What is Financial Services Market Research?

Financial services market research is the systematic study of how people choose, use, and think about banking, insurance, payments, credit, investments, and other financial products and services.

Few industries have access to more customer data. Banks can see transactions. Insurers can see claims. Payment providers can see spending patterns. Digital platforms can see how customers move through an application or abandon a journey.

Yet having more data does not necessarily mean understanding customers better.

A bank may know that customers repeatedly check their accounts at the end of the month without knowing what they are looking for. An insurer may know where customers abandon an application, but not what made them hesitate. A fintech may see strong adoption but have little idea whether customers trust the brand itself or simply find the product convenient.

That is where financial services market research becomes useful.

It puts behaviour into context. It helps financial institutions understand not only what customers are doing, but why they are doing it, what they need next, and what could make them behave differently.

And it does so in an industry where privacy, regulation, risk, and trust impose constraints on research that many other sectors do not face.

What is financial services market research used for?

Financial services research can support decisions across the life of a product, brand, or customer relationship.

The research question matters more than the methodology. A bank trying to understand why customers are leaving needs a different research design from an insurer developing a new proposition or a payments company considering entry into another market.

Common applications include:

Customer experience and journey research

Financial journeys are often long, fragmented and emotionally loaded. Opening an account, applying for credit, making an insurance claim, transferring a large sum of money, or choosing an investment product can involve multiple channels and several decision points.

Customer experience research can identify where friction occurs, what customers expect to happen, and which moments have the greatest effect on satisfaction, confidence, or abandonment.

It can also expose problems that operational data alone cannot explain.

Product and concept development

New financial products carry a high cost if the proposition is wrong. Research can help determine whether customers understand a product, whether the benefits matter, where concerns arise, and how people compare it with existing alternatives.

Concept testing can take place well before significant development expenditure, allowing teams to refine products around genuine customer needs rather than internal assumptions.

Brand, trust, and reputation

Trust is central to financial services, but it is not as simple as asking customers whether they trust their bank.

Someone may rate a provider highly while keeping accounts with competitors as a precaution. A customer may trust an institution to hold their money but not to give financial advice. Another may trust a familiar retailer enough to use a financial product embedded within its platform without having any meaningful relationship with the company providing the finance.

Good research separates stated trust from the behaviours that reveal what customers are actually prepared to do.

Customer segmentation

Demographics alone are often a weak explanation of financial behaviour.  Customers of similar ages and incomes can have very different attitudes towards debt, saving, investment, financial risk, and security.

Effective financial services segmentation can combine demographics with needs, attitudes, behaviours, life stages, and product relationships to identify groups that are genuinely useful for product, marketing, and customer strategy.

Pricing and proposition research

Price matters in financial services, but rarely in isolation. Interest rates, fees, rewards, levels of cover, convenience, service, and perceived security can all influence choice.

Pricing research can help establish which trade-offs customers are prepared to make and whether a proposition creates enough value to change behaviour.

Communications and message testing

Financial communications have to do more than persuade. Customers need to understand what is being offered, what it costs, what conditions apply, and, in many cases, the associated risks.

Testing can identify confusing terminology, unintended interpretations, and claims that appear more compelling internally than they do to the people expected to act on them.

Market entry and international expansion

Financial behaviour does not travel neatly from one market to another. Attitudes towards credit, saving, insurance, investment, banks, and digital payments are shaped by local financial systems, culture, regulation, and prior experience.

Research can establish whether an existing proposition translates into a new market or whether the opportunity requires a different product, positioning, or customer strategy.

Why financial services research plays by different rules

Regulation shapes what can be asked, how customer information can be handled, and how findings can ultimately be used.

A compliance review can add another layer to product and communications research. Personal financial information requires careful treatment. Sensitive subjects such as debt, financial hardship, and investment losses also affect how participants should be recruited and interviewed.

But regulation is only part of what makes the category difficult. Financial decisions can carry unusually high consequences. Choosing the wrong breakfast cereal is inconvenient. Choosing the wrong mortgage, investment, insurance cover, or credit product can affect a customer for years.

That changes the research environment.

People may be reluctant to admit financial difficulties. They may rationalise decisions after making them. They may describe themselves as cautious investors, yet behave differently when markets rise. They may claim loyalty to a bank while routinely shopping around. Research based only on stated attitudes can therefore give an incomplete picture.

The strongest financial services research often brings together different forms of evidence: what customers say, what they do, what their journey looks like, and the context in which the decision occurs.

Financial services market research methods

There is no single financial services research method. The right approach depends on the decision the research needs to support.

Quantitative research

Large-scale surveys can establish the size of a market, measure attitudes, compare customer groups, and track changes over time.

They are particularly useful for segmentation, brand tracking, market sizing, customer experience measurement, and testing whether findings identified through qualitative work hold across a larger population.

Qualitative research

Interviews, focus groups, online communities, and other qualitative approaches allow researchers to explore why customers behave as they do.

They are particularly valuable where the issue is complex or sensitive: debt, financial anxiety, trust, investment decisions, insurance claims, or the reasons behind apparently irrational behaviour.

UX and usability research

As more financial interactions move to apps and digital platforms, usability research has become an important part of financial services research.

Watching people attempt to complete an application, understand a transaction, make a payment or use a prototype can reveal problems that customers may never mention in a survey.

Customer journey research

Journey research examines the entire experience rather than evhaluating individual touchpoints in isolation.

It can be particularly valuable in banking and insurance, where a customer may move between digital services, branches, contact centres, brokers, or third parties before completing a task.

Concept and proposition testing

Concept research allows teams to test products and services while they are still relatively inexpensive to change.

It can identify which features matter, what customers misunderstand, what creates resistance, and whether the proposition is sufficiently distinct from alternatives already available.

Brand and market tracking

Tracking provides a consistent view of measures such as awareness, consideration, usage, trust, and preference over time.

For financial brands operating across multiple markets, it can also reveal whether movements are genuinely regional or being driven by changes in particular countries or customer groups.

Behavioural and transactional data

Customer data can reveal patterns that conventional research may miss. But behavioural data generally tells researchers what happened, not necessarily why it happened.

Combining behavioural evidence with research can turn an unexplained pattern into an actionable customer insight.

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Case Studies

DBS shows when customer data is not the same as customer understanding

DBS provides a useful example. The bank built customer research into its Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver framework, using customer observation, transaction data, interviews, personas, and concept testing. One pattern stood out: mobile banking logins increased towards the end of the month.

The data showed the behaviour. The research team then considered the reason behind it: customers appeared to be checking whether their salaries had been deposited.

That observation informed Peek Balance, which allowed customers to see their account balance without completing the full login process.

The significance is not the feature itself. It is the difference between seeing a pattern and understanding what the pattern means.

Transaction data revealed when customers were logging in. Interpretation revealed the need behind the behaviour. That distinction matters across financial services.

An abandoned application, repeated logins, unusual transaction patterns, or changes in product usage are signals. Research can identify the customer's need, concern, or decision that drives it.

HSBC shows financial services research can prevent expensive mistakes

Research also creates value by identifying problems before they become expensive to correct.

HSBC's accessibility research programme works with customers and non-customers with different physical, sensory, and neurodivergent needs to test digital services, prototypes, and other banking experiences.

During work to upgrade cash machines in the UK, HSBC tested a non-functional prototype with users before rollout.

The research established that the screen was positioned too high for some wheelchair users. The design could therefore be corrected before the new machines were built. The same principle applies well beyond accessibility.

Research carried out before development, manufacturing or large-scale launch can uncover assumptions that technical reviews and internal approval processes miss. The later a problem is discovered, the more difficult and expensive it is likely to be to solve.

How financial services market research differs across markets

One of the biggest mistakes in international financial services research is assuming that a customer segment means the same thing everywhere. It often does not.

Financial systems vary considerably between countries. So do experiences with financial institutions, attitudes towards borrowing, levels of financial literacy, adoption of mobile payments and expectations of security.

Even familiar ideas such as financial wellbeing or financial independence may have different meanings across markets.

Kadence encountered this when working with financial comparison platform GoBear to develop a Financial Health Index across Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.

The programme included surveys with 1,000 consumers in each market alongside interviews with financial experts, creating a common framework around financial literacy, security and inclusion.

But the value did not come from forcing four markets into a single regional story. Local interpretation allowed GoBear to turn the research into market-specific communications while maintaining a consistent regional benchmark.

That distinction is important. Global research needs enough consistency to compare markets and enough local understanding to explain why the differences exist.

Without the second part, international benchmarks can describe variation without helping businesses decide what to do about it.

The questions financial services brands are asking right now

The questions facing financial services companies are also changing. Here's what financial brands are asking right now.

Is digital experience becoming part of the product itself?

Customers no longer necessarily separate a financial product from the digital experience used to access it. A competitive rate or strong insurance product can still be undermined by difficult onboarding, poor app design, or unnecessary friction.

Research therefore needs to look beyond satisfaction with the underlying financial product and understand how the complete experience affects retention, consideration, and trust.

Who owns the customer relationship in embedded finance?

Financial services are increasingly appearing inside other customer experiences.

Payments, credit, insurance, and buy-now-pay-later products may be offered at the point of another purchase without the customer actively seeking a financial provider. That creates a difficult research question. Does the customer trust the financial product itself, the company providing it or the retailer or platform through which they encountered it?

The answer has implications for brand building, retention and the ability of financial providers to establish direct customer relationships.

When will customers accept automated financial advice?

Financial institutions are beginning to test more automated forms of financial guidance and recommendation. The research question is not simply whether customers are comfortable with the technology. The consequences of the recommendation matter.

Consumers may accept automation for routine tasks while wanting human reassurance before making decisions involving investments, retirement, debt or substantial financial risk.

Understanding where that boundary sits — and why — will become increasingly important as automated financial services expand.

Is financial pressure changing familiar customer segments?

Cost pressures can alter behaviours long before customers change the way they describe themselves. A previously confident borrower may become cautious. A regular saver may begin drawing down reserves. Someone who once prioritised insurance cover may become more price-sensitive.

Historic segments can therefore become less predictive when the economic circumstances behind them change. Financial services research needs to distinguish between durable customer characteristics and behaviour created by the environment customers currently find themselves in.

From insight to regulatory-safe action

Good financial services research needs to be designed with the environment in which the findings will ultimately be used.

That means involving legal or compliance stakeholders early, where appropriate, rather than discovering after fieldwork that a proposition, message or claim could never reach the market in the form tested.

It can also mean testing communications close to the form customers would genuinely encounter, rather than evaluating an idealised version stripped of the restrictions that will eventually apply.

Done properly, compliance does not sit at the end of research as a final obstacle. It becomes one of the parameters within which the research is designed. The result is more useful evidence because the recommendations have a realistic path into the business.

Why financial services market research matters

The value of financial services market research is not that it gives organisations more information. Most financial institutions already have plenty of information. Its value is in reducing uncertainty around decisions.

• Why are customers leaving?

• Which proposition has the strongest chance of adoption?

• What is creating friction?

• Which customer groups behave differently enough to require a different strategy?

• Will a product work in another market?

• What do customers actually mean when they say they trust a financial institution?

• What problem is hidden inside an unexplained pattern in behavioural data?

• And what could be discovered now that would be considerably more expensive to discover after launch?

The best research makes those questions easier to answer before a business commits to the wrong decision.

What's next for financial services market research?

The distinction between research data and operational data will continue to narrow.

Open banking and transaction-level information can provide a behavioural record against which stated attitudes and intentions can be tested.

At the same time, embedded finance is blurring the boundaries of the category. A customer's experience of a financial service may be shaped as much by a retailer, marketplace, or technology platform as by the institution ultimately providing the product.

Automated recommendations create another layer.

Financial services companies increasingly need to understand not only whether customers trust their product, but whether they trust the mechanism making the recommendation, and under what circumstances that trust disappears.

These questions make financial services research more complex. They also make customer understanding more valuable.

International financial services market research with Kadence

Kadence conducts financial services market research across the US, UK, Europe and Asia, helping organisations understand customers, test propositions, enter new markets, and turn complex customer behaviour into decisions.

Whether you need to understand one market or compare customers across several, the starting point is the same: what decision does the research need to help you make?

Have a financial services research challenge?

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