Categorisation and aggregation

Summary

One of the core features that fuels the Assess product is Bud's market leading ability to aggregate and categorise financial data and present it in an easy to consume format. With months or years of financial data it can be hard to draw conclusions or see reoccurring behaviour. However, Assess cuts through the fog by leveraging Bud's powerful AI to provide statistical analysis on the following points:

1. Categories - at different levels of granularity
2. Aggregations - logical groupings of categories

Categorisation in Assess

Bud categorisation is market leading and are the foundation on which Assess can provide the most accurate affordability calculations that in turn help our customers make the right decisions quicker.

Buds categorisation returns the type of transaction at two levels of granularity - Category (Level 1/L1) and Sub-category (Level 2/L2). These categories are assigned intelligently to each and every transaction that we ingest from either open banking sources via Connect or via the API via the first party enricher.

Once categorised, and enriched, the transactional data can be more easily processed, understood and leveraged to help understand affordability.

For more information on Bud's list of categories, please use the GET /resources/v2/categories endpoint (here).

Aggregation in Assess

Assess uses predefined groupings that underpin how it works and these groupings are modelled on the SFS standard. The groups, as follow, provide aggregated views of the data and are geared towards affordability assessments.

These groups are:

• Income - incoming transactions which include (but isn't limited to): employment income, benefits, pensions , rental income etc
• Essentials - outgoing costs which most customers will be expected to have during the month (or are unavoidable commitments given their circumstances), such as housing (mortgage or rent), utilities (energy and water), council tax, loans and childcare
• Non-Essentials - outgoing costs which will vary heavily, dependent on the customer's lifestyle (and are hence "optional"), such as eating out/takeaways, holidays, TV streaming services and concerts
• Transfers - money transferred between accounts, or payments to non-merchants (e.g. a internal transfer between accounts, cash transfers to family)
• General - transactions without enough information to be confidently categorised

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These groupings can be found via the API by using bucket with the ID assess-dashboard.

If you have any questions, please contact us via the chatbot (bottom-right of screen 👉) or via a support request or check our FAQs.