ECCB 2023-2024 Annual Report

EASTERN CARIBBEAN CENTRAL BANK ANNUAL REPORT 2023 - 2024

Guided by the view that “together we can achieve more” in 2023, the ECCB began collaborating with Ministries of Education, STEM teachers and Caribbean technology service providers to support Summer STEM Camps focused on 4 th and 5 th Industrial Revolution skills for secondary school students.

N ew W ebsite The ECCB published a new and modern version of its website on 12 July 2023. The primary objective of the upgrade was to create an interactive and more user-friendly interface, accessible across all platforms and devices. The new website features an interactive statistics module that provides monetary, financial and economic data on all the ECCB member countries. In addition to featuring a more streamlined and sleek design, the updated website is responsive and easier to navigate. Users can also subscribe to receive new content and updates from the ECCB. I ntegrating M odern T echnologies in P olicy D esign Through its research efforts, the Bank has begun to integrate modern technologies in policy design. Given the importance of tourism in the region, having an early indicator of tourism performance is important, the Bank developed a model to forecast tourism in the ECCU using Google trends data. The Bank successfully incorporated base year 2018 GDP data in its statistical enterprise solution, which relies on the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) software. The statistical enterprise solution was also updated to accommodate mergers and acquisitions of banks as well as enhancements to data reporting templates and statistics.

The ECCB provided training and technical assistance to various financial institutions in the classification of financial accounts, as well as in and the requisite protocols for submission of data through its statistical enterprise solution. That was aimed at ensuring accurate financial reporting and compliance with submission protocols when using the SAS software. The ECCB collaborated with the developers of the SAS software in revolutionising data processing within ECCB’s statistical enterprise solution. With the exponential increase in the volume of data collected from various data providers, coupled with the ECCB’s commitment to having data readily available, the Bank implemented Python data programming in SAS, which drastically reduced data processing time. The ECCB made greater use of technology to pull data to its website using an Application Programming Interface (API). This improvement resulted in a more interactive statistics module, facilitating seamless integration and real-time access to information. I mplementation of D ata A nalytics T ools In an effort to improve the Bank’s data analytics capabilities, the Bank now has access to more data analytics tools. Posit Package Manager and Posit Workbench are two of the new tools.

Check the ECCB’s New Website

39