Scale, Salience, and Hardship: A Comparison of the IMD and Open Banking Data

This paper uses Open Banking data from ~250,000 individuals to pose two questions about the IMD.
Firstly, how do current conceptions of deprivation relate to direct measures of financial hardship, as
measured by application rates for short term loans; and secondly, is the IMD’s spatial resolution
adequate to capture precarity's granular geography. We identify regional IMD variations in capturing
financial precarity and very uneven distributions of financial precarity within Lower-layer Super Output
Areas. These findings have important implications for the conception and measurement of the nature
and extent of pockets of deprivation, and the provision of resources to address it.