The magic behind an optimised consumer spending panel

At Fable Data we have been very busy working to meet the demand for anonymous European spending data. 2019 was a particularly busy year for us as we onboarded numerous data partners from far and wide across Europe to form our inaugural large scale spending panel.

Throughout the last 12 months, as the opportunity for data monetisation became better understood by banks, personal finance and credit card companies, we were able to select spending data from a 6m+ user base. By determining the best mix of accounts we were able to cherry pick the top million+ in order to generate the highest utility launch panel and the best consumer intelligence for our clients.

Our data scientists were tasked with operating a market beating selection process, meaning that our data set is setting new standards in its richness and timeliness in Europe. For example, it allows our investment clients to understand the performance of consumer companies in real time and weeks in advance of quarterly earnings results. But beyond stock market insights, the data allows our clients to understand market share, customer churn, retention, cross shopping and switching trends for all those wishing to know a customer base in the most granular detail. We have also been able to map consumer demand by location for corporate planning and geographic investment decisions. The use cases for our data are far reaching, but this is only true due to our ability to cherry pick the best accounts. With all our data partners we went through an audit process to analyse the account spending attributes in relation to panel size and value, spending categories and merchants.

Spend frequency and value – High account spend frequency and value creates a large panel of statistically diverse users per country, ensuring a strong degree of confidence in our data. Consumer spend from sticky financial products are a priority since this allows our clients to track acquisition, retention and churn.

Stratification – The demographic and geographic diversity of our accounts is highly important so our panel is unskewed and statistically representative.

Category diversity – The richness of account data can be represented via the number of categories shopped at with a bias away single purpose usage. Consumers with monthly penetration into multiple categories give the best signal.

Merchant diversity – It is important that a number of merchants are featured in each valuable customer account to avoid single merchant usage.

Tradeable entities – Data value is aligned with the presence of European and global stock tickers for our investment clients. We also have signals on many Fintechs, private companies and payment providers which are valuable ahead of IPOs.

The magic mix – The strength of our consumer spending panel relies on the fact that it draws from numerous different data sources with checks and balances on key metrics such as demographic skews and merchant spread. We have combined feeds from credit cards, debit cards and current accounts. Our data scientists balance the user attributes across the panel by taking the best sample from each of our data partners to create the most stratified final product. This means that with only 1.5% population coverage, our spend data is highly predictive of the whole economy.

Please message stephanie@fabledata.com to discuss how our dataset can help you.