MoneyVis: Open Bank Transaction Data for Visualization and Beyond

Abstract

With the rapid evolution of financial technology (FinTech) the importance of analyzing financial transactions is growing in importance. As the prevalence and number of financial transactions grow, so does the necessity of visual analysis tools to study the behavior represented by these transactions. However, real bank transaction data is generally private for security and confidentiality reasons, thus preventing its use for visual analysis and research. We present MoneyData, an anonymized open bank data set spanning seven years worth of transactions for research and analysis purposes. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world retail bank transaction data that has been anonymized and made public for visualization and analysis by other researchers. We describe the data set, its characteristics, and the anonymization process and present some preliminary analysis and images as a starting point for future research. The transactions are also categorized to facilitate understanding. We believe the availability of this open data will greatly benefit the research community and facilitate further study of finance.