clearly, during the lockdown, from march 17 to may 31, 2020, we saw a sharp consumer shift to digital payments. our national retail payment system ( nrps ) grew by 74 percent in volume and 42 percent in value from the beginning of 2020 to march 16, 2020. prior to the lockdown, nrps transactions stood at 18. 43 million in volume and php428. 23 billion in value. by contrast, during the lockdown, transactions rose to 32. 05 million in volume and 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches php607. 92 billion in value. we expect this dramatic shift to digital payments to continue even after the pandemic. increased digitalization however came with its own set of problems, such as a significant increase in the number and variety of cyberthreats and cyberattacks. while these heightened cyberthreats declined towards the end of the lockdown because of the countermeasures that were timely and carefully deployed by the bsp and our supervised financial institutions, heavy - reliance on automated systems and third - party technological firms can nevertheless raise the risk of cyber incidents with possible systemic impact to the financial system. in the coming years, we expect more supply of new and more sophisticated financial products and services that can attract customers without them realizing the risks involved and raising serious consumer protection issues. with new risks and challenges continually emerging from technological innovations, we know that central bankers can never be passive. part of our strategy to remain agile and well positioned to respond to risks and challenges before and as they materialize is embracing and harnessing the potential of technology, in the form of supervisory technology or “ suptech ”, in fulfilling our mandate. broadly speaking, the bsp ’ s suptech initiatives are classified into three categories : first – data acquisition, where bsp receives data and information from the bsp - supervised financial institutions ( bsfis ). second – data analytics wherein the acquired information gets analyzed and third – data dissemination wherein processed and analyzed information are sent out to other government agencies, internal users, and the public. data is at the heart of any effective supervision. hence, the acquisition of relevant data and its analysis and dissemination to the right parties is crucial. while we are still in our early stages of our own digital transformation as a supervisor, our initial experience with suptech has been positive. we have seen that suptech applications support faster and more flexible data capture compared with traditional template - based approach

. in turn, this leads improved off - site monitoring and earlier detection of potential risks. this has proven to be beneficial during the pandemic when social distancing rules limited our physical ability for off - site monitoring and the resources of our supervised institutions have to be channeled to cope with the changing circumstances. as we progress into the new normal — or what i like to call the new economy — we expect suptech initiatives to become part of the business as usual stance in bank supervision. this is especially so as we welcome the entry of digital banks as a new category of banks in the philippines. we are looking forward to fully reaping the other benefits of suptech, such as reduced costs for doing away with laborious manual data validation and increased capability towards a predictive and proactive risk and compliance monitoring. suptech, however, no matter how technologically advanced it may become, remains a tool in the 2 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches hands of human supervisors. hence, it becomes a great challenge to central banks to continually upgrade their financial supervisors ’ technological skills to ensure that their capabilities remain up to date and able to tackle the increasing complexities of financial supervision. i suspect that this process is currently creating a new breed of technologically savvy financial supervisors that are able to make evidence - based decisions and formulate data - driven strategies at a faster pace than ever before. at the same time, these supervisors are poised to act quickly, proactively, prudently, and mindfully to maximize the benefits of these technologies while minimizing the attendant risks to the financial system. as the financial system continues to rapidly develop because of technology, you can expect the central banks and financial supervisors to also evolve as necessary. while we virtually see each other today in the central bank stream of sap financial services live 2020, a nagging questions comes to mind – what is in store for us in the next year ’ s sap financial services live? as i ponder upon this question, i end confident that you will find the talks in this stream interesting and useful. thank you very much for your attention. 3 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches