New research from the University of Nottingham, in collaboration with Lloyds Banking Group, has used anonymised banking data to show how financial abuse plays out in victim-survivors' everyday financial lives years before they disclose the abuse.
The study, published in Nature, analysed 373 financial and account-management indicators drawn from the banking records of 5,428 women who had disclosed experiences of domestic or financial abuse to Lloyds Banking Group's specialist Domestic and Financial Abuse Team, comparing them with 15,602 matched customers with no known disclosures. The two groups were matched on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics as they stood seven years before disclosure, allowing the researchers to track how their financial lives diverged over time.
The research – which also involved an academic team from Durham University and London Metropolitan University – is one of the first large-scale studies to use administrative banking data, rather than surveys or interviews, to document the lived experience of financial abuse.
Banking data lets us see something that surveys and interviews struggle to capture: objective data on a person's financial life, month by month, over many years. This study shows the effects of financial abuse on victim-survivors are significant and persistent over time."
Compared with the matched control group, victim-survivors showed depleting savings and increasing debt in the years before disclosure, culminating in missed payments and declining credit scores. On average, victim-survivors had higher planned overdrafts, lower savings balances, and were more likely to incur credit card interest, loan repayments, overdraft charges and cash withdrawals. Their credit scores were on average 109 points lower than the matched control group, and they were substantially more likely to miss direct debit payments.
Victim-survivors were also more likely to move onto Universal Credit and disability benefit, and less likely to receive NHS payroll income, than the matched control group.
Banking data provides a unique window into the lived experience of victim-survivors. Our findings show that financial abuse is associated with profound and lasting financial difficulties, with differences evident across many aspects of day-to-day financial behaviour."
The data also showed changes in day-to-day spending. Victim-survivors spent less than the control group on self-care categories such as dental care, opticians and sport. They spent more on off-licence (liquor store) purchases and legal expenses, and less on furniture. Spending on petrol and taxis was higher, while spending on commuting-related travel, such as public transport, was lower — a pattern the researchers suggest may reflect the constrained and safety-conscious circumstances in which many victim-survivors manage everyday travel.
Victim-survivors were also more likely than the control group to change their address, reset their passwords, reorder PINs and report lost or stolen cards, and had more frequent contact with the bank by branch, telephone and internet banking. Rates of remedial payments for fraud and complaints were also higher among victim-survivors.
The researchers also tested the findings against two alternative comparison groups — customers matched on similar levels of financial distress, and a smaller group matched on the date relationships ended rather than the date of disclosure — and found broadly consistent patterns.
The paper is the latest in a series of studies by researchers at the University of Nottingham, Lloyds Banking Group and collaborating institutions that use anonymised banking transaction data to examine outcomes not usually visible in survey data. A team of postdoctoral and PhD researchers funded in partnership with Lloyds, have undertaken groundbreaking research on a variety of socially important topics. The same collaboration has previously used comparable banking data to examine the relationship between gambling and financial, social and health outcomes (Nature Human Behaviour, 2021), the link between workplace inequality and status-signalling spending (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022), the carbon footprint of household spending (Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2023), and early behavioural markers of declining financial capacity (JAMA Network Open, 2025). The financial abuse study extends this programme of work to a further area in which financial behaviour can reveal experiences that are otherwise difficult to evidence.
The paper, Banking records reveal characteristics of financial abuse, is published in Nature.
