Strategic Development of Central Banks: NBU Holds Seventh Annual International Roundtable on Strategic Management

On 26–27 November 2025, the NBU hosted its seventh international roundtable dedicated to strategic management. Flexibility, Digitalization, and Innovation: A New Era in the Strategic Development of Central Banks was the event’s topic this year. The event highlighted an ongoing global transformation in which regulators are abandoning their isolationism and increasingly immersing themselves in collaborative efforts to enable the exchange of best practices and the joint development of cutting-edge technology.

The event’s participants discussed challenges, opportunities, and new approaches to strategic management. They also exchanged experience and results of analyzing the financial sector’s digital transformation trends.

Opening the roundtable, NBU Governor Andriy Pyshnyy emphasized the key role of strategic management, especially amid global uncertainty and complex macroeconomic challenges.

“In Ukraine, we operate in an exceptionally challenging environment that includes full-scale war, energy vulnerability, inflation risks, and continual shocks. Despite full-scale war, we’re building a central bank that thinks strategically, acts flexibly, undergoes a tech overhaul, and integrates into global finance. In such conditions, strategic management ceases to be just a desirable tool and becomes a driver of stability and a benchmark for everyday decisions,” said Governor Pyshnyy.

The NBU Governor also outlined mainstream trends in strategic development that matter for modern central banks:

1. Transition from static to dynamic strategy. Modern-day central banks must operate on adaptive models with shorter strategic cycles, regular priority reassessment, and decisions informed by real-time data.
2. Technological transformation as a strategic tool. Innovative development must be consistently integrated into operational models and strategic documents, ensuring predictability and manageability of technological change.
3. Human capital as a strategic advantage. Training employees in digital competencies and cultivating partnership and responsible leadership are what pave the way for institutional resilience.

Governor Pyshnyy added that the NBU views its strategic documents as tools for adjusting to high volatility instead of as only formal statements of intent.

“The strategic management process is at the core of how we operate. We have been clearly demonstrating and proving that our strategy is not just a declaration of purpose, but rather a living, breathing instrument that shapes our behavior and role within our state and in global finance. This is our response to uncertainty, our guarantee for citizens and financial market participants, and our commitment to future generations,” said the NBU Governor.

Key topics discussed by participants over the two days included:

• the future of financial services and the role of the central bank
• new approaches to strategic management and performance management, specifically dynamic and scenario planning and iterative approaches to strategic management
• the growing role of strategic foresight
• ways to optimize the organizational structure of central banks and resource management for the successful implementation of strategies
• the role of digitalization in optimizing the monitoring of, and the reporting on, strategy implementation
• scaling up central banks’ internal capacity for change
• digital transformation and simplification of operational processes
• practical cases of AI applications in central banks.

An analysis of international practices shows that the mission of regulators is undergoing groundbreaking change: from control to technological leadership, from rigid planning to adaptive strategic management, from isolation to frameworks that pilot breakthrough solutions and scale them in collaboration with global partners. Digital transformation results in the ability to integrate information to create connections between strategic, operational, and financial management, and enables the use of real-time data, helping make strategies flexible and update them on time.

Discussions on concrete cases of AI application, robotics, and tokenization underscore a paradigm shift that has seen regulators actively experiment with technology in intergovernmental collaboration and jointly shape new industry standards and approaches to human capital development.

In his closing remarks, NBU First Deputy Governor Sergiy Nikolaychuk emphasized the significance of international partnership in developing the strategic potential of regulators, and thanked the participants for actively contributing to the discussion. Over the past seven years, the NBU’s initiative has grown into a powerful international collaboration effort on strategic management, enabling central banks and financial regulators to become even more resilient and future-ready, he said.

This major online event was attended by nearly 100 representatives of central banks and other financial regulators from 32 countries, including: Azerbaijan, Argentina, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Armenia, Georgia, Estonia, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, the Netherlands, Germany, North Macedonia, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Ukraine, Finland, France, Croatia, Chile, Montenegro, Switzerland, and Sweden. Representatives of the ECB, IMF, IFC, World Bank, OECD, as well as other foreign and Ukrainian organizations, also joined the event.