Shirish Chandra Murmu: Regulation in the digital era - issues, opportunities and challenges
Special address by Mr Shirish Chandra Murmu, Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, at the Third Annual Global Conference of the College of Supervisors "Adapting the regulation and supervision to the digital age", Mumbai, 9 January 2026.
The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.
Distinguished guests and my colleagues, Namaste and a very good afternoon! It is a privilege to address this illustrious gathering at College of Supervisors' Third Annual Global Conference convened around the theme of 'Adapting the Regulation and Supervision to the Digital Age'.
Digitalisation has brought significant benefits such as efficiency and productivity gains, improved transparency, enhanced competition and expanded access to financial services. At the same time, it is also creating new categories of risk and reshaping familiar risks in unfamiliar ways, altering their transmission, visibility, and controllability. The digital transverses beyond products, platforms, or processes to organizational structures, partnerships, and information flows, and with enhanced speed and scale, fundamentally altering the nature of how risks emerge and spread, and how trust is built or undermined. These shifts compel regulators to revisit the operating assumptions of their regulatory approaches. Trust, a cornerstone of financial stability, is increasingly being forged through digital channels, presenting regulators with the challenge of balancing innovation against risk.
Building on this, I will first touch upon some issues and challenges that digitalisation presents for regulators, and I will then turn to the opportunities it offers for developing more effective and forward-looking regulatory approaches. I will conclude by outlining a set of guiding principles that, in my view, should anchor regulation in the digital age.
I. Issues and Challenges for Regulation in the Digital Era
A. Regulatory Agility
4. Digitalisation has compressed the time dimension in finance. Transactions settle instantly, services operate continuously, and decisions across payments, credit, and markets are executed automatically at machine speed. This has narrowed the time available between early warning and realised impact; with the risk that operational incidents, fraud, or loss of confidence may scale rapidly, even before conventional indicators register meaningful deterioration. Accordingly, the regulatory processes historically designed around reporting cycles and post-facto remediation must also evolve towards proactive detection and agile interventions without sacrificing prudence and quality of regulatory judgement.