bit kind of what was happening in the early days. But if you look nowadays, cybercrime has evolved into a massive industry. It's like a business. There's knowledge sharing, there are sophisticated tools being used. You see these automated bots, these botnets, these networks of devices that have been kind of captured and convinced to carry out attacks on sites. So the scale of cybercrime has completely changed, as have the level of stolen or breached identity data. I mean, we've heard in the press over the years, many large well known businesses where there have been data breaches and we have to assume now that all of us, our names, our addresses, our emails, some of our passwords are all out there for those that want to buy them and test them. So the sheer scale of cyber crime has changed. And what we're seeing now is that fraudsters are actually, they've always been shifting to focus on how they can be successful. But one of the recent trends we've seen is a move away from fraudsters maybe accessing our accounts directly and stealing from us, and actually going back to those scams that I mentioned earlier from dating. The different kinds of scams now to convince you or me to actually move our money and pay it into a fraudsters account. But having a story so convincing that we're doing it willingly and not realising we're being scammed.

YS Chi: 12:41

Right.

Stephen Topliss: 12:42

So it's a scary world out there and criminals, you know, ultimately, it's much easier and safer for them to try to commit this types of fraud and crime online than walking into a bank with a gun.

YS Chi: 13:10

You are keeping this so nice, clean, diplomatic. But I need some juicy stuff. So you must have come across some very particularly interesting stories about fraudsters who have been caught, without necessarily mentioning names. What are some of the most sophisticated ways that you've seen fraudsters operate online?

Stephen Topliss: 13:33

Yeah, I've definitely got a few stories I can share and maybe I'll change the angle slightly and highlight a little bit how we've dealt with them or how I've seen companies deal with some of these fraudsters as well. So if I go back to the scams first of all, again, thinking of an early example, with those dating sites and scammers. One of the problems that you have to deal with. If you can identify these fraudsters on your site, what do you actually do about it? So you could just block them. But the problem is, if you block them straight away, they know that you're onto them and that actually is only going to help them, study that a little bit more in detail and figure out how to change their attack and come back and try and get past you again. So one thing that for me, I remember very well in the early days was that some of these dating sites would use our technology to identify the scammers. But rather than blocking the scammers, they would lead them to a second site, which would look exactly the same as the original dating site, but was actually a fictitious dating site where they would bring all the scammers and all the fraudsters together and they could effectively play against themselves. So I thought that was always an interesting a...

YS Chi: 14:50

...lovely sting operation.

Stephen Topliss: 14:52

Exactly, exactly. But you asked, I mean, another example about actually catching fraudsters. So I guess

YS Chi: 14:58

Bravo. back in 2014, 2015, we saw that the banks that we were working

Stephen Topliss: 15:01

...guys got locked away. So for me, it was, with were getting more successful at being able to identify the fraud because of all this rich, digital intelligence that we could provide. But there was always the frustration that the fraudsters and the criminals, they never got really caught by the police and went to jail. And one of the reasons for that was that historically, that there wasn't really the evidence that could be used in a court of law, or even if it was there, maybe the police didn't really understand how to use it. So there was one specific case in that year where there was some fraud. It was clear that there were some fraudulent behaviour and a number of online banking accounts were being accessed and money was being moved out. In one way or the other, I don't remember exactly how, but the police had identified that there was a potential link to a hotel room, and they did a raid on this hotel room, found and arrested a couple of men in there and seized a laptop. That laptop was actually opened at the time in an online banking session. So they now had suspects, they had a laptop and they had records from several of the UK banks, highlighting fraudulent transactions, fraudulent money transfers. They were pretty sure that this was all linked, but they couldn't link them together. And so one of our banks and one of our banking customers came to us and said, can you help us explain the data that we have to your service to the police? So I got personally involved there and worked together with the bank and one of the police officers to look at that device and through doing some analysis around the device, we were able to identify how that device was linked to the individual events, and that device ID that I mentioned earlier. And so I I generated, I wrote up a witness statement for that to help in the prosecution there and it was really one of the first times that we were able to see the police actually prosecute, based on actual online crime using digital intelligence. And these.. you know, personally very satisfying, but I think for the industry as a whole, it was nice, because it started changing the focus and made people think they could actually succeed in prosecuting some of these criminals.

YS Chi: 17:38

Right. That's what I think probably what they wanted to see is a proof that it can be done. Right?

Stephen Topliss: 17:43

Exactly, exactly.

YS Chi: 17:45

Well, the pandemic, I'm sure has caused, not only the disruption suffering to the most of us, but it is become an exploitative opportunity for these fraudsters. So what is the impact of COVID on financial crime, as you can see already?

Stephen Topliss: 18:04

So it's changed actually during the course of the pandemic. So at the beginning, as these lockdowns started coming into force around the world. When we looked in our data, we saw that actually the fraudsters were being impacted as much as the rest of us, so fraud actually decreased initially. And then as we've seen this rapid growth in digital transactions online, as everyone starts shopping from home, as everyone's logging in remotely to services from home, we've seen the volumes of good transactions go up very, very fast, and the fraud has gone up as well. Luckily, the fraud hasn't gone up as fast as the good transactions, at least not in the data that we're seeing. But what we do then see is the fraudsters are shifting to the opportunities that are out there. So you can imagine that everyone working from home, not everyone is used to doing that, not everyone has the maybe the same security in place. There's potentially opportunity for fraudsters to take advantage of that. Then there are also new opportunities for new types of fraud. So around the world, we see the government's, you know, government supported loans that are being made available to businesses to get them through the pandemic, and they are absolutely the new target for the fraudsters. So we're seeing fradusters.

YS Chi: 19:27

Easy money.

Stephen Topliss: 19:28

It's easy money and the thing is those programmes are being rolled out rapidly, so people can take advantage, and that...

YS Chi: 19:35

With a bunch of holes

Stephen Topliss: 19:36

Exactly. Exactly, and the fraudsters are all over that.

YS Chi: 19:39

And the amounts are small, too, isn't it Stephen? So that, you know, nobody's really going after the 200 frauds they want to go after the 2 million fraud and some of these can be lost.

Stephen Topliss: 19:49

Yeah exactly, exactly. So that's definitely concerning.

YS Chi: 19:53

What would you say that we can do to protect ourselves and not help criminals get away too easy?

Stephen Topliss: 20:01

You know, a lot of it and I hate to say it, but a lot of it comes down to common sense. I've seen plenty of examples of fraud prevention experts as well being caught out. So we should never be, you know, embarrassed or concerned about sharing, you know, questioning something. But you know, only share what personal data you need to share when necessary when you're online. Use trusted websites if you're going to buy online. Buy from the websites that you can trust. If you're using a new website, you know, just spend a bit of time checking that it doesn't, that it doesn't look a bit dodgy. Look out for anything unusual and suspicious. Definitely don't trust anything that sounds too good to be true, because it probably isn't. And then the last thing is, especially on the payment side, keep an eye out on those bank statements. I think that's also a big risk that we don't necessarily look at those as much anymore, especially as we're sometimes moving from getting paper statements that we would open on a monthly basis and scan through them, to now having everything online. That's what fraudsters also, you know, are playing on the people maybe don't notice those small transactions coming through.

YS Chi: 21:13

Where there is prosperity, there is a magnet for fraudsters who like to take shortcuts like parasites.

Stephen Topliss: 21:21

Exactly.

YS Chi: 21:22

Yeah. Well, thank you for that background. Shall we move on to how ThreatMetrix and more broadly LexisNexis Risk Solutions are addressing these issues? You're working at the extreme front of digital identity intelligence, which is all about aggregating billions of anonymized transactions. I guess to differentiate a trusted customer from a cyber attack. I understand you can do this in really near real time. Can you tell us how it works without revealing any undue trade secrets?

Stephen Topliss: 21:56

Yeah, absolutely. So I mentioned earlier the concept of a device ID and identifier for a device. If we start simply and we look at kind of the initial approach to building fraud rules, to catch online fraud. We would take a device ID and we would look for unusual things related to that. So a couple of really simple examples would be, is one device actually buying things online with more than, say, two or three different credit cards? That could be an indication of a fraudster with a list of stolen credit cards that they're testing. Or with that one device do I have, you know, really quite a number of different email addresses that I'm using to log into different accounts? Again, that could be indicative of someone having a list of compromised data. So, in fraud analysis, we have that data. We have the digital intelligence and we combine it with the event data, the transactional data, whether it's a credit card number, or an email address, or phone number, or name, or something like that. All of those pieces of information are anonymized or hashed in the database, and what we can do, what we do over time and with those fraud rules, is we also looked to compare over time. So, if I log into my account today, how does that behaviour compare to when I logged in yesterday? Is it? Am I using the same device? Do I have the same kind of relationships between those, those identifiers? What we realised over time, actually was that we were kind of creating, a kind of digital identity. Nowadays everyone talks about digital identity without thinking about it. But for us, I guess six or seven years ago, we started thinking. Yeah, this is a form of identity in the digital space. And that's one of the reasons we refer to that solution today. So basically, what the solution is doing is, in real time, every time we analyse an event for one of our clients. We're taking the data from the event, we anonymize it, and then we create this digital identity. We see how it aligns with the digital identity's history in that global network, with the goal to basically understand, is it looking like normal? Or is there something different? So if I log into my bank today, is my digital fingerprint for this event, does it generally match what has logged in historically into my account? If it does, then trust me and let me in. If it doesn't then raise a red flag to the bank.

YS Chi: 24:40

Right. This sounds like a smart person overcoming a smarter person, and yet another smart person on top of that. For businesses, particularly online consumer facing ones, there is probably an ongoing challenge of balancing between convenience for the customer, and security verification. Are there different approaches for different regions when it comes to combating fraud? And are there different approaches to security versus convenience between different generation perhaps?

Stephen Topliss: 25:24

Yeah, and that's one of the fun things of the international role because there are clear differences. I think they're changing over time. So if we look at the US, for example, I would say that on, in the digital world or the online world, the focus is absolutely on customer experience. Customer experience is first in America, whether you're in a store or whether you're online. That can, that experience can come at a raised level of risk from a security point of view. If you contrast that to parts of continental Europe, and parts of Asia Pacific. In those cultures, you're much more accustomed to stronger, what we call multi factor authentication when you access services online. So you'll be asked for a username and password and then there'll be another step. Maybe you'll be you know, challenged in some other way. So it's the experience, the user experience, there is more friction, as we call it. But it's generally more secure, and therefore the risk of fraud and the rates of fraud tend to be lower. The UK is probably somewhere in between the two. So that's what you see, kind of generally around the world. Then also consider that type of industry and service, there are also different levels of security. The generational question is a really interesting one because what I described is probably the norm right now. I think that the shift is going to come from the younger generations. The way that children at school and leaving school now are so familiar with all this digital technology and the latest phones and devices. What we're seeing with the younger generations, I think what we're going to see, being a bit of a disrupter here is that those services that are more securely protected with higher levels of friction with stronger authentication techniques, are probably going to turn away those younger people.

YS Chi: 27:40

That sounds like you have to go through more doors to enter finally, to the performance.

Stephen Topliss: 27:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're going to look for other services offering similar service, but with an easier entry point. So we are, from a security point of view, we are going to have to adapt to meet the expectations of younger generations. At the same time, I think there's an educational part that's the responsibility of all of us. Public outreach schools, organisations like ourselves to make sure that the young are really aware of the risks online, and that they shouldn't be too open with sharing their data. Just to protect themselves a little bit.

YS Chi: 28:23

I suppose they need to know that there's a pain on the other end for being careless.

Stephen Topliss: 28:28

Exactly, exactly.

YS Chi: 28:29

For adults, it could be loss of, you know financial assets. For young people it might have to be an embarrassing situation.

Stephen Topliss: 28:37

Yep. Well exactly, exactly, and it's, I think it's something that we can do more of. It's really interesting. I spent, I spent two years, I dragged my family to Silicon Valley for two years to live out there and when they were in the the American schools there, they really had lessons that focused on exactly that. How to be safe online. I feel since we've moved back to Europe, I feel that we do that a little bit less in Europe. So I think that's something we should do more and make make children more aware of.

YS Chi: 29:10

Yeah. I think that this trade off is one that companies have to make also, but we as individuals have to make, between our privacy and convenience. When we do that properly, we can take responsibility for the choices that we make.

Stephen Topliss: 29:29

So I think as a society, we've become increasingly aware of how our data online is potentially being harvested and used for marketing or other purposes. That's driven that focus on, you know, our data and privacy around it, and it's introduced regulations to protect our data and I think that, you know, we're on the right tracks there. Certainly in Europe we have the GDPR regulations and other parts of the world have been looking at all that. I think looking at it from a cybersecurity point of view, we just need to make sure that these regulations consider where private data can be used in the right way to prevent crime. So, you know, we sometimes see regulations carving out the ability to use data to prevent crime and it's a really important distinction there. Otherwise that can also potentially impact cybersecurity in the future.

YS Chi: 30:28

Indeed, we need to make sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Stephen Topliss: 30:31

Exactly. Exactly.

YS Chi: 30:33

Because we have to fight those fraudsters.

Stephen Topliss: 30:35

Exactly. And that, you know, there's the regulation side there that I think it's important for us to get that right. At LexisNexis Risk Solutions, the way we design our products is also we follow what we call it privacy by design approach. So, you know, those anonymization techniques that I mentioned earlier. It's what you end up actually being able to develop products that can identify fraud, by creating these anonymized digital identities and you actually don't need to know who the person is behind those digital identities.

YS Chi: 31:06

That's right. So looking ahead, keyword these days, of course, is AI machine learning. How is that going to, come in to the future of digital fraud prevention at ThreatMetrix?

Stephen Topliss: 31:20

So we're already using machine learning today and we continue to build that out. One of the reasons that's so important is just the sheer amount of data. So I talked about those simple fraud rules earlier, and fraud analysts used to go in and change those rules on a weekly basis. But the volumes of data, the number of events that you have to look out now, it's not possible to do that manually. So you need to use machine learning techniques to optimise those rules, to learn from the changing fraud trends. So I think that's, you know, one area that machine learning is being used. I think, you know, there's there's a couple of other things that we're doing in the short term, looking ahead with the ThreatMetrix product, and that's to actually continue to bring in the latest digital intelligence, like phone intelligence. So as everyone is turning more and more to the mobile channel, the data associated with the mobile channel is becoming increasingly important. As we bring more data in from that, and also from emerging technologies like behavioural biometrics, it just increases the data again, and increases the need for this automized, automated machine learning to optimise things.

YS Chi: 32:38

Does that give us the future in which we're not just doing a cat and mouse catch up post fact, but perhaps something a solution that is so innovative, that maybe it can really prevent them before they happen?

Stephen Topliss: 32:56

I'm not sure that we're ever going to reach that stage. I think that biometrics specifically is generally going to have quite a big impact. And by biometrics, in this case, rather than behavioural biometrics, I'm thinking more about the biometrics from facial recognition, fingerprints, things like that. They are really quite secure. Although not impossible, impossible to beat. The problem with some of those technologies is adoption, though. You can have a really secure piece of technology, but if only a small part of your population actually want to use that technology, then you still haven't solved the problem.

YS Chi: 33:39

Right. And this adoption Stephen, a matter of economics? Or is it a matter of convenience choice?

Stephen Topliss: 33:49

I think it's three things. It can definitely be economics, especially in different parts of the world. It's choice, some people just don't like the idea. And third, it comes back to the generational aspect as well. I think that with biometrics, the younger generations are probably very comfortable with it. Some of the older generations aren't very comfortable with it, and it's maybe difficult for them to use. So that's generally a problem for some of these new techniques not being able to be adopted. And if they're not adopted across the board, then obviously the fraudsters, they adapt and they figure out exactly who to target that isn't using that, for example. Plus, we talked about scams earlier, and if I use biometrics, that doesn't change anything when it comes to scams. I'll still carry on sending my money to the wrong place and I'll smile happily at the camera.

YS Chi: 34:43

Yes, often it is us who opened the door for them.

Stephen Topliss: 34:46

Exactly.

YS Chi: 34:46

Voluntarily.

Stephen Topliss: 34:47

Exactly.

YS Chi: 34:48

You know, in a slightly different scale, but in a parallel manner. I have spent the past few decades in the publishing sector where we've been fighting for copyright issues and IP protection. I've always said three E's as a principle. First is, educat people. That stealing i stealing, whether it's digita or physical goods, it' stealing. Second is economics It has to be such, that ther isn't as much economica incentive to steal, then to ear it the right way. And then th third is enforcement when al else fails, there's got to b exemplary enforcement to sho people that there's a price t pay for crime. I wonder if thes thoughts that you had kind o shared with us today i different parts of th conversation are similarl applicable to online i cybersecurity fraud

Stephen Topliss: 35:50

Yep, no, I agree. It's an interesting parallel. Yeah.

YS Chi: 35:53

Well, I've learned an awful lot from you today about cyber security, and the unique contributions of LexisNexis Risk Solutions team for combating this. Before I let you go though, I'm very curious about what else you're doing these days to keep yourself, you know, kind of balanced, and not constantly working, or doing homework with your children.

Stephen Topliss: 36:20

So I've always liked to keep fit, and I love swimming. I haven't been able to swim, really the last year.

YS Chi: 36:28

Me too.

Stephen Topliss: 36:29

So I've tried to figure out a different approach to keeping fit. So if I go back to my last years at school and university, I used to skip as part of my fitness routine. I saw an article in the paper recently about skipping and I thought, you know what, I can do that in the home, I can start doing that again. I went online, I bought a skipping rope. But what I discovered is there is a whole new world out there of skipping ropes, jump rope workouts that I don't think existed five years ago. It's a booming business. You could spend 10 euros, you could spend 150 euros on a skipping rope. So I now have a kind of mid range skipping rope. I'm skipping every day, there's lots of...

YS Chi: 37:13

I'm hoping to graduate to the high end skipping rope one day. Like the bikers do or people like us golfers think that, it's the equipment that's going to get us better score card.

Stephen Topliss: 37:23

Exactly. I think my children think I'm crazy. But yeah, that's my brand new world at home of keeping fit right now.

YS Chi: 37:31

Fantastic. Stephen, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much for being with us today, and I hope that the audience has learned as much as I have.

Stephen Topliss: 37:40

Thanks YS. It's a pleasure talking to you.

YS Chi: 37:42

Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to hit subscribe on your podcast app to get new episodes as soon as they're released. In our next episode, we'll be talking with Anna Dycheva who runs Reed Exhibitions in Russia, the Middle East, Turkey and the UK, about the role of the events industry. Thanks for listening.