Our Impact Report for 2025

When Smart Data Foundry was established in 2022, we were driven by a simple but ambitious belief: that financial data, when used responsibly, can be a powerful force for public good.

This report reflects not just what we have built, but why it matters - and where we are going next.

Our Mission

At Smart Data Foundry, we believe financial data holds untapped potential to drive meaningful change. By making private sector financial data both accessible and discoverable, we enable impactful research and informed decision-making - helping reduce poverty and inequality and improving economic wellbeing.

In Numbers

2025 was a transformational year for us with major launches across insights and research, the delivery of our new website and significant effort put into delivering new datasets and indicators to support our mission. This has resulted in significant growth in users, the creation of new research projects, national media coverage and greater public awareness of our work.

Reducing Poverty and Inequality

In 2025, we launched the Economic Wellbeing Explorer—a major new data tool designed to strengthen understanding of poverty and economic inequality across Great Britain—equipping the public sector, charities, and researchers with timely, actionable insight into financial hardship. 

The Economic Wellbeing Explorer provides a granular, map-based view of economic wellbeing, allowing users to explore how financial resilience intersects with contextual factors such as geography, demography and more. By making disparities visible, in near real-time, at local and neighbourhood level, the platform supports more targeted responses to inequality and poverty. 

Working with Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Alongside this, we deepened our partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; supplying detailed income volatility datasets and creating our Income Volatility Dashboard, providing 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.

In the last 12 months, research users more than doubled, NGO engagement increased by 163% year-on-year, and government users rose from 7.5% to 18.6% of the user base. These datasets are being used in research conducted at the University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh and the Resolution Foundation.

Understanding Hidden Poverty

Launched to Scotland in May 2025 and to England and Wales in November 2025, the Economic Wellbeing Explorer is already providing insights to a broad spectrum of users, and is being used to tackle hidden poverty, homelessness and economic inactivity.

How we are working with the community 

East Renfrewshire Council

The Economic Wellbeing Explorer has provided East Renfrewshire Council with a comprehensive, near real-time view of local economic wellbeing. It has already delivered valuable insights that are influencing decision-making and enabling resources to be directed more effectively, ensuring that support reaches the people who need it most.

Healthy Homes, Healthy Kids

Healthy Homes, Healthy Kids is a joint initiative led by the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute and the Wellcome Trust. By linking Scotland’s health, housing, and energy-spending data at unprecedented scale, the project reveals how the conditions in which children live directly shape their health outcomes. The project will deliver actionable, evidence-based policy recommendations to reduce health inequities and ensure every child grows up in a home that supports, rather than undermines, their health.

Improving Economic Wellbeing

In 2025, we launched our Economic Nowcast. The Nowcast combines consumer banking and business payroll data to deliver a timely, monthly assessment of economic wellbeing and productivity across the economy. By identifying early indicators of financial stress, income volatility, and potential labour market disruption, the Nowcast enables more responsive action to support economic security and sustain productivity.

These insights have informed economic analysis undertaken with partners such as NatWest Group and Fraser of Allander, and have been presented to an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG). This work is complemented by our ongoing collaboration with Sage and cebr to produce a quarterly SMB Tracker. This provides detailed insight into the financial health, performance, and resilience of small and medium-sized businesses, which are an essential driver of employment, productivity, and economic growth. The new Workforce Tracker further strengthens this evidence base by monitoring workforce trends and dynamics across sectors.

Pioneering Data Partnerships

Our mission to unlock private sector data for good is made possible by our pioneering data partners, who are at the forefront of the data for good movement. We are proud to act as a trusted custodian, connecting researchers to their data for the first time and creating secure tools that civil society can use to design interventions which address challenges around poverty, inequality, economic wellbeing and productivity.