Open Banking: Bank Transaction Categorization

Photo by hellooodesign on Unsplash

You want to attribute automatically a category to your banking transaction? Give each one a specific category according to your behavior?
This article will explain you step by step how you can do that by building categorization engine and help you to manage your money.

The goal is to associate a category for each transaction using only the transaction label (label displayed by the bank).

I. Collect & Label Data

The first step is to collect banking data for this use case. You can download my own banking transactions which I already anonymized or collect your personnel data by exporting yours from the bank app or website.

My own sample of data are available on my github.

The next step is to label this data. Labeling step consist on associate each transaction with a category. This step will help us to train the model. Once the model trained, it will be able to predict the category of any transaction given in input.

• For this step, start by defining all your category for example (Restaurant, Healthcare, food, supermarket, hobby, …).
• Second step, when you have all your category defined, you can associate a category for each transaction using labeling tools like Doccano, Prodigy…