rbrsa: An R Package for Turkish Banking Sector Data

Documentation

An R package for programmatic access to Turkish banking sector data from the Turkish Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BRSA, known as BDDK in Turkish). The package provides R users with a clean interface to fetch monthly and quarterly banking statistics, financial reports, and sectoral indicators directly from BRSA’s official APIs. Specifically, The package retrieves tables from two distinct publication portals maintained by the BRSA:

Key Features

  • Direct API access to BRSA monthly bulletins (17 financial tables)
  • Quarterly FinTurk data with city-level granularity (7 tables, 82 cities including ‘HEPSI’ for all cities)
  • Consistent parameter interface for both data sources
  • Built-in metadata for tables, banking groups, and provinces
  • Multiple export formats: RDS, CSV, Excel via save_data()
  • Returns base R data frames ready for analysis

Design Philosophy

Lightweight and Authentic: Other packages providing access to BDDK data (like bddkR) also fetch data programmatically, but they add a heavy translation layer -maintaining manual configuration files to map Turkish column names and categorical values to English. This provides user convenience at a high maintenance cost.

rbrsa takes a different path. It interacts directly with the API and uses the data it returns with minimal alteration:

  • For the Monthly Bulletin, it uses the official English column names and labels provided by the API when lang = "en" is set.
  • For the FinTurk dataset, where the API provides data only in Turkish, it returns the authentic Turkish names.

This is a deliberate choice. By avoiding a separate translation file, rbrsa eliminates a major maintenance burden, aiming to adapt instantly to any API changes. This way, the data you see is exactly what the official source provides.

  • bddkR (R): Uses manual configuration for translations and column mappings and provides access only to the Monthly Bulletin.
  • bddk (Python): Provides similar functionality for Python users with the same constraints as bddkR.
  • bddkdata (Python): Provides similar functionality for Python/pandas users with the same constraints as bddkR.
  • pybrsa (Python, forthcoming): Python companion to this package with consistent API.

Installation

You can install from CRAN

The development version can be installed from GitHub:

#install.packages("pak")
pak::pkg_install("obakis/rbrsa")

Getting started

A vignette demonstrating how to use main functions, download and save data from both BDDK and FinTurk interface can be found at: https://obakis.github.io/rbrsa/articles/introduction.html

The rbrsa package retrieves tables from two distinct publication portalsmaintained by the Turkish Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency (BDDK). Both portals are official sources, but they organize the data differently:

  • The Monthly Bulletin Portal provides high-level, summary reports designed for general consumption and quick overviews of monthly trends without any geographic coverage.
  • The FinTurk Data System provides granular, detailed data, including statistics broken down by province, whereas the standard Monthly Bulletin offers national-level aggregates.
library(rbrsa)
## Explore available tables
list_tables("bddk") # list_tables("bddk","tr")
list_tables("finturk")  # list_tables("finturk", "tr")
list_groups("bddk")  
list_groups("bddk","tr")  
list_groups("finturk")

## Monthly data (Table 15: Ratios)
data <- fetch_bddk(2024, 1, 2024, 3, table_no = 15, grup_kod = 10001)

## Quarterly FinTurk data
q_data <- fetch_finturk(2024, 3, 2024, 9, table_no = 1, grup_kod = 10007)

## Save results
temp_file <- tempfile() # filename should be without extension
save_data(q_data, temp_file, format = "csv")