German bank proprietary customer data (restricted access)

Confidential single-counterparty data: not exercised here

This is confidential data from a single bank (kept anonymous). It is not for sale, not publicly downloadable, and not re-obtainable without the same agreement: it carries no provenance badge because there is no access path we can run here. Researchers obtained it under a confidential agreement with the bank. The page documents what the data is and the gotchas; treat it as unverified. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

The proprietary bank data is the individual-level customer record from one anonymous German bank: financial-product holdings, wealth, income, and stock-market participation for a sample of customers. It complements survey and broker data by observing balance-sheet and participation measures inside a single institution. A paper we distill uses it: Laudenbach, Malmendier & Niessen-Ruenzi use proprietary bank data on 326,437 randomly selected customers (2019) for financial-product holdings, wealth, income, and stock-market participation, alongside the Bilendi survey and the online-broker data.

• Cost: not for sale. Confidential single-counterparty data.
• Source: an anonymous German bank.
• Coverage: the bank’s own customers, not the German population; a cross-sectional sample of customer records.

Access (restricted)

• No public download and no resale. The data is the bank’s confidential customer records; it cannot be purchased or redistributed.
• Through a confidential agreement with the bank. Access required a research agreement, and the bank’s identity is not disclosed. There is no standing way for a third party to reach the same data.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• One bank is a selected clientele. The sample is this bank’s customers, who differ from the population on who banks where; external validity is the central caveat. Do not generalize participation or wealth to all Germans.
• Holdings at this bank, not total wealth. Wealth and product holdings are what this bank sees; assets at other institutions are missing, so wealth and participation can be understated. Treat it as a partial balance sheet.
• Cross-section, not panel. The data is a snapshot (here 2019); it cannot speak to within-person dynamics. Match the question to the cross-sectional design.
• Income is bank-observed. Income is inferred from what the bank records (inflows, declared income), not a tax authority; it is noisier than administrative income. Treat it as a proxy.
• Not redistributable and bank stays anonymous. Results can be reported but the microdata cannot be shared and the bank is not named, limiting external replication. Plan for non-reproducibility of the raw inputs.

Citation

Cite the source and arrangement, e.g.: Proprietary retail-bank customer data (anonymous German bank), confidential; used under agreement, YYYY-MM-DD. State the snapshot date, the sample size, and that holdings reflect one institution.