Piero Cipollone: The experience of 10 years of data in central banking - from gathering real-time data and big data to challenges like storage or skills

Speech by Mr Piero Cipollone, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Italy, at the international conference "Future of Central Banking" organised by the Bank of Lithuania and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) on the occasion of the centenary of the Bank of Lithuania, Vilnius, 29 September 2022. 

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am delighted to open this Session on "Central bank as a pool of real-time data: the 'Whys' and the 'Hows'" jointly organized by Lietuvos bankas and Bank for International Settlements on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary of Lietuvos bankas. I would like to thank the organizers for the kind invitation.

1. Introduction

I would like to share the Bank of Italy's experience in central banking, using real-time data – also known as big data, Nontraditional data or Alternative data – for policy purposes with all the challenges involved.

As we all know, we live in a data-empowered era where we can plan a trip and Google can estimate our travel time by recommending the best route based on both current and past traffic data or where Netflix can suggest us movies or shows we might like based on its data from people with similar preferences. Our lives have become not only more data-driven but also more and more data-producers, generating more data than ever before. This combined with greater and greater computing power and ad-hoc technology enables private companies and government institutions to use that new data for different purposes efficiently.