Seventh ECB conference on statistics ‘Towards the banking union –opportunities and challenges for statistics’ ECB (2015). 4  Other European countries have already started to work on this (the Centre d’accès sécurisé aux données in France, the Administrative Data Research Network in the UK and the Deutsche Bundesbank Research Data and Service Centre).
In addition, we need to find solutions to allow us to link microdata belonging to different institutions without compromising individual confidentiality. The explosion of granular data provides many new research opportunities. For all the issues I have highlighted, big data have big potential. In the past two days we have just scratched the surface. More research is surely needed.