How better data practices are shaping the next phase of financial supervision

Across central banks and other financial authorities, the conversation around supervisory technology (known as suptech) is maturing. Discussions at SupTech Week 2025 focused on the reliability, scalability and trustworthiness of tools. Through these conversations, data emerged as the central element for this new focus.

Cambridge University’s State of SupTech Report 2025 underscores this shift, showing that while suptech adoption continues to accelerate, foundational data practices are emerging as one of the most significant constraints on progress.

Financial regulators are already using technology to protect and strengthen the financial system, but 38% still identify weaknesses in data governance as a material barrier. Suptech tools are effective only when supported by high-quality data, stable infrastructure and strong governance, areas where many authorities are still consolidating basic capabilities.

The Public‑Private Secondments for SupTech Innovation (PPSSI) initiative, created by the World Economic Forum and the Cambridge SupTech Lab, offers practical support for this data-focused evolution. The initiative pairs experts from the private sector with global financial authorities to tackle supervisory challenges during short-term secondments. Three recent projects illustrate how different entry points into suptech, including data warehousing, digital rulebooks and consumer‑facing tools, are ultimately connected by a reliance on data.

Like many authorities, the National Bank of Moldova (NBM) operates multiple legacy and sector‑specific systems that have evolved over time. While each serves a purpose, their limited interoperability makes it difficult to develop a consistent, cross‑sector view of risk. As data needs grow, the institution has identified opportunities to strengthen interoperability and streamline data workflows across these systems.

Through a PPSSI secondment, a team from DANA, an Indonesian fintech, worked with NBM to explore the feasibility of a centralized data warehouse (CDW) as part of a broader supervisory data modernization agenda. The project was designed as an exploratory effort to inform NBM’s internal decision-making on pathways toward a future CDW through foundational research, peer learning, and hands-on technical experimentation.

Bimandika Hasanah, IDC System Engineer Lead at DANA, said: “Successful supervisory technology initiatives rarely begin with tools, but with shared clarity around data definitions, ownership and governance. Building that common understanding is often the most critical first step before advanced analytics or automation can deliver real value.”

Within a sandbox environment – a controlled testing space that allows new tools and processes to be safely developed and evaluated without impacting live systems – the DANA team demonstrated an end‑to‑end supervisory use case, from data ingestion and transformation to analysis and visualization. The exercise showed how automated workflows could replace manual reporting, while also surfacing practical questions around roles, responsibilities and governance that would need to be addressed before scaling.

Reflecting on the collaboration, Mihai Ursu, Chief Digital Officer, Department of Information Technology, at NBM said: “The sandbox environment we built together now serves as both a proof of concept and a practical reference point for our upcoming pilot project.”

As NBM moves toward a pilot phase, the secondment results will help inform a broader supervisory data transformation and the development of a formal data governance framework.

A secondment project at the Bank of Mauritius (BoM) tackled a different but closely related challenge: how regulatory rules themselves are created, managed and consumed as data.

At BoM, as in many jurisdictions, supervisory guidelines are issued as static PDF documents. The internal process is manual and time-consuming. For regulated firms, interpreting and operationalizing the guidelines also involves manual updates of their internal policies and systems.

Urvashi Soobarah, Director of Supervision at the Bank of Mauritius, said: “A key element of our suptech strategy involves migrating from static PDF based regulations to structured, machine readable rules.”

Through the secondment, experts from TSO, a UK-based regulatory technology provider, worked with BoM to explore how existing regulations could be transformed into machine‑readable, structured formats, to create a digital rulebook. The proof of concept demonstrated how regulatory content can be converted into detailed, structured data, managed through one workflow, and published simultaneously as user-friendly guidance, APIs and traditional PDFs.

The benefits from this implementation would ripple outward as supervisors gain faster update cycles and internal solutions, such as AI‑enabled tools to enhance compliance management. Furthermore, firms can reduce compliance friction by ingesting requirements directly into their systems and the broader ecosystem benefits from greater transparency and interpretability.

Alan Blanchard, TSO Business Development Director, said: “Converting unstructured regulatory content into structured, machine-readable formats can remove friction from regulatory change, improve access to authoritative information and ultimately support a more future-ready financial ecosystem.”

Crucially, digital rulebooks bridge internal and external data worlds. They sit at the boundary between supervisory processes and market behaviour, translating regulatory intent into operational reality.

A third secondment project demonstrates how well‑governed supervisory data can ultimately be made accessible beyond the regulator, creating public value.

A central bank in the Middle East is aiming to develop a consumer fee transparency tool designed to collect product and fee data from all domestic financial institutions and present it in a comparable, user‑friendly format. For consumers, this promises clearer choices and reduced information asymmetry. For supervisors, it offers a structured, standardized view of market practices.

Through a secondment with that central bank, DANA conducted comparative research on existing fee comparison tools, focusing not only on user experience but on data update processes, accuracy and governance. The findings highlighted that consumer‑facing transparency tools hugely depend on the robustness of their underlying data, including consistent definitions, clear update responsibilities and validation mechanisms. This could enable the repurposing of the same data collected for supervisory purposes to strengthen consumer protection, financial education and inclusion.

As supervisory mandates expand and expectations around transparency and accountability grow, data will increasingly be the connective tissue linking internal supervision, regulatory design and public outcomes.

Authorities that treat data governance as a strategic priority, instead of a technical afterthought, will be better positioned to harness the full potential of suptech. The secondment initiative shows how public‑private collaboration can accelerate that learning, helping authorities test ideas safely while building internal understanding.

The next phase of suptech is less about adopting the next tool, and more about ensuring a strong foundation.