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Settlement of bank cards in trade - creating an open dataset and infographic in Google Data Studio

This is my first publication on Habré. I am interested in and partly practicing data journalism and would like to share with you infographics illustrating bank card payments in trade. And also to share the open dataset in Data.World, and talk about the creation of this project.

So, the final infographic:



→ Link to the same report in a much more interesting interactive form
→ Link to an open dataset (registration on Data.World is required).

By the way, unfortunately, it was not possible to embed the report in the publication on Habré either through the iframe or the oembed tag.

Background of the project

Due to my professional interests in the payment industry, I periodically monitor the statistics of the Bank of Russia related to settlements with bank cards. So, recently I turned to the topic of card settlements in the article “More acquiring!” where already operated with some data from this project.

The quality of the statistics of the Central Bank is very mediocre. If you wish, you can find some insights, but the nature of the data and especially the presentation format leaves much to be desired.

The shortcomings are as follows:

  • Selective, fragmented dataset.
  • Data is presented only in xlsx. Normal datasets did not appear on the new site either.
  • The structure of Excel tables is poor; various indicators and periods are mixed.

As a result, every time I needed to prepare analytical materials, I had to manually reformat the xlsx-files of the Central Bank and bring them into a digestible form - for example, for the same charts.

Requests for analytics are different: sometimes you look at the acquiring part, at other times the emission component, statistics in a regional context, etc.

Almost every time the statistics of the Central Bank had to be manually re-shoveled, including to bring it together with data from other sources (often from Rosstat).

From time to time, the thought arose in my head that I needed to make some convenient dataset, keep it up to date, and use it. Communication with Ivan Begtinibegtin, the leader of Infoculture and the Evangelist of Open Data, had the idea that open data is good. Therefore, to place such a dataset, apparently, it makes sense in some specialized public repository.

Project History

So, the starting point: the creation of infographics illustrating the state of non-cash payments in Russia.

What for?

  • Use in analytical work.
  • Use as interactive material at meetings, negotiations, at relevant events.
  • Pumping skills in working with data and infographics.

The topic of data journalism and infographics, the services for its creation, and even the courses I was interested in before. There are a lot of reviews on the web on this topic, for example this one ).

Having spent some time studying some of them, I had the impression that, without an idea and a data set, these tools, although attractive, are unlikely to be useful.

This time, as a result of a rather chaotic surfing, I came across the Google Data Studio (GDS) service.

I liked the service, although the first impression was that it was tailored for aggregating and analyzing data from various Google services for webmasters.

What did you like:

  • Flexible and clear work with data sources.
  • A large set of diagrams that are usually automatically drawn correctly and aesthetically.
  • ( , ).
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In principle, the service is arranged quite understandably, but a very sensible article from Texterra.ru helped me quickly master GDS .

The idea to use other Google products in parallel, including for storing data, also impressed me.

To get started, I started experimenting with the simplest storage option - Google Sheets. Surprisingly, this bunch worked crookedly. Data formats flew in the tables; Data Studio sometimes did not recognize them at all.

Plus, in my head there was an idea to make data open, through Google Sheets this is somehow not entirely ideologically correct.

Other Google products that are connected to in Data Studio also seemed to me not quite suitable or complex.

In search of a complete repository of open data, I turned my attention to Data.World - in fact, this service is one of the first listed in the list of third-party GDS connections.

Registration, creation of the first project, and downloading data from the xls-file did not cause any difficulties. The Russian text was automatically transliterated, the data format was not affected.
Connecting with GDS and further use of data (unlike Google Tables) also went flawlessly.



I will not dwell on creating diagrams in GDS in detail. Firstly, I used fairly standard and therefore uninteresting templates. Secondly, although the process of creating charts is different from Excel, it is intuitive.

What's next?

I plan to supplement the dataset with other data related to bank card payments: the number of POS-terminals, retail turnover, regional payments, etc.

I suppose that the output will be 3-4 pages of GDS reports, which will make it possible to get a fairly complete impression of the development of cashless payments in Russia.

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