I'll be giving an online talk for the FS Club (Z/Yen Group)!
📍 Where: Online webinar 📅 When: Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 13:00-13:45 GMT
The talk is called "What Our Card Payments & Mobile Data Say About How We Live", and it's kindly sponsored by Northeastern University London.
The order in which people make purchases can sort a city's residents into distinct lifestyles. I'll be talking about how combining anonymised credit card transactions with mobile phone data reveals patterns in how much people spend, how far they travel, where they live and how varied their social circles are - patterns that also divide along familiar lines like gender and age.
I'll discuss what this means for studying urban inequality, how factors like time of day and urban planning shape social stratification, and how these records - already held by banks and mobile networks - can help fill real gaps in our knowledge of women's economic lives in particular, and even track how a recession or rising prices change spending across groups almost in real time.
The session will be chaired by Professor Michael Mainelli, Chairman of Z/Yen Group.
🔗 Register for free: Book your place here