The big five personality traits as predictors of financial wellbeing: a big data approach

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2327706 (Table of contents)

Research has posited credit card transactions as highly probable to be grounded on the personality of the card holder. In this research, we investigate whether the big five personality traits of customers derived from credit card transactions predict their financial wellbeing. Our approach uses real data from a private Turkish bank, which contain both the demographic and financial records of 10,172 consumers located in Istanbul with 911,280 transactions. We filter purchasing categories related to the big five personality traits from Matz, Gladstone, and Stillwell’s study (2016). First, we link spending categories to the big five personality traits by considering Matz et al.’s study (2016). Then we calculate the big five factor scores of customers by monthly aggregating the individual big five scores of their transactions. Next, we investigate the relationship between the monthly big five personality scores and payment behavior of their credit card statements. In our main model, we estimated customers’ on-time payment behavior of the full amount due 8.8 % better than a random prediction (with 54.4 % AUROC value) by using their monthly big five personality scores and yearly and six-month based trends as independent variables.