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The Bank for International Settlements Financial Stability Institute published a paper that takes stock of 71 suptech tools used for prudential supervision in 20 jurisdictions and explores the benefits, risks and implementation challenges. It found that more than half of the tools assess mainly qualitative data, underscoring the importance of analyzing textual information in prudential supervision. The remaining tools are split between those that analyze mainly quantitative data and others that scrutinize both quantitative and qualitative data. Despite these variations, all tools aim to extract deeper supervisory insights or to improve supervisory efficiency.

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB) reiterated the importance of ensuring digital euro privacy and data protection by design and by default. The EDPB cautioned against the use of systematic validation and tracing of all transactions in digital euros. In this respect, the EDPB recommended that the digital euro be made available both online and offline, along a threshold below which no tracing is possible, to allow full anonymity of daily transactions.

Oracles are lines of code that connect information in the real world to contracts and other agreements on a blockchain. They serve as a bridge between on-chain, which is every interaction that occurs on the blockchain, and off-chain data. While oracles solve one problem for blockchains, giving them access to real-world information, they create another in the form of centralization. Decentralized oracles solve the off-chain data problem by granting blockchains access to real-world information without introducing a single point of failure. They do this by using distributed data sources to avoid single points of vulnerability.

The European Data Protection Supervisor recently published a tech dispatch on CBDCs and privacy. It recommends that a CBDC should follow a clear data protection by design and by default approach. If this is not ensured, a CBDC can be a systemic risk for profiling and surveilling users. For a CBDC, privacy enhancing technologies, including advanced pseudonymisation techniques and zero-knowledge proof, should be used to minimize the information shared between transaction partners. https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications/techdispatch/2023-03-29-techdispatch-12023-central-bank-digital-currency_en

"Is it possible to show that something is true without revealing the data that proves it? This is what 'Zero Knowledge Proof' technology proposes, a technique which employs cryptographic algorithms so that various parties can verify the veracity of an item of information without sharing the data that compose it."

The Bank for International Settlements published a paper on digital platform economics. It found that digital platforms can dramatically lower costs and thereby aid financial inclusion - but these same features can give rise to digital monopolies and oligopolies. Digital platforms operate in multi-sided markets, and rely crucially on big data. This leads to specific network effects, returns to scale and scope, and policy trade-offs. To reap the benefits of platforms while mitigating risks, policy makers can: (i) apply existing financial, antitrust and privacy regulations, (ii) adapt old and adopt new regulations, combining an activity and entity-based approach, and/or (iii) provide new public infrastructures. The latter include digital identity, retail fast payment systems and CBDCs. These public infrastructures, as well as ex ante competition rules and data portability, are particularly promising. Yet to achieve their policy goals, the paper concludes that central banks and financial regulators need to coordinate with competition and data protection authorities.

The IMF published  a paper that develops a detailed model to evaluate the necessary investment requirements to achieve affordable universal broadband. The results indicate that approximately $418 billion needs to be mobilized to connect all unconnected citizens globally (targeting 40-50 GB/Month per user with 95 percent reliability). The bulk of additional investment is for emerging market economies (73%) and low-income developing countries (24%). It also finds that if the data consumption level is lowered to 10-20 GB/Month per user, the total cost decreases by up to about half, whereas raising data consumption to 80-100 GB/Month per user leads to a cost increase of roughly 90% relative to the baseline. Moreover, a 40% cost decrease occurs when varying the peak hour quality of service level from the baseline 95% reliability, to only 50% reliability. The paper concludes that broadband policy assessments should be explicit about the quantity of data and the reliability of service provided to users. Failure to do so will lead to inaccurate estimates and, ultimately, to poor broadband policy decisions.

"Crunchfish has applied for a Swedish patent protecting Digital Cash by combining two different data integrity schemes. First, payments are negotiated offline by short-range data communication between payer and payee communication devices using a quantum-secure cryptographic key as a shared secret. Successfully negotiated offline payments are stored locally and securely in the devices. Subsequently, payment settlement by broadband data communication is secured by signing the settlement request with another quantum secure cryptographic key."

The Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) published a brief that highlights key payment trends as observed in the 2022 Red Book statistics (available at the BIS Data Portal). These statistics were collected in the second half of 2023 from CPMI member jurisdictions. The use of digital payment methods continues to increase, particularly for small amounts. In tandem, cash withdrawals and the number of small-denomination banknotes in circulation have declined. Fast payments reached new heights and are a prominent driver of the digitalisation of countries' payment ecosystems. Even so, consumers continue to use cash to pay at home and abroad: both cross-border card and e-money payments and cross-border cash withdrawals increased sharply in 2022. (Data portal: https://data.bis.org/topics?topicFilter=CPMI)

"In the world of DeFi (decentralized finance), oracles play a crucial role in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of data - especially pricing data - used within various protocols and platforms. A price oracle is a specific type of oracle that provides off-chain (external) price information to on-chain (blockchain) smart contracts. Given the isolated nature of blockchains, smart contracts cannot access external information directly, and oracles serve as a bridge to bring this external data onto the blockchain."

The European Central Bank (ECB) published a blog post that explains what degrees of payments privacy future users of a digital euro can expect. It claims that it will promise better privacy and data protection than other current electronic means of payment, but not the same degree of privacy as cash although paying with an "offline digital euro" comes pretty close. Online digital euro payments will not be so private, because the commercial banks that run the user-facing parts of the platform will have full access to user identity and transaction information, just like they currently do on their own platforms. However, digital euro holder identities will be separated from the payment data, and the banks will pseudonymize user data so they are not visible to the Eurosystem.

The Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) published a response to a call for submissions from the European Commission (EC) Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA) on any issues and opportunities relating to the deployment of DLT based infrastructure and services in the European Union (EU) that may merit the EC's attention. AFME's overarching view is that a transformative potential of DLT is that can enable companies and individuals to access a shared, peer-validated database as a single-source-of-truth, without the need to centralize data and transaction processing with a single actor. This increases accessibility by participants, data security and immutability, and data transparency in the real economy. Innovation in finance plays a key role in this vision, which will only begin in earnest with the updating of capital markets infrastructure.

The BIS and the Bank of England have have developed a prototype data analytics pipeline which includes data collection, storage and analysis, that can provide supervisors with near real-time data about stablecoins' liabilities and their backing assets. Pyxtrial can provide insight into whether the backing assets exceed their liabilities at all times, and enhance the efficiency and responsiveness of the monitoring process, which helps supervisors to respond faster to potential risks.

"Blockchain technology is powerful but has a fundamental limitation: it cannot access real-world data on its own. Smart contracts, essential to many blockchains and decentralized finance applications, rely on external data to function. This is where "oracle networks" like Chainlink come in. Oracles enable smart contracts to securely pull data from a wide range of information sources, instead of relying on a single provider. Over 14 blockchain ecosystems are compatible with Chainlink, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Polygon, and BNB Chain. Through these integrations, over 1,600 projects are using Chainlink's technology as of 2025."

The Bank of Canada published a paper that explores the use of privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) in the design of central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems, potentially paving the way for solutions that better safeguard end-user privacy and meet rigorous data protection standards. PETs can offer robust protection for data throughout their lifecycle, whether stored, in transit or during processing, and ensure privacy is maintained even when data are extensively shared or analyzed. However, they can introduce performance overheads and add complexity to systems, and their effectiveness and applicability are currently limited due to their early stage of development. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of how PETs can transform privacy design in financial systems and the implications of their broader adoption.

In an increasingly information-driven world, legal frameworks governing the sharing and use of data in payment services - and awareness of their unintended consequences - are of critical importance. This article explores the dynamics between modernized privacy laws in the European Union (namely, GDPR) and open banking initiatives (namely, PSD2).

Alternative data could be a rich source of alpha, but most asset managers are handling it more like high grade explosives due to the risk of privacy violations.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is getting ever more serious about blockchain data, as it seeks more data on public blockchains.

Ping An built an empire around safe and staid products like life insurance. Now it's betting its future on inventive uses of big data-and gearing up to do battle with fast-growing tech giants like Alibaba.

"The face of insurance is changing. Again. Led by data, digitalisation and a need to engage the customer, there are already many shifts underway. This current round of technology-driven change differs from those of the past, not least because of the speed and scale involved. Harnessed properly, these powerful forces offer new hope for the insurance industry to remain central to the lives of its customers. Swiss Re's Sigma report Data-driven insurance, ready for the next frontier? explains what's going on and presents a potential roadmap for progress."