Administrative data linked with personal financial management tool

Abstract

Administrative Data: The data comprises the administrative bank records of more than 100,000 clients of a major German bank from 2015 to 2019. The data comprises the clients’ full history of holdings and transactions in various financial instruments, including credit, savings, and investment products. Personal Financial Management Tool: At the end of 2014, the bank launched a Personal Financial Management (PFM) tool within its online-banking environment. The tool categorizes customers’ transactions into different categories of inflows and outflows and is provided free to customers. For customers who activated the tool the categorization feature provides us with direct measures of (regular and irregular) income and consumption. While the tool’s functionalities are comparable to financial applications such as Mint.com the major difference is that the PFM tool in our setting is part of the online-banking environment and not offered by a third party, which potentially improves sample representativeness. In fact, customers at the bank can activate the PFM tool with one click in the online-banking environment, without creating an account, disclosing additional (private) information, or linking external bank accounts. Linked Survey Data: Several projects using the administrative data were complemented by short and simple surveys designed to measure client preferences, beliefs and other behavioral variables potentially driving client financial decisions. The surveys are implemented by the bank and conducted within the bank’s online portal. The survey tool only allows for 5-point Likert scale question types. While anonymized, survey answers can be linked to a client's full administrative data. In the future, we plan to augment the existing infrastructure by conducting (incentivized) surveys on a different platform within the Limesurvey environment and inviting participants via email. This allows creating more complex surveys including online experiments and treatments studies.