Financial Services Research
Harris Interactive’s award-winning, full-service Financial Services Research team combines sector expertise with a rich heritage in market research. We provide leading companies with impactful insights, delivering the advice and guidance they need to make sound, strategic business decisions that ultimately make a difference to their bottom line performance. We offer a comprehensive range of bespoke and agile research solutions, from DIY to full-service, delivering tailored research at the speeds our clients require today.
A Wealth of Financial Services Research Expertise
The financial services sector is complex, ever-changing and contains many diverse sub-sectors; Harris Interactive keeps abreast of developments in the industry and is able to bring its contextual knowledge and experience to bear across all areas. We conduct market research amongst a variety of stakeholders, including consumers, customers, claimants, HNWIs, brokers, IFAs, B2B decision makers and affinity partners. The team is staffed by enthusiastic individuals with a great deal of knowledge, business understanding and research expertise in the sector and who combine agency experience with time spent on the client side. We have a wealth of experience across different types of research including; brand and marketing communications research, product and service development, market understanding, stakeholder relationships, product lifecycle reviews and regulatory-driven research.
Our clients include:
- Retail, commercial and investment banks
- Wealth management / private banks
- Personal and commercial insurers
- Life providers
- Regulatory bodies / trade associations
- Management consultancies
- Aggregators
Case studies
Designing the financial product of the future
Our client was looking to design the ‘account of the future’.... Read More
Online community to support wider consumer understanding
Our client, a leading financial services provider, was looking for a continuous research tool to enable them to undertake regular, agile and cost effective research amongst UK consumers (including their own customers and small businesses).... Read More
Understanding a brand’s future relevance
This financial service organisation had a long running brand tracking solution that predominantly measured established traditional brand metrics such as Awareness, Consideration... Read More
Latest Blogs
Interest on Savings Accounts – what would make you move?
The arrival of COVID 19 caused us all to ‘batten down the hatches’ in many areas of our lives and this study is demonstrating that the Savings market is no different. ... Read More
A Christmas like no other?
With a third (33%) of UK consumers worrying more about money than they did before the pandemic, what does this mean for how they are approaching Christmas?... Read More
Testimonials
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We have enjoyed a strong working relationship with Harris Interactive for a number of years, and this hasn’t happened by accident. Through their flexibility and thoughtful account management, they have always been able to design solutions which take into account the practical realities of our business. Above all, we have benefited from responsive, flexible and attentive service and an account team that ‘just gets it’, giving me the assurance that we can always trust them to come up with answers and to deliver reliably. - Financial Services Insight Manager
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“Concept Testing was quick, efficient and sufficiently flexible to suit our requirements. The online real time system was a good way to engage our stakeholders and excited real interest in the project. It raised the profile of research internally and challenged – positively – expectations of what could be delivered by when.” Customer Insights Manager – UK High Street Bank
How We Help Clients
Below are some examples of how we’ve helped clients recently.
- Improving investment product brochures and website content to aid understanding and help consumers make informed decisions.
- In light of regulatory changes, helping a syndicate of insurers to understand and benchmark how well changes to renewal letters have been implemented from the customers’ point of view.
- Tracking the brand strength of a global investment provider amongst HNWI and senior B2B audiences across the globe, a programme we have supported for over 15 years, including helping them to redefine their positioning on two occasions.
- Identifying the investment needs and complexity of structured products for investors with different levels of financial sophistication for an industry body. Outputs included a bespoke online simulator
- Helping insurance providers understand consumer hunger for, and concerns about ‘Smart technology’
- Establishing which insurance propositions appeal most to consumers, providing the client with real-time data so they could start to consider the implications during fieldwork.
- Measuring the impact of numeracy skills on financial capability.
Exploring attitudes and behaviours to pensions across different age groups, helping our client shine a light on the UK’s pension crisis, including for PR purposes.
- Helping a price comparison website to identify the appeal of potential new propositions to help it decide whether to enter a new market.
Experts
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Michael Worledge
Financial Services Sector HeadMichael is the Harris Interactive Financial Services Sector Head. He joined Harris Interactive in 2005 and has been in market research for over 20 years. After working in consumer and pharmaceutical research as well as ops-project management, Michael has specialised in Financial Services research at Harris. He has extensive consumer and B2B experience across UK and international markets, including market understanding, brand and comms/literature testing, product reviews and new product/service development. Michael has written three papers which have been shortlisted for the Market Research Society Financial Services Research Award, winning once, has a BSc in French and German from Aston University and is a Certified Member of the Market Research Society. -
Mark Foran
Associate DirectorMark is an Associate Director in the Financial Services research team at Harris Interactive. With more than 20 years’ market research experience, Mark has been with Harris for 15 years. While at Harris he has worked across a range of Financial Services sub-sectors including wealth management, investment banking, insurance, pensions and banking. He has also been responsible for quant and qual, ad hoc programmes and trackers, different methodologies and many of our solutions including brand and NPD. Throughout his tenure at Harris, Mark has been responsible for one of the company’s largest tracking studies, rising from Project Manager to Account Director. Mark has a degree in Retail Management from Loughborough University and is a member of the Market Research Society.