Abstract
There is a constantly growing demand for accessible transactional data, not only for analytical purposes, but also to support the rapid global adoption of open banking. Around a quarter of the world’s data is generated by financial institutions (Winship et al., 2016), with an estimated total of 708.5 billion global non-cash transactions between 2018 to 2019 (Capgemini Research Institute, 2020). Open banking is still a developing concept where there is an opportunity to create a secure mechanism for connecting the various stakeholders to openly, legitimately, and consensually share the data required for open banking. Integration and data sharing are still managed in silos and centralised in the ecosystem between the larger entities that have the resources to do so. Smaller fintechs generating data and businesses looking to consume data are largely excluded from the process.
The Big Transactional Data Marketplace, or BTDM, is a proposed solution framework that aims to provide a secure decentralised marketplace for data providers to list their transactional data; data consumers to find and access that data; and data subjects (the individuals making the transactions that generate the data), for managing the data that relates to themselves. The platform also aims to enable an integrated system for downstream transaction-related data from merchants, enriching the data product available to build a comprehensive view of a data subject’s spending habits. A robust and sustainable data market can be developed by providing a more accessible mechanism for data producers to monetise their data investments, and encourage data subjects to share their data through the same financial incentives. This platform can ultimately support the growth, prosperity and development of economies, businesses, communities and individuals, by providing accessible and relevant transactional data for big data analytics and open banking.
This thesis applies a Design Science Research approach, backed by an in-depth literature review of the current domain, to identify three core problem statements and one major opportunity. 1 – Limited access to transaction data for big data analytics, 2 - The difficulty that data suppliers face in monetising their data, 3 - Exclusivity and inaccessibility of centralised platforms, and lastly 4 - The opportunity in open banking. A systems development architecture design was chosen as the derived output artefacts of the methodology and base of the framework. A working prototype was methodically selected as the most suited evaluation method for the
3 | A d e s i g n f r a m e w o r k f o r a n o p e n m a r k e t p l a t f o r m o f e n r i c h e d
c a r d - b a s e d t r a n s a c t i o n a l d a t a f o r b i g d a t a a n a l y t i c s a n d o p e n b a n k i n g
solution. This was implemented through an Ethereum-based blockchain contract of the core functions of the BTDM which demonstrated the practical deployment of the design framework.
The paper concludes by summarising and evaluating the findings and conclusions of the research, and whether the provided artefacts could indeed adequately address the initial problem statements and opportunity. It also identifies the current shortfalls and limitations of the solution, the industry and the existing technologies available. Lastly, it proposes the steps that can be taken to develop the BTDM further given the positive results of the research so far.