The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has announced it will develop an open-source code to help build a data monitoring tool for central banks.

The tool is part of the organisation’s “Rio” project – Spanish for “River” – because it uses data-streaming tech, which was originally developed by social media platforms to analyse and respond to user traffic.

The bank’s new Innovation Hub, which builds technologies to solve problems in the financial system, is developing the tool to help “smoothly handle millions of messages and analyse these accurately in real time.”

According to BIS the prototype for the open-source tool will be ready sometime this year.

“We plan to test it in volatile markets requiring 7 million updates an hour – that is almost 2,000 every second,” the general manager of the BIS, Agustín Carstens, said last month. “This is what it will take to alert central banks to market dislocations, liquidity issues and volatility in real time.”

Carstens revealed that the organisation has spoken with 40 central banks about the new tool and assured that despite varying use cases and currency markets, the new technologies are flexible enough to accommodate them.

“Powerful tools do not have to be "one-size-fit-all," he added. “The same technology could play multiple roles in central banks as well as incorporating additional data from other markets.

“As central banks collaborate, the best innovations will prosper.”

BIS has opened Innovation Hubs in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Switzerland, and plans to open new centres in Toronto, London, Stockholm and a Eurosystem centre spanning both Frankfurt and Paris.

Share Story: