Who’s Falling Behind? New Dashboard Uncovers the Real Impact of Income Volatility
At Smart Data Foundry, we believe data should work for people, not just institutions. In a groundbreaking partnership with Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) Insight Infrastructure programme, we want to shed light on the growing financial pressures millions of Britons face.
The Income Volatility Dashboard, powered by anonymised data from more than 1.2 million NatWest Group account holders, is updated weekly, giving an almost real-time snapshot of household finances. This pioneering dashboard aims to provide crucial insights for researchers, charities, and policymakers who are battling to understand, and hopefully alleviate, the financial struggles faced by ordinary families across the country.
Rather than relying on outdated reports or estimations, this dashboard tracks how financial pressures like rising bills, unpredictable wages, and debt affect people in real life and beyond one-off events like COVID-19, to identify recurring patterns that affect household incomes. It highlights the growing gap between those who bounce back from financial shocks and those who struggle to recover, helping us understand why some households are being left behind.
The data collected will soon be combined with JRF’s research. By combining financial data with personal experiences from communities facing hardship, we can create a fuller picture of economic insecurity and work towards meaningful change.
Why This Matters
Rosario Piazza, Chief Insight Architect at JRF, said: “This close to real-time data on income volatility can allow researchers and policymakers to gain a better understanding of what life is actually like for earners and consumers across the UK. Many people, for Instance, do not receive regular monthly wages they rely on the gig economy or are self-employed. However, a good proportion of policies, financial services and products are based on the assumption that all workers rely on steady earnings, whereas the reality is that both income and expenditures are subject to frequent fluctuations.
“Policy decisions are often based on data that is out of date or does not capture fast-changing dynamics of people and communities. The Income Volatility dashboard and the safe research environment within MyFoundry aim to change how decisions are made. SDF offers access to data sets that look at a smaller number of people or can look at people from all different walks of life not just those in poverty. You can find people on large salaries who have huge overheads and big debts who are financially really struggling and explore what types of policies could be put in place to address these issues.
Access to better data means that we have the opportunity to fairly represent human behaviour and base policies on facts, not preconceptions. In the long term, we hope this will translate Into lasting positive social change.
The anonymous data can be accessed via a free public dashboard, which allows anyone to view summaries and aggregations of near real-time banking data by geography, demographics, and financial activities. There is also a researchers’ data haven, where researchers and academics can access raw data by submitting and getting approval for research proposals focused on income volatility and related issues.
Joseph Rowntree Foundation has a number of free licenses to the researcher’s data haven to enable charities and policymakers to access this data and do their own analysis around income volatility.
A Call to Action for the Financial Sector
For Smart Data Foundry, this project is a step towards a bigger vision: unlocking financial data for social good. Magdalena Getler, Head of Academic Engagement, hopes this initiative will inspire more banks to share their data in ways that benefit society.
We believe financial data can be a powerful force for change,” she says. “When combined with other information, like health data, it can show us how poverty impacts every aspect of life, helping us drive better solutions.
Shaping Policy with Income Volatility Data
In March, Smart Data Foundry and Joseph Rowntree Foundation hosted a webinar exploring the insights into the income volatility dataset and its policy applications and case studies from researchers using FINDS income volatility data.
Watch the recording on YouTube.
Accessing the Income Volatility Dataset
Access to the Income Volatility Dataset is provided via our secure MyFoundry platform, for which you will be required to register.
Once registered, you can access the aggregated data that powers these insights in our data catalogue to interrogate the data with your own tools, or for even more refined research, apply for access to our Trusted Research Environment where the microdata is stored.
