The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has established a new division called Avant-Garde Digit to use artificial intelligence to innovate data collection and presentation methods.
SBP Deputy Governor Sima Kamil said at a conference organized by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) that with the new division, the central bank has officially started the exercise to enhance its statistics department by making it “go beyond traditional economic data”.
She also said SBP is trying to be more responsive and increasing monetary policy committee meetings to 8 times a year demonstrates this.
SBP has assembled a team of economic agents nationwide to gather anecdotal information about business conditions. “We’ll have teams of people that’ll meet businesses, small and large, and assess and gain economic intelligence,” she said.
The Bank will also launch a digital consumer price index to track real-time inflation using multiple layers of non-traditional data using satellite images. Kamil said additional efforts were already underway for SBP to be a “responsive organization”. She remarked, “We’ve increased the frequency of monetary policy committee meetings from six to eight times a year”.
The central bank deputy governor further explained that the regulator had increased the frequency of its stress-testing exercises to evaluate the banking sector’s resilience to “severe but plausible” shocks.
She dubbed the new sources of risks and uncertainties the 4 Ds, claiming that decarbonization, digitization, de-globalization, and demography will create unprecedented risks for businesses and households.