Hello, I'm Ben O'Neill, Emlex's news editor in our London Bureau. If you're familiar with

Emlex's podcasts, thanks for joining us again, and if this is your first time, a very warm welcome.

Today we're talking about Brexit's impact on data flows and I'm joined by Vesler Gladyshechever,

our senior telecoms media and IT correspondent. Hello? And by Matthew Holhouse, our senior Brexit

correspondent. Hello. With all our lives and the activities of businesses across the board

increasingly dependent on the digital world,

data and information flows have never been so important.

Now much of the preparation work for the UK's withdrawal from the EU

has involved trying to ensure that the withdrawal agreement

seamlessly maintains the data flows that companies rely on, and that it preserves the data privacy

regime pioneered by the EU. As we speak today, though, Brexit is still up in the air, and a no-deal

scenario looms large. And should that come to pass,

the consequences for data flows and for privacy could be dire. Vesler, could you kick us off just

by explaining what the worries are here? Of course, as you just mentioned, data flows have

become increasingly important for companies. In the context of Brexit,

of course, we mean companies on both sides of the English channel. And we're talking about all sorts

of data, paste lips, photo albums, uploaded on cloud services, medical records. And the risk for company lies in the fact

that when the UK finally leaves the EU, they will face a legal vacuum for data transfers. And in the

case of a no-deal Brexit and a no transitional period in place, they will have

to think about alternative methods to keep those data flows going. Companies preferred way

to fill that legal void is a so-called UK-EU adequacy certification from the European Commission

that would allow data to keep flowing freely from the EU to the UK.

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