Statistical tables and charts to transition gradually into dashboards
The Bank of Finland's statistical offering is undergoing a reform. Old statistical tables and charts will be transformed in a controlled manner into interactive dashboards. Following the reform, our statistical offering will be structured more clearly by topic.
Traditionally, statistical information compiled by the Bank of Finland has been provided, in addition to topical statistical releases, as tables and charts. However, a gradual transition is underway where tables and charts are being replaced by Microsoft Power BI reports, or so-called dashboards, which have been under heavy development efforts lately. The background of the reform is the technological obsolescence of old solutions and the need to clarify the statistical offering.
The challenge for tables and charts is to locate the right information from an extensive offering, as there may be several tables and charts around a single topic, based on a given definition or breakdowns. However, for the user, it would often make more sense to review topic areas on a centralised basis from different perspectives or using different breakdowns. Using dashboards, this can be achieved interactively. This means that the user can filter data and change the breakdown or presentation to differ from a set of options defined by our specialists, without the need for several static publications.
The dashboards published so far largely follow the data content of the Bank of Finland's statistical surveys. For example dashboard on credit institutions (banks) provides information on Finnish non-financial corporations’ (NFC) and households’ bank loans and deposits. The data contents are from the RATI (MFI) survey. As regards payment statistics, we have dashboards at three different frequencies (quarterly, semi-annual and annual) because the contents of the payment and fraud data collection vary by frequency. In addition, the annual dashboard is used to combine data from the current and old data collection into longer time series. Additionally, there are dashboards on topics such as other financial institutions’ (OFI) household and NFC loans, securities holdings and issue statistics and housing corporation loans (in Finnish). However, we will also shortly publish dashboards combining data from separate surveys to describe economic phenomena more clearly. As an example, there will be a dashboard on saving and investing, which will combine deposit and securities statistics to provide a comprehensive overall picture of financial assets in different sectors.
In connection with the reform, we intend to discontinue old tables and charts in a controlled manner after the related data contents have been made public in the dashboards. We will seek to communicate the changes well in advance, both within the respective publications and separately. We recommend that those who further process or programmatically access data from tables and figures explore our open data service – for more information, look here. The dashboards utilise time series that can be retrieved from the time series interface of the open data service.
An up-to-date list of the dashboards is available here.
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