The financial services sector is one of the most competitive, fast-moving, and highly regulated in the world. Success demands more than strong products — it requires trust, relevance, and a seamless end-to-end customer experience.
Financial services market research combines qualitative, quantitative, behavioural, and neuroscience methods to provide clear, evidence-based insight that supports strategic decision-making across brands, products, customers, competitors, communications, and experience.
Brandspeak partners with UK and international financial services organisations across B2B and B2C markets, bringing specialist expertise across retail and commercial banking, fintech and challenger banks, investment and asset management, insurance and protection, commercial lending, payments, and accountancy and tax advisory.
Financial services market research gives you the clarity and evidence needed to make confident decisions that will:
In a crowded sector where many brands look and sound alike, mental availability is critical to growth. BrandSpeak uncovers the insights needed to build brand relevance and differentiation.
New propositions and market entry always carry risk. The right insight — at the right time — reduces risk, prevents costly missteps, and maximises commercial potential.
If you don’t know who your priority audiences are, or how to target them, you could be wasting a significant proportion of your marketing budget. Research identifies who to target, how to target them, and the messages they need to hear.
Even the strongest proposition can be undermined if the customer experience introduces friction at key touchpoints. Research identifies where the experience needs to work harder — and how to fix it.
No two financial services research projects are the same — which is why we design every programme from the ground up. We blend proven and advanced techniques to uncover what customers do, think and feel.
A collaborative forum for exploring existing ideas and developing new concepts.
Identify market trends, competitor activity and category insights using desk research.
Observe real-life behaviour to understand authentic actions, needs and decision-making moments.
Explore audience needs, perceptions and behaviours in rich qualitative detail.
Turn complex data into clear insight, revealing patterns, drivers and opportunities
Gather deeper insight through multi-day discussions, tasks and real-world activities.
The following are the project types most frequently commissioned by our financial services
Rather than just monitoring your brand in isolation, our market-leading GrowthTrack solution identifies and measures all the factors that determine brand health and commercial performance across key touchpoints. It also quantifies where the biggest opportunities for brand growth exist.
We analyse how your brand, products, and customer experience compare to competitors to determine where you’re winning, why you’re losing, and where future opportunities exist.
We use a range of customer segmentation techniques to divide your customer base into smaller, targetable segments — each with distinct characteristics and personas that bring them to life for internal stakeholders. A segmentation model will tell you who to target, how, and with what.
Whether launching a current account, insurance solution, or investment product, our research will identify:
– The optimal proposition
– The target customer
– Needs, expectations, and behaviour to address
– Appeal versus competitor propositions
– Overall proposition appeal and commercial potential
We evaluate creative at any stage — early idea through to final execution — to ensure it cuts through, lands your message, and drives commercial impact.
Our research identifies:
– Strength of the creative (clarity, relevance, recall)
– What drives or limits effectiveness
– How it performs versus competitors
– Commercial impact
The outcome? Confidence that your campaign will drive brand growth and commercial return — before you invest media spend.
We support qualitative research in 40+ global markets, working with native-speaking moderators and trusted in-market partners to ensure cultural accuracy and insight quality. Wherever your audience is, we can reach them and deliver insight that drives better decisions.
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Our team will contact you within 24 hours.
We learn about your needs and goals and how to achieve them.
A quick snapshot of the scale and experience we bring to every project.
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Depth Interviews
Brandspeak is proud to be a member of both The Association for Qualitative Research (AQR) and The Market Research Society (MRS) — demonstrating our commitment to quality, ethical practice and industry-leading research standards.
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We worked with Brandspeak on a brand awareness project and we were extremely pleased with the quality of service and the process. They understood the complexity of the briefs and asked plenty of questions to make sure they fully understand the objectives. They interacted with all levels of people in our business and understood the differences within the market and suggested ways to tie the research together so it was still comparable. The results were delivered with easy to digest summaries that could be used across the business. We would highly recommend using them.
Very informative, easy to work with and a really friendly team. I would recommend Brandspeak to help any business grow. They are great quality for money, help niche sectors and present their findings in an understanding manner. They have provided a brand review, market review post-covid to ensure we are still up to date, along with two very valuable website reviews. Working with them for qualitative and quantities research has a been fantastic for us. Thank you for all your help!
It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with Brandspeak on our qualitative assessment of different ads across 5 EU markets. Throughout this project, Brandspeak have been expert, professional and so flexible with our requirements and timings. The research analysis that they provided us with was extremely valuable and insightful. I look forward to working with them again – highly recommend!
Great service from Brandspeak – highly recommend for thoughtful and detailed brand measurement and tracking.
Brandspeak recently conducted a complex and sensitive piece of research for us across the US, China, India and Europe. The work was carried out with the utmost professionalism (particular thanks to Jen!) and has provided us with invaluable insights that exceeded our expectations. A great team to work with and thoroughly recommended!
We wanted to understand how elements of our brand were perceived by consumers and identify opportunities where we could make improvements. Brandspeak clearly understood the brief and worked closely with us to develop a research approach that would answer our questions. The insight has been used to inform the development of our creative and also applied to other areas of our marketing communications. It was a pleasure to work with Brandspeak.
Brandspeak helped us with getting invaluable market insights! They showed great flexibility and professionalism throughout the entire process and provided us exactly with the results we needed. I would recommend working with Brandspeak to anyone and anytime.
From the moment I contacted Brandspeak I can’t thank Jeremy and his team enough. Offering a professional approach they took the time and effort to make the whole process easy and effortless. I highly recommend Brandspeak and look forward to working with them again in the future.
From their initial proposal they displayed an understanding of financial services and a clarity of thinking that made them stand out. Since then they have consistently delivered to demanding timescales. But what really sets them apart are their actionable and business focused recommendations which give them the credibility to influence senior internal stakeholders. I have really enjoyed working with them and look forward to doing so again.
It is always a pleasure – and a relief! – to work with researchers who get the whole thing – effortlessly… a heartfelt thanks.
With offices across major cities we provide global reach with local expertise.
+44 (0) 203 858 0052
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+44 (0) 121 314 4647
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