NBU’s Sixth Annual International Roundtable on Strategic Planning Convenes Participants from 34 Central Banks and Financial Regulators

On 27–28 November 2024, the NBU hosted its sixth international roundtable dedicated to strategic planning. Strategic Development and Change Management in Central Banks in Times of Extreme Uncertainty was the event’s topic this year.

Opening the roundtable, NBU Governor Andriy Pyshnyy described how the NBU has been operating since russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine. He emphasized the importance of strategic planning when working under extreme conditions.

“Unfortunately, Ukraine is operating amid unprecedented uncertainty triggered by the war. The depth and complexity of the processes taking place in the country are at times comparable to the anguish of what would have been open-heart surgery on a person running a marathon. We don’t know how long the war will last. But we must fulfill our mandate and the Ukrainian people’s expectations as best we can, no matter how long it takes,” said Governor Pyshnyy.

This is why the process of strategic planning and updating is always ongoing at the NBU, he said. “We have made it clear to ourselves that strategic planning is one of the ways to reduce uncertainty. And so we proactively communicate our strategic documents to economic agents to give them a better take on what our development will be like. Strategic planning and updating is a process that forms the foundation of our activities.”

In particular, this is the second time, since russia’s full-scale invasion, that the NBU has clarified its strategic guidelines. “Strategic planning under uncertainty calls for unconventional solutions: making real-time updates, modeling the implementation of differently focused strategic changes, assessing risks, and developing contingency plans to address them. We realize that the relevance of the strategic documents adopted last year needs to be tested. This is the reason that we have for the second time now been updating the Financial Fortress, an NBU strategy that we adopted in 2023,” said Arsen Makarchuk, Director of the Strategy and Development Department.

For the two days that the roundtable went on, the NBU served as a platform for constructive discussions and exchange of opinion and global experience on strategic planning. The participants placed a strong focus on rethinking strategy in times of extreme uncertainty, taking cutting-edge approaches to drafting and updating strategic documents, managing strategic risks, ensuring business continuity and digital transformation, using artificial intelligence, and exchanging stories of success and failure of central banks that have implemented strategic documents.

The international roundtable’s participants took special interest in the digital transformation of central banks and the use of AI in finance. The participants from Ukraine, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Moldova, and the ECB shared accounts of their experience implementing AI and data ethics policies in their activities and of potential application scenarios and principles for introducing AI in central banks and financial regulators. 

A key issue in the discussions was also how to mitigate uncertainty in a turbulent environment. In their speeches and panels, the participants talked about how, despite fundamental challenges, central banks and financial regulators are constantly streamlining their procedures for strategic planning, change management, risk management, and business continuity. Similar initiatives are being implemented in the United Kingdom, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, Moldova, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, among others.

This online event was attended by nearly 120 representatives of central banks and other financial regulators from 30 countries, including Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Iceland, Spain, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Colombia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Moldova, Germany, Norway, Peru, North Macedonia, Poland, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Finland, France, the Czech Republic, Montenegro, and Sweden. Representatives of the ECB, the EBRD, the Bilateral Assistance and Capacity Building for ​Central Banks (BCC/SECO) program, the Ukrainian government, and foreign and Ukrainian companies and organizations also attended the event.