Shared data, shared impact: A vision for private, public and third sector data collaboration.

Smart Data Foundry is driven by a simple but ambitious belief: that financial data, when used responsibly, can be a powerful force for public good.

For too long, vast amounts of this data had remained locked away - underused, inaccessible, and used mostly within organisation to serve customers, for product development and of course, to help financial organisations meet their profit and strategic goals. When the pandemic hit, bringing with it change at an unprecedented pace, it drove propelled the importance of up-to-date data for more informed decision making and created a shared sense of the responsibility and benefits of sharing data.

Our data partnership with NatWest grew out of that crisis, and is now delivering impact across the country. Whether it's combining datasets to better understand fuel poverty, using economic wellbeing metrics to spot emerging financial hardships or identifying the trends behind headline official statistics – financial data, used responsibly, has huge potential for doing good.

Why? Because this type of data – how we earn, spend, save and budget – shows us the economic realities behind the headlines. It can show us not just how the economy is changing but who is most affected by that change – for better or worse. UK GDP is the highest it's ever been but listen to any vox pop on the news and you will hear that that doesn’t matter when your weekly food shop budget stretches to less and your kids can’t get a job.

Impactful use cases for data sharing

At a closed door event with our partners Joseph Rowntree Foundation, we brought together representatives from financial institutions, researchers, economists, government and the third sector to talk about how we can build upon this impact.

We considered data sharing from different angles; from top-down, economic analysis to assessing the impact of socio-economic policy at a national and regional level and how to address the challenges faced by those experiencing financial vulnerability and homelessness.

Professor Paul Mizen, of the Bank of England Decision Maker Panel (DMP) and King’s College London, spoke about how the DMP’s monthly survey of UK business leaders captures how businesses intend to respond to macroeconomic changes such as Brexit, covid and high inflation as well as how they are performing. The outputs closely align with official statistics, but can be prepared and shared much quicker – providing a more accurate and responsive view to the Bank and Government when setting monetary policy.

Attitudes to smart data are also transforming in the economic research sphere. With concerns over growth, jobs, skills, the need for us to get a clearer picture of what’s going on in industry, and its eventual impact on each of us as an individual, is hugely relevant for researchers.

Alternative data sources like smart data can be used to better understand the macro and micro economic environment and complement survey-based official statistics to provide a more complete picture.

Professor Adrian Pabst, of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) spoke of the need for speedier private sector data sharing to go beyond national figures, especially as the ONS steps back from delivering sub-national statistics. National figures cannot inform the targeted policy interventions required to drive regional growth. Private sector data can also provide greater insights into issues like gambling harms, which can be over-represented in communities already experiencing deprivation.

When it comes to how financial data is being used to better understand poverty and inequality – and address its root causes - Rosario Piazza from Joseph Rowntree Foundation Insights Infrastructure team and Kate Cokayne-Naylor from the Royal Foundation’s Homewards project both spoke to the role financial data can play (alongside other data such as lived experience) as a tool to understand the realities of poverty and identify signals which indicate someone may be at risk of homelessness.

The event wrapped up with workshops, where groups discussed some of the problems they would try to solve given access to the right data, the challenges around this and the steps that could be taken to move beyond those challenges.

What emerged from those discussions was the need to recognise that data doesn’t solve problems – people do. Sharing data between organisations and sectors can enable the experts within those sectors to develop new interventions and ideas to contribute to solving the problem at hand.

The impact smart financial data is already having

At Smart Data Foundry we've been busy turning financial data into impact; from our growing research data catalogue, providing the income volatility data for JRF's Insights Infrastructure and our Economic Wellbeing Explorer is being used by local government to address homelessness, understand hidden poverty and tackle economic inactivity.

Want to learn more about impactful data sharing? Read out new Impact Report.

Join the data for good movement

Data partners, public sector and the third sector increasingly see the transformational impact that data sharing can have and the scale of that impact. From projects which address how to best support vulnerable customers in their day to day lives, through to research which feeds policy on productivity and growth; data partners know they play a vital role in addressing these societal challenges.

If you would like to talk about how to use financial data in your work, or start a conversation about sharing data for impact, then please do contact us.