Fellows and Projects
We take a collaborative approach to providing high-quality financial data for the UK research community. By supporting academic research into the root causes of poverty, inequality, and economic wellbeing, we help uncover insights that inform meaningful solutions. We provide the Financial Data Service for Smart Data Research UK.
FINDS is the Financial Data Service, funded via UKRI’s Smart Data Research UK programme. One of six data services, FINDS provides the UK research community with free access to FINDS data and enables research that can transform our understanding of how economic shocks and policy interventions affect different communities, helping policymakers design more targeted and effective responses to economic challenges.
FINDS is a collaboration between Smart Data Foundry and the University of Edinburgh.
The FINDS Fellowships
These FINDS Fellowship provide funding to support innovative, data-driven research projects that use our secure, deidentified financial datasets to explore key societal challenges.
The £430,000+ funding for this Fellowship is provided via our grant from SDR UK.
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
Fluctuating Finances: Instability in Individuals’ Incomes and Spending
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. She intends to handle the inherent difficulties of these areas by researching regional discrepancies and employing advanced segmentation algorithms. Her research aims to contribute to the creation of data-driven frameworks that guide policies based on evidence and promote socioeconomic outcomes.
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.
This fellowship will use FINDS income and spending dynamics data to produce the first comprehensive, transaction-based evidence on youth financial vulnerability. I will:
- develop financial vulnerability metrics from transaction data
- identify how vulnerability emerges across age bands and geographies
- document systemic youth penalties through age-differentiated benefits
- create a Youth Financial Vulnerability Index for ongoing policy monitoring
The fellowship intends to deliver academic publications, policy briefs for DWP and the Youth Financial Vulnerability Index as an ongoing monitoring tool. Young Scot, Scotland's national youth charity, will provide contextual interpretation of findings based on their ongoing engagement with young people, ensuring findings are grounded in lived experience and communicated appropriately. Research findings will be disseminated to third-sector and financial services organisations via EFI's Compassion in Financial Services Hub (CiFSH) and Young Scot's networks, while public-facing outputs, including blog posts, will be produced through existing EFI and Young Scot communication channels. These outputs will inform targeted youth support programmes, provide evidence for policy reviews and financial service redesign, and advance FINDS’ missions to reduce inequality and improve economic wellbeing.
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, and benefit policy is a key lever. Yet policymakers still know relatively little about how extra income supports living standards, beyond quantifying effects on incomes, 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.
This fellowship will use FINDS’ financial data to estimate precisely how benefits targeted at families with children are spent, and their effects on expenditure volatility and financial distress. The project will focus on Scottish Child Payments (SCP) and the two-child limit to Universal Credit. It will add important evidence on the effects of these policies on living standards, and complement a broader research agenda on the wider impacts of benefits on children’s development, shedding light on the mechanisms by which income might affect education, health and other outcomes. This will inform more effective policy making, at a time when governments want to reduce child income poverty and tackle wider inequalities between richer and poorer children.
Outputs will include a flagship policy report, an accessible briefing, interactive data-visualization, a write-up within a broader academic paper, and FINDS-focused technical resources to support other researchers and public bodies using this new data resource.
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. Although we know much about pay, income, and spending differences across people at a point in time (cross-sectional inequalities), we know little about how individuals’ finances fluctuate over time (longitudinal instability – shocks). Information about instability mostly concerns year-to-year fluctuations. 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 an acute issue for low-income people because they are least likely to have resources such as savings to tide them over. Many high-income people experience pay volatility too, but we don’t know whether they respond via spending or saving. Filling these gaps is the project aim.
The objectives are to document the fluctuations in working-age individuals’ finances, analyse how spending responds to pay and income instability (and vice versa), and how patterns differ across people, including at different income levels. I exploit FINDS strengths: high frequency observations over multiple years; very large samples; multiple financial domains (pay, income, spending, account balances); also allowing subgroup and source breakdowns.
Outputs are working papers, journal articles, blog posts and policy briefs, stakeholder meetings and presentations, and an end-of-project findings workshop. Impacts are new evidence, unavailable from surveys and administrative statistics, about individuals’ financial fluctuations, informing design of policies to enhance financial resilience (e.g., savings products, employers’ pay frequency choices), and the income-smoothing role of universal credit.
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:
This project will analyse recent increases in the National Living Wage (NLW) and employer National Insurance Contributions (NICs) announced in the 2024 Autumn Budget and implemented in April 2025. 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 (which makes the NLW recommendations), 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.
The challenge is to obtain data on micro firms across a wide range of businesses, sectors and geographies. The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings only records 1% of the employment population, which tends to disproportionally sample large firms. The Labour Force Survey has unreliable data due to sampling issues. The Decision Maker Panel (DMP) at the Bank of England (Bank) surveys small firms with more than ten employees, but this omits micro firms. Using FINDS data we will be able to access SME accounting records for SMEs that includes micro firms, overcoming a major data collection issue.
The aim is to explore the effects of NLW and NICs increases on small firms, measured by their response (higher prices, lower profit margins, lower employment). This will help policymakers such as LPC and Bank to understand wage pressures in the labour market and inflation. We will publish our findings as official reports, blogs and journals.
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 (FPC) policy is intended to ensure that people receive support based on need rather than 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. Yet, no research has examined whether local financial circumstances play a role in shaping who receives FPC and how much care is delivered.
This fellowship will investigate whether FPC is delivered fairly across Scotland. It will examine how local need, patterns of ill-health, financial vulnerability and healthcare use are related to the level of FPC provided in each area. The study will use secure, aggregated data from the FINDS programme alongside national social care data, population indicators, and detailed health measures from DataLoch.
The project will produce a set of practical and accessible outputs: a peer-reviewed research paper, a policy briefing for the Scottish Government, an interactive online dashboard allowing users to explore local patterns of care, and a public-facing summary with and accompanying infographic.
The findings will provide the first integrated evidence on how economic conditions and health needs combine to shape access to FPC. This will help government, local authorities, care providers and communities to understand where provision may be falling short, support more transparent and equitable planning, and contribute to improving care for older people across Scotland.
What data can I access?
Thanks to our trusted data partners, we provide access to previously inaccessible near real time consumer and SME financial data. This data is volumetrically, geographically, and demographically representative.
Our de-identified microdata and curated data collections offer exceptional granularity, covering a wide range of financial variables. With persistent IDs, researchers can track individuals over a 5-year period, supporting robust longitudinal analysis. This supports the identification of long-term trends and generates valuable insights into pressing social and economic challenges.
