But to reap all the benefits, central banks have to be up to the technological challenge, which is huge. They have also to face a much larger competition in the new data Era, with a view to maintaining trust in public information. They have therefore to become Big Data players and not only observers. This requires significant efforts. Let me illustrate this in five avenues to adapt to the digital evolution. a)  The Big Data era implies large changes in the IT infrastructure and a strong  determination to address novel technical challenges and to build a forward-looking data management and analysis scheme. At the Banque de France, we are building a Data Lake that covers all the new data functionalities, from data collection to machine learning. 3 b)  Central banks should also organise themselves to answer the legitimate  request from academics to have access to a wide range of granular data, in a modern and researcher-friendly way. At the Banque de France, we opened just one year ago a Data Room which gives access to 600 million of anonymized series, and it has already attracted more than 30 research teams. Harvesting Big Data capacities is only beginning and central banks should be in the race. c)  Data quality should be maintained at the same time. There should not be with  central banks input/output process any ‘garbage in, garbage out’.
It will in particular change the relationships between the members of the financial community and between this community and the non-financial world  II. Regarding Big Data, central banks will have to switch from an observer status to a user or player position, which implies significant changes in performing part of their activities  III. Big Data raise regulatory issues that cannot be solved within a national context but require a global reflection from public authorities. I. Big data will have significant economic effects. Entry costs for carrying out financial  transactions have already been reduced and will be lowered further in the future. Customer knowledge, in particular regarding the conditions applied by financial institutions, will be enhanced and more generally information asymmetries between clients and providers of financial services will narrow. Big Data can be a powerful card to play by GAFAs or other native non-financial firms to develop new activities. The financial industry has therefore to adapt rapidly to face the data revolution and compete with the new entrants, while protecting privacy against increasing cyber risks in particular. All in all, competition will increase, which is beneficial to the economy. The flip side can be enhanced risks for financial stability, implying a new form of vigilance for central bankers in particular. I will elaborate a bit more on this later on. II. Terabytes of data are available and more will be coming soon. Central banks will  collect more and more granular data. This is a clear opportunity for better forecasting and even nowcasting.