Today, 'Big' customer retail market data are created in many areas, including grocery retailing, energy, health and wellbeing, insurance, mobile communications and retail banking. Analysis of such sources can offer many new insights into contemporary lifestyles.The vision of the Retail Business Datasafe (RBDS) is to create a service that will open up the data resources routinely collected by the retail business sector to academic research, training and capacity building. The public face of the work will be the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC), which will be developed in association with the Leeds University Consumer Data Research Support Service. RBDS will also conduct a full and novel range of related Big Data research training and capacity building activities, developed in close association with the retail industry. RBDS will provide focus for ESRC's interests in the retail sector and its commitments to capacity building in relation to Big Data research skills. It will also develop a wider service role for other social science research that will benefit from the availability of consumer data. RBDS is a collaboration between University College London, the University of Liverpool and the University of Oxford.