rbrsa: An R Package for Turkish Banking Sector Data

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.

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.

Related Packages

• 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

install.packages("rbrsa")

The development version can be installed from GitHub:

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

Getting started

Full package documentation with function references is available at: https://obakis.github.io/rbrsa/

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")