Tale of Three States: Analysis of Large Person-to-Person Online Financial Transactions in Three Baltic Countries

摘要

Person to Person transactions have come a long way from trading goods, then to cash and now the possibility of online transactions. In the era of the internet, individuals often make payments through various financial platforms such as mobile payments, bank’s online interfaces, etc. This paper presents an analysis of a large person-to-person (P2P) financial transactional network of three Baltic countries, namely Estonia, Latvia and, Lithuania. We collaborated with one of the largest financial institutions operating in these three countries to analyse an anonymous dataset of more than two million customers. We modeled these transactions from network science and explored the data with four different objectives. The first objective was to explore the network of transactions from a structural perspective and interpret their meanings. The next two objectives included the attributes of the nodes. In the second objective, we analysed the network for the similarity of interacting nodes in terms of income level. In the third objective, we analysed the spending pattern similarity among the interacting customers. The fourth objective aimed at exploring the relation between income and spending patterns. Our results indicate that the online payment network of Estonia is the most intact, among all the three countries, confirming the slogan of e-Estonia and Lithuanian network being the most fragmented. In addition, Latvia and Lithuania are more similar to each other in terms of their income vs. similarity patterns compared to Estonia. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that has studied such a large P2P financial network across three countries and the results of this study can provide insight into the financial behavior of the three Baltic countries.