Smart Data Foundry Secures £3Million Funding for Financial Data Service

Smart Data Foundry, a not-for-profit subsidiary of the University of Edinburgh using financial data to tackle societal issues, has secured £3million in funding to operate a new Financial Data Service. 

Smart Data Research UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), has awarded funding to Smart Data Foundry to enable more researchers to study the financial health of millions of households across the UK, by providing secure access to financial behaviours, economic resilience, and regional economic activity.

By partnering with financial institutions and research institutes, the new Financial Data Service aims to deliver insights providing access to detailed evidence about financial behaviours, economic resilience, and regional economic activity.

This data will enable researchers to tackle urgent policy challenges including the cost-of-living crisis, financial inclusion, the changing nature of employment, and productivity in different economic sectors and geographic places. Ultimately, the service aims to enhance the UK’s understanding of how economic shocks and policy interventions impact different communities, helping policymakers design more targeted and effective responses to economic challenges.

Dougie Robb, interim CEO at Smart Data Foundry, will lead the new Financial Data Service alongside Professor Chris Dibben from the University of Edinburgh, as it looks to provide unprecedented insights into the economic health of the UK through secure access to de-identified banking and finance data from millions of households and businesses.

Since its launch in 2022, Smart Data Foundry has earned national recognition for its work using anonymised financial data for public good, including research in partnership with NatWest Group into how Covid-19 affected how people earned, spent and saved during and post-pandemic and its work with SAGE and CEBR on a quarterly SME tracker.

‘A new age for data’

The new service, which will operate from Smart Data Foundry’s base at Edinburgh Futures Institute, will become part of a network of five other data services across the country.

“We look forward to joining five of the most forward-thinking data service organisations in the UK in this groundbreaking network,” explained Dougie Robb. “It will foster data-sharing partnerships between academia, public institutions and private enterprise leading to public good outcomes which will improve the lives of people across the UK.

“In partnership with the University of Edinburgh, we’ve made great progress in holding and making available for public benefit research financial data resources. We have forged fruitful data partnerships with NatWest Group, Virgin Money, SAGE, and Equifax, and built a team of transdisciplinary experts with expertise across finance, banking, digital technology, product, data science, and information governance.”

“Understanding the financial situation of households across the UK is vitally important for social and economic research,” Professor Dibben also added. “However, this key aspect of economic life is often poorly measured in our research datasets or even absent. This investment by Smart Data Research UK in a Financial Data Service will allow us to change this situation, enabling more public benefit social and economic policy research.”

Magdalena Getler, head of academic engagement at Smart Data Foundry, concluded: “With the new Data (Use and Access) Bill currently going through Parliament, we are at the beginning of a new age for data. If successful, the new legislation will empower safe data use, access, and sharing for the good of society like tackling challenges such as the impacts of poverty and economic inactivity.”