From Tools to Infrastructure: Making the Case for Suptech as Digital Public Infrastructure
By Dr. Carlos Leon ( Director of Central Banks and Financial Market Infrastructures) and Dr. Kimmo Soramäki (Founder & CEO)
Rethinking Financial Supervision in the Digital Age
The digital transformation of financial systems has brought immense opportunities and profound risks. As real-time payments, open banking, crypto-assets, and decentralized finance reshape the financial landscape, financial supervision authorities are grappling with challenges their traditional approaches were never designed to meet. Manual processes, lagging data, low-dimensional analysis, and institution-centric frameworks are increasingly mismatched with systems that operate 24/7, across borders, and at machine speed.
In response, supervisory technology (Suptech) has emerged as a promising solution to modernize oversight capabilities. But while its adoption is growing, Suptech is still often viewed as merely a support function or software tool. This perception is increasingly outdated. As supervision becomes more data-intensive, real-time, and interconnected, Suptech must be recognized not just as a technology solution but as a pillar of financial stability.
This article makes the case for considering Suptech as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)—an element in the set of foundational digital systems that form the backbone of modern societies. Suptech should be regarded as just as important for supervision as payment and settlement systems are for the safe and efficient functioning of financial markets. Suptech is the digital nervous system of supervision, foundational to the efficient and effective functioning of financial oversight and the safeguarding of financial stability.
Suptech’s Evolution: From Point Solutions to Institutional Infrastructure
The early generation of Suptech tools focused on automating reporting processes and providing descriptive analytics. These were important first steps. However, as financial authorities encountered a growing volume and velocity of data, a new generation of Suptech emerged: real-time monitoring systems, predictive and advanced analytics models, dynamic dashboards, and digital twins.
This evolution reflects both quantitative and qualitative shifts. Authorities are expanding their use of Suptech across prudential, conduct, payments, fraud/scams, and AML/CFT domains. They are also deploying more advanced technologies—machine learning, network analytics, simulation—that allow them to not just observe but also anticipate and shape developments in the financial system. Authorities are adding system-wide supervision to traditional institution-centric supervision, and liquidity to the traditional focus on solvency.
Crucially, Suptech systems are no longer isolated tools. They are integrated platforms that support core supervisory workflows, risk and crisis management, and policy evaluation. In effect, they are becoming the backbone of the supervisory infrastructure.
Why Suptech Is Digital Public Infrastructure
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is a set of foundational digital systems that forms the backbone of modern societies, enabling secure and seamless interactions between people, businesses, and governments. Suptech is DPI for financial supervision, aimed at providing the means for supervision authorities to interact with institutions providing financial services, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding financial stability and promoting economic development. There are three main reasons why Suptech constitutes DPI.
Functionally Essential
Functionally Essential Suptech enables core supervisory functions that are essential to maintaining public trust and financial stability. This includes:
Real-time risk monitoring of the financial system (e.g., liquidity stress, operational anomalies, contagion risk build-up, individual and system-wide vulnerabilities).
Enforcement of prudential and conduct standards.
Detection, investigation, and management of fraud, scams, cyber threats, and systemic vulnerabilities.
Oversight of interconnected financial market infrastructures (FMIs).
Without these capabilities, financial authorities cannot fulfill their supervisory mandates effectively, putting the efficient and safe functioning of financial systems at risk.
2. Time-Sensitive and Always On
Suptech systems operate continuously, supporting monitoring and decision-making in fast-moving environments. In this way, they mirror the demands placed on financial institutions, payment systems, and other financial market infrastructures. Supervisors must be able to detect, analyze, and act on risks in real-time—not days or weeks later.
3. Interconnectedness and Spillover Risk
Interconnectedness and Spillover Risk Suptech platforms increasingly interact with critical systems—real-time gross settlement systems, securities settlement systems, central securities depositories, market surveillance tools, and financial data hubs. A failure or misconfiguration in one component (e.g., a risk detection model or data pipeline) can have cascading effects, impairing the ability to detect and respond to market stress, cybersecurity threats, or market misconduct.
As with systemic FMIs, the resilience and interoperability of Suptech platforms are key.
Suptech Infrastructure in Practice: What It Looks Like
Suptech as infrastructure is already taking shape through a variety of real-world implementations:
Supervisory Reporting Analytics platforms automate the ingestion, validation, and analysis of regulatory reports, enabling early identification of outliers and trends, covering micro- (i.e., institution-centric) and macro-prudential (i.e., systemic) supervision.
Liquidity Monitoring Tools provide early-warning dashboards for supervisors by flagging abnormal payment behavior that may signal institutional or systemic stress.
Digital Twins simulate real-time payment systems using actual or synthetic data, enabling central banks to test policies, design features, and stress scenarios in a controlled environment.
Transactional Anomaly Detection systems continuously scan payment networks for unusual transaction patterns, helping prioritize supervisory action and prevent operational failures.
National Anti-Scam Utilities enable real-time detection, tracing, freezing, and restitution of fraudulent transactions across banks and payment service providers.
Each of these systemic capabilities reinforces the others as a backbone to safeguard financial stability. Furthermore, these systemic capabilities enable secure and seamless interactions between the financial system and supervision authorities—a critical layer of the foundational digital systems that form the backbone of modern societies.
Policy Recommendation: Building Suptech as Critical Infrastructure
To fully realize the potential of Suptech, financial authorities and policymakers must:
Institutionalize Suptech as a strategic pillar within supervisory frameworks, governed with the same rigor as FMIs.
Adopt infrastructure-grade standards for availability, resilience, data security, and continuity planning.
Provide sustainable funding and avoid treating Suptech as discretionary IT expenditure.
Ensure interoperability with payment systems, data repositories, and cross-border supervisory networks.
Promote capability-building for supervisory staff to operate and evolve these systems.
Conclusion: Suptech as the Digital Nervous System of Supervision
In a digitized and interdependent financial world, effective supervision depends on timely, intelligent, and connected insights. Suptech enables exactly that. It is not simply a support tool; it is the digital nervous system of modern financial supervision.
Recognizing Suptech as DPI is not just a semantic shift—it is a strategic imperative. Financial authorities that make this shift will be better prepared to safeguard stability, anticipate disruptions, and guide innovation responsibly.
Why FNA Is the Standard for Suptech Infrastructure
With a deep foundation in network analytics, simulation, and digital twin technology, FNA offers not just software products but supervisory-grade infrastructure solutions. FNA’s tools are trusted by over 150 institutions, including leading central banks, regulators, FMIs, and international organizations.
FNA pioneered the concept of RTGS digital twins, applied agent-based modeling to retail CBDC adoption, implemented dynamic and interactive micro- and macro-prudential visualization and analytical tools, and developed anomaly detection systems purpose-built for large-value payment systems. Additionally, FNA developed National Anti-Scam Utilities that enable real-time detection, tracing, freezing, and restitution of fraudulent transactions in retail payment systems. Unlike general-purpose data platforms, FNA’s solutions are designed from the ground up for supervisory use cases—prioritizing interpretability, resilience, and supervisory alignment.
Financial authorities choosing FNA are not just adopting tools—they are aligning with a standard that elevates Suptech from operational support to strategic infrastructure. FNA’s active role in industry initiatives, standard-setting discussions, and cutting-edge research cements its status as the benchmark in Suptech.
Suptech is becoming a Digital Public Infrastructure—and FNA is the platform of choice to build it.
