Real-time Anatomy of the Cost-of-living Crisis

The UK cost-of-living crisis, brought on by shifts in the economic landscape, has disproportionately affected many of the poorest in our society, many of whom must rely on short-term loans for living essentials. This paper presents one of the very first geographic analyses of Open Banking Smart Data, a temporally continuous source, which underpins developments in FinTech. This holds potential for understanding the circumstances and behaviours which drive short-term loan demand as well as developing fairer measures of financial