Economic Wellbeing Explorer
A groundbreaking map-based platform offering powerful insights into economic wellbeing across national, regional and local levels.
Introducing the Economic Wellbeing Explorer
The Economic Wellbeing Explorer is Smart Data Foundry’s map-based insights tool, allowing users to explore trends and themes in economic wellbeing at a national, regional and local level.
Tailored for governments, NGOs, policy teams, and service providers, this innovative tool presents a dynamic, multi-level view of financial wellbeing—empowering smarter resource planning, service design, policy development, and evidence-driven interventions.
By providing actionable, data-driven insights, the Economic Wellbeing Explorer helps policymakers, analysts, economists, and service providers make informed decisions that drive impactful change—reducing poverty, tackling inequality, and improving overall economic wellbeing.
Launching first in Scotland, the Economic Wellbeing Explorer offers an unparalleled opportunity to harness data for smarter decision-making. Whether shaping national policy, optimising regional resource allocation, or refining local service delivery, the Explorer can provide the insights needed to create meaningful, lasting change.
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Unlock the power of data-driven decision making
Support evidence based policy
Leverage robust data insights from near-real time financial data to understand financial realities for different economic sectors and shape policies that directly impact economic wellbeing.
Improve service delivery
Gain deep insights into how people are living at national, regional, and local levels and optimise interventions by identifying and addressing areas in need more effectively.
Track impact over time
Understand how policy changes and interventions affect economic conditions across different areas, and track interventions in near-real time.
A dynamic, interactive view of economic wellbeing
The Explorer’s intuitive map-based interface allows users to navigate effortlessly between national, regional, and local views. By zooming in and out across different levels, policymakers and service providers can easily compare key economic wellbeing indicators and assess the impact of economic trends and interventions.
Indicators currently include metrics on spending behaviour and financial resilience, which can be explored by geography, time, age range and income range, as well as compared with contextual open data. Indictors can also be explored alongside purpose-shared data (subscription required).
register interestGet detailed national, regional and local insights
Powered by ground-breaking data partnerships
Smart Data Foundry works with trusted data partners to responsibly share de-identified financial data for good. This data is used in research, policy making and public service delivery and supports decisions which improve economic wellbeing and reduce poverty and inequality.
The Economic Wellbeing Explorer is underpinned by a dataset built on 5.3 million consumer bank accounts dating back to November 2023. This data is regularly shared by our data partners, prepared and aggregated by our data science team to produce the indicators you can interrogate in the Explorer.
The Economic Wellbeing Explorer also supports comparing these financial indicators against open data or purpose-shared data (subscription required).
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From insight to impact: local government use-case
A local authority has pioneered the use of de-identified private sector financial data, explored via a map-based dashboard, to identify areas of hidden child poverty, target the delivery of services and support and help local schools to better understand the impact of financial insecurity on their pupils.
"This project illustrates the work that can be undertaken to support households in their times of need...With that shift to early intervention, we have the opportunity to work to contribute to making the public finances and public services more sustainable as a consequence..."
- Name
- John Swinney
- Role
- First Minister of Scotland
Coming soon: The Smart Data Foundry Economic Nowcast
The Smart Data Foundry Nowcast will provide policymakers, analysts, and service providers with the timely insights they need for proactive decision-making, enhancing their ability to quickly and effectively respond to economic challenges.
The Economic Nowcast will track economic wellbeing indicators in near-real time, providing a clear picture of how economic factors such as inflation or wage growth are impacting the population, as well as the financial resilience of UK households and SMEs.
Sign up below to be the first to know when the Economic Nowcast is live.
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Be the first to know when we launch
Complete the form and we will make sure you're the first to know when the Economic Wellbeing Explorer and Economic Nowcast are live.