The financial crisis of 2007/08 has highlighted the need for using granular data3 on financial institutions and markets to detect risks and imbalances in the financial sector. Administrative data producers are witnessing a growing need to improve granular data access and sharing. Sharing granular data is fraught with significant legal and technical challenges related to, among others, safeguarding statistical confidentiality. This presentation introduces the international network INEXDA, which provides a platform for administrative data producers to exchange practical experiences on the accessibility of granular data, on metadata as well as on techniques for statistical analysis and data protection.
To meet the demand of data users and data compilers for (granular) data sharing and to facilitate the implementation of Recommendation II.20 of DGI-2, a group of central banks established the International Network for Exchanging Experience on Statistical Handling of Granular Data (INEXDA) on 6 January 2017. Current INEXDA members are the Banco de Espãna, Banca d'Italia, the Banco de Portugal, the Bank of England, the Banque de France, the Deutsche Bundesbank, and the European Central Bank. However, in accordance with the objectives of INEXDA outlined below, participation is open to other central banks, national statistical institutes and international organisations.
Among other developments, this presentation also introduces the metadata schema used by INEXDA to describe granular datasets from different countries. The schema, agreed on by all members, facilitates a comprehensive inventory of existing granular datasets conducted in the member institutions. This inventory, in turn, will foster harmonisation activities between INEXDA members, broaden metadata and potentially future data sharing between institutions represented in the network, and pave the way for metadata on publicly available granular datasets to be shared with external researchers. The INEXDA metadata schema was developed to be easily adaptable for non-INEXDA institutions.