The Salad Money Open Banking Transaction level data were created in collaboration with Salad Money. Salad Money offers a novel approach to lending that does not utilize traditional credit score ratings. Salad Money uses data obtained via the Open Banking standard to securely gather financial data directly from applicants' banks and employs advanced data analytics and affordability checks to evaluate loan eligibility. This approach ensures precision in assessing an individual's ability to meet loan obligations without compromising sensitive login credentials and assesses applicants based on their current financial situation, recognising that a credit score is not the sole indicator of creditworthiness.

The majority of Salad Money applicants are key workers. Initially providing loans only to NHS key workers, Salad Money extended its offer to private sector key workers and set the prerequisites to apply for a loan as follows:

• not self-employed
• have a monthly income of at least £1,400
• maximum amount allowed for a loan is £1,000 payable in 12 or 18 months.

The dataset contains transactions amounts in GBP for categories of spending created by Salad Money. Additional demographic information on the loan applicants is provided.

Content

The dataset contains total transactions and corresponding total amounts in GBP by: day; Salad Money spending category; Salad Money spending subcategory; Salad Money transaction type; Individual user.

The dataset also includes the bank account’s balance minimum and maximum amount for the transaction day. When a user provided more than one bank account, both transactions and balances are summed together to produce total spending and balances by user.

Additional geodemographics, age and sex are provided. The data has been anonymised to avoid identification and protect Salad Money users’ privacy. However, the relatively fine-grained spatial and temporal resolution means it might be possible, in certain circumstances, to infer the identity of a small number of users, based on their approximate location, demographics and spending habit.

The spatial granularity is Output Area level. Researchers interested in the dataset can also request Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOA) and Middle Layer Super Output Areas (MSOA) granularities, where transactions amounts are grouped by geography, day of the transaction, Salad Money transaction category, subcategory and type.

The data is available in CSV, Parquet or database table forms.

For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary, which can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The dataset provides sufficient detailed information about a sample of UK key workers living in financial precarity who applied for a loan through Salad Money. It can still be useful to detect spatial heterogeneity and neighbourhood geodemographics patterns in open banking data transactions.