Research Agenda
Our research agenda is structured around strategic pillars that guide our collaborative efforts, outlined by year.
Research Governance & Ethics Framework
Our research agenda operates under rigorous governance and ethical standards, ensuring responsible stewardship of financial data while maintaining the highest levels of privacy protection and security.
Research priorities are set through our collaborative governance structure, ensuring balanced representation and expert oversight of all initiatives.
- Steering Committee consensus-based priority setting
- Scientific Council expert review and guidance
- Open network participation through transparent calls
All research activities adhere to privacy-by-design principles and the highest international data protection standards, safeguarding individual and institutional data.
- GDPR and international compliance standards
- Secure data handling and anonymization protocols
- Regular audits and oversight mechanisms
Every research project undergoes rigorous ethical review to ensure societal benefit, research integrity, and responsible use of financial transaction data.
- Mandatory pre-registration of research proposals
- Public good focus and open access to insights
- Continuous monitoring of research impact
Research Pillars (2025)
Develop standardized methods to translate bank data into economic information, enabling interoperability with (inter)national accounting standards and robust comparisons of research findings.
Technological advances in the financial sector have enabled pathbreaking behavioural insights into financial decision-making. Still, this financial research field lacks a unifying bottom-up framework to measure and track markers of financial health and stability of households and firms consistently.
Developing a robust framework that is compatible with (inter)national account standards is a core priority of the research network. Harmonizing measurement approaches for economic concepts, such as household consumption and its constitutive elements, is a vital building block that enables comparability across borders and time.
Key Activities:
- Developing foundational principles to guide research using financial transaction data
- Establishing best practices for translating financial transaction data into economic information for research
- Creating standardized methodologies for data processing and analysis
Develop state-of-the-art toolkits to monitor and explicate the financial well-being of households, firms, communities, and the broader economy.
Common standards make it easier to test generalisable theories and compare socioeconomic developments over large geographies. However, without clearly defined policy goals the research collaborative falls short of its mission to advance research that benefits society.
Enfranchising research that reflects social dynamics requires an explicit commitment to address economic questions of societal importance.
Priority Issue Areas:
- Growth, income, labour and wealth
- Inequality
- Social mobility
- Climate change
- Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors
Utilize granular transaction data to address the heterogeneity of households, firms, and other entities. This approach will enhance the design of targeted policies, ensuring they effectively reach those in greatest need and maximize societal benefits.
This pillar emphasizes the importance of targeted policy recommendations, which are essential for creating effective and inclusive economic policies. By utilizing detailed transaction data, researchers can identify nuanced patterns and trends that may be overlooked in aggregate analyses.
Key Activities:
- Developing analytical techniques to dissect financial transaction data, providing insights into the behaviour of households and firms
- Evaluating the distributional effects of economic policies, ensuring that interventions are equitable and effective
- Creating data-driven policy recommendations that address the specific needs of various demographic groups