Corporate services: RBNZ’s data and information strategy

The past few years have seen dramatic changes in how data and information is handled at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. Critical to the change was the establishment of a data and information strategy in 2022, alongside an internal restructuring of the bank and the launch of several major infrastructure projects, which began to come to fruition in 2024.

Kate Kolich, assistant governor and head of the information, data and analytics group, joined the bank three years ago and spearheaded the effort to change how the RBNZ works with data. She describes the institution as having been “a little behind the pack” before the strategy was launched, but says it has since managed to execute an “ambitious programme of work”. The changes have brought the RBNZ to the frontier of data governance among central banks.

“We achieved all the goals we set out in our original data and information strategy, and we’re now onto the second iteration,” Kolich tells Central Banking. “It’s an enabler for critical projects and programmes across the organisation.”

A few factors spurred a major rethink on data among RBNZ’s executives. A review by a group of independent economists had urged the central bank to step up its supervisory and economic analysis, including through better data use. But perhaps the biggest factor – and a more painful lesson – came in 2021 when the RBNZ suffered a cyber breach after malicious actors managed to access a third-party file-transfer application, Accellion. A report into the affair found Accellion had failed to warn the RBNZ for several days after the initial breach, but reviewers said the bank was also using the system in a way that was not intended and left it vulnerable.

Michelle Burke, director of knowledge and information management at the RBNZ, says subsequent internal reviews identified the need for action. She was promoted into her current role in 2022 and tasked with redesigning data and information governance at the central bank, a function that “didn’t really have a home” previously, she says. The data and statistics directorate was also moved from financial stability into the newly-formed information, data and analytics group, emphasising the cross-cutting nature of its work.

Burke says the first iteration of the data and information strategy was designed to lay the foundations for future change. A key part of that was the information management uplift project, an initiative designed to create common ways of working across the bank and break down siloes. Instead of starting with technology, the team started with people – gathering information on what RBNZ staff needed to do their jobs better, as well as identifying what was working well, which in turn helped to make staff feel included in the transformation process. “It helped the bank staff know what their part was to play in all this,” Burke says.

The team interviewed their colleagues and identified key ‘personas’ – data producers, consumers, decision-makers – which then guided decisions on what technology to adopt. They also mapped out the ‘lifecycle’ of data management, from the initial idea of collecting a useful data point through ingestion, processing, storage, analysis and eventual destruction of the data. This helped people in different departments understand how they fitted into the process, and how it would benefit them.

The work shifted into build mode in the past 18 months, with a platform called Puna being one of the main results. Puna, meaning ‘pond’ in Māori, is a cloud-based data and analytics platform that offers tools that can be used by staff in departments across the bank. Puna launched in 2024 with a project analysing the banknote lifecycle using large volumes of data from note-sorting machines. The RBNZ is now building a data hub for its treasury management team on Puna. Economists are next in line, and should have access to new, more granular datasets by mid-2026.

Puna allows non-specialists to work with data securely. Metadata is used to organise the data and to ensure that only the right people can access sensitive information. The system is connected to the cyber security centre to monitor for any suspicious activity, and regular penetration testing is used to check for weaknesses.

Puna is built on architecture provided by Snowflake, a system that is increasingly being used in the wider financial sector, potentially allowing more straightforward data-sharing between commercial banks and the RBNZ. Snowflake also separates storage from computing and only charges for what is being used, making it easier to manage budgets and see which teams are using the most resources.

Besides Puna, the RBNZ is midway through adopting a new electronic document and records management system, which is expected to go live later in the year. A future step will be to adopt artificial intelligence tools. The hope is that these will make it even easier for non-specialists to extract insights from the data. Such advances have been made much more feasible by the foundations already laid in terms of data governance and infrastructure.

“As a central bank we need to have really solid data and insight to enable the interactions we have with industry,” says Kolich. “Having a platform like this has revitalised the organisation.”

The Central Banking Awards 2025 were written by Christopher Jeffery, Daniel Hinge, Daniel Blackburn, Joasia Popowicz, Riley Steward, Jimmy Choi, Levente Koroes, Thomas Chow and Blake Evans-Pritchard.