Dougie Robb: The power of financial data 

Every time you use your card, pay a bill or even get paid, financial data is created.  

Between your bank and that coffee shop you go to every day, data is filed away in your bank’s system, creating your statement at the end of the month.  

But what use is this data? Past knowing how much you spend a week on flat whites, it doesn’t hold much additional value to an individual. But, if you take an individual's banking data and add it to the data of over 5.3 million people, it becomes a lot more useful.  

That's where Dougie Robb, the chief executive of the Edinburgh-based Smart Data Foundry (SDF), steps in.  

“What we do is work with the public and the private sector to encourage them to share their data with us so,” says Robb. “Then we can then curate it and make it available to the research community and public sector for decision-making purposes.” 

The SDF was established in 2022 as a University of Edinburgh subsidiary company that operates as an independent, not-for-profit organisation focused on tackling issues like poverty and inequality using banking data collected through the Financial Data Service (FINDS). 

The data, which is collected in collaboration with major financial institutions, including the NatWest Group and the Financial Conduct Authority, is used to understand the economic dynamics at play in people’s lives. 

“We're making data available to researchers that has never been available to them before,” says Robb. “Our own mission-related research themes are around socio-economic issues and economic growth and productivity. So, we're really looking for researchers who are interested in furthering their own research in those areas and making use of this data.” 

Using this resource provided by the SDF, researchers from across the UK can access de-identified microdata and curated data collections that cover a range of financial variables from income categories like salary and investments to expenditures like gambling and travel costs. 

“We think our data can help policymakers understand things like economic inactivity in the country,” says Robb. “We can understand the intersections between things like age, gender, health conditions, ethnicities and workforce participation and then we can help identify it and remove obstacles that are preventing people from working.” 

Dougie Robb | Credit: Smart Data Foundry

By collecting data from a huge database of banking customers, along with tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, the SDF can also offer researchers a virtual Aladdin’s cave of information into the spending and saving habits of the population.  

“An example of a good research project uses the data that we get from [the accounting platform] Sage to look at the impact of adverse weather events on SME cash flow,” says Robb. “This is really granular data, but in some cases it is transactional and in other cases it's slightly aggregated, but that just shows how detailed you can get with this data.”

The data is only accessible to approved researchers from universities who pass the SDF’s rigorous ethics and selection process and public bodies like local councils and governments. Those with business interests are strictly prohibited from accessing the data. To ensure this process is airtight, the SDF operates as a Trusted Research Environment (TRE), where data is stored in a secure system and researchers use built-in tools to analyse it, ensuring the data is not downloaded or extracted. 

The infrastructure for this TRE data storage system is provided by the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh. It is used by NHS Scotland to store its patient data and is the home of one of the UK’s fastest supercomputers, Archer2. The EPCC is also the site of the UK’s next supercomputer project, funded with a grant of £750m by the UK Government and forecast to come online in 2027. 

“The data that comes into us is anonymised by the data-sharing institution and when it comes in, we run rigorous checks to make sure that it is anonymised,” says Robb.

“Because we don't want to run the risk of being able to potentially identify someone. It's something that we take very seriously, which is why we use the facilities at EPCC and why we've got these safeguards and checks in place to make sure that the data is secure, because we understand how privileged we are to be able to work with it.”