About the Bank On National Data (BOND) Hub

The St. Louis Fed’s Bank On National Data (BOND) Hub serves as a national reporting platform for all financial institutions offering certified Bank On accounts.

Financial institutions are asked to submit to the BOND Hub their account data on 25 metrics related to account openings, usage and consistency, and online access. These data allow stakeholders to better understand the market locally, regionally and nationally.

The BOND Hub also allows financial institutions to benchmark the performance of Bank On-certified products and use this information for regulatory examinations of their community services. Additionally, it helps Bank On coalition partners illustrate their progress in promoting local banking access without requiring multiple data requests. The ability to quantify the Bank On initiative’s national impact—and how consumers are opening and using safe, affordable transaction accounts—is an important asset for banking access efforts and demonstrates the market for Bank On-certified accounts.

The goal of this data collection is to understand the demand for and use of Bank On-certified accounts. Results from analyses with a descriptive cross-sectional study design allow us to examine national activity for three categories of metrics: account opening, account usage and consistency, and online access. Further, the design enables the St. Louis Fed to provide detail on takeup and usage rates based on geographic location, proximity to a Bank On coalition, and unbanked and underbanked rates by developing an interactive data tool. Since the St. Louis Fed used a nonexperimental design and did not study the outcomes of Bank On accounts for account holders, annual St. Louis Fed reports based on the data present no causal relationship with Bank On account ownership and the effectiveness of the Bank On initiative.

We hope the reports’ findings will inform financial institutions’ decisions to implement certified Bank On account programs and submit their annual data to the St. Louis Fed through its secure online portal. Data for this study were collected using a purely quantitative method. Financial institutions participating in the data collection were asked to enter into a data-sharing agreement with the St. Louis Fed. Upon full execution of the data-sharing agreement, each institution was invited to submit data securely to the St. Louis Fed. Once the St. Louis Fed received the data from all participating institutions, the data were compiled, cleaned, aggregated by ZIP code (with three or more reporting institutions) and combined into a national data set.

Participating financial institutions provided data for 289 fields, with 24 metrics reported in monthly increments and one metric (“total number of certified accounts opened”) reported on an annual basis. To simplify the data reporting process, it is conducted once a year. Understanding that all institutions may not have data to report for all fields as the reporting infrastructure continues to develop, the St. Louis Fed asked participating institutions to provide the data they could for each of the metrics.The data available in the public file are limited to ZIP codes with three or more financial institutions reporting. As a result, analysis completed using the public data file may not match the results of the St. Louis Fed’s annual reports. The data for each metric were calculated based on the combined total of Bank On-certified accounts reported during the data collection. All data presented were rounded to the nearest whole dollar or percentage and were calculated using the financial institutions’ monthly data weighted by the share of currently opened accounts.The data were cleaned, dropping observations above the 99% percentile, and aggregated using the number of currently opened accounts as the weighting variable. The reason for this procedure is to give each opened account the same importance regardless of the size of the reporting institution by assigning a higher weight to observations that come from an institution with many currently opened accounts relative to another institution with only one currently opened account.

Notes

1. The data available in the public file are limited to ZIP codes with three or more financial institutions reporting. As a result, analysis completed using the public data file may not match the results of the St. Louis Fed’s annual reports.
2. The data were cleaned, dropping observations above the 99% percentile, and aggregated using the number of currently opened accounts as the weighting variable. The reason for this procedure is to give each opened account the same importance regardless of the size of the reporting institution by assigning a higher weight to observations that come from an institution with many currently opened accounts relative to another institution with only one currently opened account.