Financial Data Service awards over £430k to fund innovative smart data research projects
We’re proud to announce our five FINDS Fellowships, funded through UKRI’s Smart Data Research UK programme, with a total investment of over £430,000 in smart data enabled research.
FINDS is the Smart Data Research UK’s Financial Data Service, operated by Smart Data Foundry and the University of Edinburgh, and the inaugural fellows will be using our novel financial datasets to tackle pressing societal questions, with direct links to policy.
We received many high-quality applications, and throughout the review process we were impressed with the ambition and understanding of the potential of our data across our selected projects.
“Financial data is a powerful yet novel evidence base for socioeconomic research. Our FINDS Fellowship projects represent exactly the kind of rigorous, independent research which can turn smart data into genuine public insight. SDR UK’s, and FINDS’, investment in these innovative projects will showcase the usability and relevance of smart data for research and policy”
— Magdalena Getler, Head of Research Growth, FINDS
FINDS is a collaboration between Smart Data Foundry and the University of Edinburgh. Funding for these Fellowships is provided via our grant from SDR UK.
Introducing the FINDS Fellowship Projects
When and Where Young People Struggle: Evidence on Youth Financial Vulnerability
Research Lead: Eugenia Wong is a PhD research student at the University of Edinburgh Business School. Her research is focused on enhancing spatial and spatiotemporal algorithms through the use of machine learning approaches, with a particular emphasis on clustering and segmentation methods. Her research aims to improve the precision and interpretability of these models in order to extract practical insights into socioeconomic phenomena such as youth unemployment, financial well-being and demographic trends.
Project: Young people in the UK face unprecedented economic challenges that have fundamentally reshaped how they manage finances. Rising living costs, housing insecurity, and precarious employment force difficult choices between essentials, delay life milestones, and increase reliance on credit. Yet policies and financial services remain poorly calibrated to these realities as they rely on self-reported indicators and aggregate analyses that obscure how young people experience financial stress and how they cope.
Using FINDS income and spending data, this project will produce the first comprehensive, transaction-based evidence on youth financial vulnerability. It will develop new metrics from transaction data, map how vulnerability emerges across age groups and geographies, and build a Youth Financial Vulnerability Index for ongoing policy monitoring.
The Impact of Child-Related Benefits on Parental Spending
Research Lead: Tom Wernham is a Senior Research Economist in the Income, Work and Welfare team at IFS, where he has worked since 2020. His research focuses on living standards and poverty, the design of the benefits system, and its impact on low-income households. He is also a part-time PhD student at University College London.
Project: Reducing child poverty is a central policy priority for the UK and Scottish governments, yet beyond income measures policymakers still know relatively little about how extra income supports living standards, or about the wider impacts of benefits on children’s outcomes. Existing evidence on how benefits are spent is mainly drawn from outside the UK, studies historic policies, and relies on small-sample survey data ill-suited to precise estimates of effects on spending, or to examining dynamic effects such as expenditure volatility, which are crucial to answering these questions.
Using FINDS financial data, this project will estimate precisely how benefits targeted at families with children, including the Scottish Child Payment and the two-child limit to Universal Credit, are spent, and their effects on expenditure volatility and financial distress.
Fluctuating Finances: Instability in Individuals’ Incomes and Spending
Research Lead: Professor Stephen P. Jenkins is Professor of Economic and Social Policy at the LSE. He is an applied economist and quantitative generalist with much of his research about income inequality and income dynamics, based on both household survey data and administrative data. Amongst recent research, he has documented month-to-month employee earnings volatility in the UK using HMRC PAYE data (with Brewer and Cominetti). With his FINDS fellowship, Stephen will develop this work in several directions.
Project: Individuals’ financial resilience depends on the size and frequency of ‘shocks’ they receive and their abilities to deal with them. While much is known about income and spending differences year on year, far less is understood about how individual finances fluctuate month to month yet most working-age Britons live on a monthly cycle, reflecting how often pay and benefits are received and housing and other major spending commitments are due. Instability is particularly an issue for low-income people, but many high-income people also experience pay volatility, but we know less on how they respond.
Using FINDS’ high-frequency, large-sample data across multiple financial domains, this project will document income and spending instability, analyse how households respond, and assess how patterns differ across income levels.
SME responses to increases in National Living Wage and National Insurance Contributions: Evidence from SME accounting data and the Decision Maker Panel
Research Lead: Professor Paul Mizen is Deputy Dean, Vice Dean (Research) and Professor in Economics at King’s Business School, King’s College London. Paul’s research interests are in matters related to economic statistics, business investment, uncertainty and productivity. He is Principal Investigator of the Decision Maker Panel, a consultant to the Bank of England and a member of the Leadership Executive of ESCoE. He is a former member of the National Statistician’s Committee Advising on Standards in Economic Statistics (NSCASE) and a member of the Government of Jersey Fiscal Policy Panel. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Academy of Social Sciences and Vice President of the Money Macro and Finance Society. He was awarded Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the King’s Birthday Honours List in 2026.
Project: The April 2025 increases to the National Living Wage and employer National Insurance Contributions have raised firms’ labour costs significantly. These have increased firms’ labour costs, and businesses must absorb these additional costs by either increasing prices, lowering profit margins, reducing employment, or adjusting wages. How businesses respond is of interest to the Low Pay Commission, as well as the Bank of England, which is paying close attention to the effects of these policies on inflation dynamics and the labour market.
Using FINDS’ access to SME accounting data for small and micro businesses—a population largely absent from existing surveys—alongside the Decision Maker Panel, this project will examine how SMEs have responded through pricing, margins, employment, and wages. Findings will directly inform the Low Pay Commission and the Bank of England’s assessment of wage pressures and inflation dynamics.
Exploring Fair Access to Free Personal Care in Scotland
Research Lead: Dr Elizabeth Lemmon is a Lecturer in Health Economics and Econometrics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the economics of health and social care in Scotland. Using linked administrative data, she works to build a population-level picture of how care is provided across Scotland, uncovering inequities and understanding costs. Her FINDS Fellowship will explore fair access to Free Personal Care in Scotland. Elizabeth is passionate about using routinely collected data to produce evidence that informs policy and improves people's lives. She is equally passionate about supporting other researchers to navigate Scotland’s administrative data landscape.
Project: Scotland’s Free Personal Care policy is intended to ensure that people receive support based on need rather than their ability to pay. However, despite its universal design, local areas with similar levels of health and deprivation appear to receive very different levels of care. At the same time, communities across Scotland experience increasing financial pressures, income instability, and rising demand for support as people live longer with multiple health conditions.
Using FINDS data alongside national social care, population, and health datasets, this project will produce the first integrated evidence on how local economic conditions and health needs combine to shape access to care - with direct implications for Scottish Government planning and local authority commissioning.
