Financial Services Research 2023

Alex Cook, Head of Product & Customer Strategy, NewDay
Alex has 15 years’ experience in the UK Consumer Credit market working across Product, Marketing and Commercial roles. Currently, Alex is Head of Product at NewDay, a financial services company specialising in retail credit cards and POS financing solutions, with a big focus on technology-enabled credit. Alex led the project to bring Bip to market as a commercially viable and scalable credit proposition. Prior to NewDay, Alex spent six years at Capital One as a business analyst.

Ali Pugh, Co-head, Jigsaw Financial, Jigsaw Research
Ali Pugh is Joint Head of Jigsaw Financial, the largest sector at Jigsaw Research.
She is a specialist in financial services and public sector qualitative research with significant experience in researching vulnerable consumers in both sectors – for life and pensions companies, organisations such as the Money and Pension Services and regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority and Ofcom.
Ali has presented at the MRS Conference and AURA with the Money and Pensions Service on topics such as how to help financially vulnerable households transform their financial well-being and using ethnography to get beneath the skin of financially vulnerable consumers.

Anna Koczwara, Head of Behavioural Science, NatWest
Since gaining a PhD in human decision-making, Anna has been passionate about using science and data to understand how people make sense of the world around them and really make decisions. She’s worked with broad groups, ranging from doctors to police officers and construction workers.
Within the bank, Anna established, built, and leads the Behavioural Science & Applied Psychology Team. The team applies behavioural science and psychological research alongside data-led insights to solve complex problems, shaping propositions and experiences to enable customers and colleagues to reach their potential and thrive.

Anna Miley, Partner, The Foundation

Asha Parmar, X-Change Community Research Lead, C Space
Asha Parmar is an Associate Director of Insight, Innovation and CX at C Space. She has extensive strategic experience both in-house and agency-side for B2C and B2B clients, bringing deep sector expertise in tech, financial and professional services, and automotive.
She is passionate about combining psychological insight and human behaviour to better understand economic decision-making and is the founder of the C Space Behaviour Lab.
Asha is fluent in French and Spanish having spent several years working in France, Argentina and Peru, and has helped clients across the globe, from APAC and MENA, to EMEA and the Americas.

Bri Mcintosh, Research Director, Insites Consulting
Bri is a Research Director at InSites Consulting. He is a specialist qualitative researcher in both online, offline and customer closeness methodologies, with a focus on the financial sector. He is account lead for a number of UK financial services clients, for both online community and ad hoc research and consultancy, with a key focus on ensuring that deliverables provide tangible insights alongside commercially relevant and actionable outputs.
Beyond his consultancy role, Bri is founder and lead for the Financial Services Global Town Hall (FSGTH) forum within InSites Consulting. This initiative brings together senior account leads from across the globe to share insights, monitor and map wider micro trends and act as a live knowledge hub within the business.
Bri is also the co-founder of InSites Out, the global LGBTQIA+ network at InSites Consulting which was introduced to reflect, support and champion colleagues across the globe, and also sits on the Diversity and Inclusion committee within the business.

Daniel Cunill, Director, Market Research UK & Global Head of Mobile, Bilendi

Dr Carol McNaughton Nicholls, Associate Partner, BritainThinks, Financial Services Consumer Panel
Carol has been leading insight, research and strategy for over twenty years, with a particular focus on the financial services industry.  Her work ranges from customer closeness to innovation, communication and proposition development, across diverse topics and audiences – from understanding the lived experiences of vulnerable customers, to the financial management strategies of Gen Z, MPs perception of the industry or how to develop effective anti-fraud campaigns. Throughout her work she applies a lens of understanding that is grounded in consumer psychology and sociological change. Her clients include industry bodies such as the ABI, FLA and The City UK, regulators such as the Financial Conduct Authority and Lending Standards Board, and firms such as Barclays, Nationwide, Lloyds Banking Group, Co-op Bank and Zurich. She also regularly works with the UK Government on preventing fraud and financial crime, and leads the cost of living diaries thought-leadership project at BritainThinks, tracking how the public are responding to rising costs.

Charlie Sim, Partner, The Foundation
Charlie is one of the Partners at The Foundation, an company that helps brands and businesses pioneer on behalf of customers.  He is a strategy, insight and CX expert who has spent many years understand customer needs and behaviour and heling organisations get into better action.  His career has spanned both client side and consultancy, working across sectors and geographies.
He joining The Foundation 12 years ago he has worked with the likes of HSBC, Virgin Media O2, Metro Bank and E.On.  He recently worked with the senior team in Sky to make their CX as good as their products, and helped Asda rediscover how to make customers feel good about great value.
Before the Foundation Charlie worked in marketing ending up in the government where he specialised in behaviour change.  He then added broader commercial and delivery expertise in Capgemini.  When not working, you’ll find him with his family, talking football (or any sport) and drinking red wine.

Christian Blackford, Senior Insights Consultant, Xero 
Christian Blackford is a Senior Insight Consultant working for the global Customer & Market Insight team at Xero. After years of successive growth, Xero are on a mission to make business beautiful for their three million subscribers comprising of notoriously hard-to-reach audiences; small businesses, accountants, and bookkeepers.
After seven years in luxury automotive, Christian made the switch to the FinTech industry in 2021, and supports Xero in bringing the voice of customer to life within the global organisation – with a focus on product development, market-fit, growth opportunities and more.

Cristina Wilkinson-Salamea, Senior Researcher, Clear View

Flora Vieites, Divisional Director - Financial Research Survey (FRS), Ipsos
Flora Vieites heads up the Financial Research Survey (FRS), at Ipsos UK, the largest and longest financial research survey in GB (since 1977). The FRS is a multi client programme that is subscribed to by most of the UK’s major providers of financial services.
Flora has over 20 years market research experience; spanning agency, client side and management consulting roles.
She has written papers /thought pieces and presented at Conferences on topics such as Gender Equality, Financial Wellbeing, Diversity & Inclusion; the latter with Lord Woolley for the MRS and was a judge at the Marketing Effectiveness Awards during the pandemic.

Francis McGee, Member, Financial Services Consumer Panel
Francis is an independent consumer advocate and consultant helping businesses, public bodies and charities with issues around financial services policy and practice. He is a member of the Financial Services Consumer Panel, the Advisory Board of Auden, a fintech consumer credit lender, and an independent member of the governance board of Lenders Compared, a comparison website for cash loans set up by the Competition Commission. He is a former member of the Public Responsibility Oversight Board at Salad Money and of the Open Banking Implementation Entity Steering Group.
Earlier in his career, Francis was Director of External Affairs at StepChange, Head of Corporate Affairs at AEGON UK and Head of Regulation and Strategy at the Association of British Insurers.  Before that he held a number of positions in HM Treasury, the Bank of England and in financial services regulation.

Lisa Edgar, Director, the Big Window  

Lisa has worked in Insight and Strategic Planning for more than 30 years, both on the agency and client side and at Director level for over 20 years.
The Big Window strive to take thinking forward in how motivational and cognitive psychology can be most effectively used for understanding and anticipating consumers’ behaviours. They are particularly interested in the financial decisions consumers make and how our FS clients can support those decisions with the very best products and services. About 75% of their clients are Financial Services clients.
Alongside this, they have developed a very strong understanding the needs of the older market. The population is ageing and older consumers today have the unique combination of health, wealth and time on their hands. Lisa’s quest has been understanding the needs of older consumers through what we provide and the way we do so, all to make consumers’ older years the best years of their lives. It is this quest over the last 10years, being thought leaders in this area, developing a deep understanding of the ageing mind and behaviours that culminated in the Big Window joining the Saga Group PLC early 2022.
Lisa is now in the enviable position of driving the Big Window forward as boutique agency focussing on financial services, as well as leading Saga's understanding of and commercial response to the ageing consumer; enabling it to uniquely fulfil the needs of consumers as they age, responding to them in a way that befits the positive way older people want to live their lives.

Lisa Hulme-Vickerstaff, Head of Customer Research & Insight, Lowell
Lisa is Head of Customer Research and Insight at Lowell.  She brings a wealth of customer and B2B experience from a diverse range of sectors to the FlexMR board.
Lisa has worked in research and insight for over 25 years primarily in client-side organisations including BT, O2, Bupa and Unilever.
At Lowell, Lisa set up their first in-house research and insight team and has helped the business become much closer to their customers in understanding their wants and needs.
In February 2021 working with FlexMR Lisa established Lowell’s customer panel, a first in the debt sector.  The panel membership has grown to over 3000 and increasing by the week.  The Lowell Customer Panel members have been involved in a diverse range of research studies including comms testing, proposition development, service initiatives and UX testing.
Lisa is passionate by the actionability of customer research and is known to read every verbatim comment customers have left in surveys into the several 100’s to ensure customer feedback is not wasted and insight is used.

Louise Mushet, Senior Service Designer, Nile
Louise is a senior service designer who is passionate about using her skills for good. With almost a decade of experience across public, private and third sectors, her main mission is to get everyone thinking like a designer. She's a whizz at driving design research, translating insights into opportunities, and bringing people and ideas together through skilful facilitation.

Ian Roberts, Sales Director, Americas, Bilendi
With over 20 years of experience in Market Research, covering all aspects, Ian is now focused on making the most of data, and making the CX experience as seamless as possible through the use of Bilendi & Respondi’s social media platform - Bilendi Discuss.
Ian has had experience across the spectrum of Market Research:

• Client side, as a purchaser of Marketing Research, statistical analysis and benchmarking studies around the growth of the ‘Information Society’;
• Operations and customer support for survey data collection tools;
• Head of a UK Statistics and Technical services department
• Migration of offline panels to online
• Development of Big Data databases and data connectors
• Sample provision and outsourcing services; and
• Speaking and webcasting about Technology, 5G, IoT and Blockchain; and
• Making coffee and providing general entertainment!

Experience within different organisations, be they public or private sector, small or multi-national companies, has driven a desire to improve business agility to quickly deal with all facets of data, regardless of their source or structure.
A keen runner (and coach), no distance or challenge is too much: Don’t get me started, I’ll bore anyone with tales of black toes and the mental strength of running 100 miles in a day!

Jane Reece, Customer Insight, Marketing, NatWest Group
Jane Reece is a Customer Insight Manager with over 25 years’ experience conducting research in the public and private sectors, across both agency and client-side roles. Financial services research has been the one constant in her career. She has worked on projects for some of the UK’s largest financial providers as well as on the insight teams at Tesco Bank, Virgin Money, and currently NatWest Group.  In her role at NatWest, she works as part of the Strategy Insight scrum and delivers projects that put customers at the heart of decision-making in areas such as climate, cost-of-living, access to cash, and cryptocurrency. The NatWest Customer Closeness Programme is a core part of her work and aims to bring senior leaders and colleagues closer to the experiences of the Bank’s customers by hearing directly from customers themselves. The programme involves activities including customer surgeries and live call listening. Jane is also part of the Insight Academy which delivers training to support the development of her fellow Customer Insight colleagues. Away from work, Jane enjoys her exercise but only if it’s outdoor – running, cycling and bootcamp. She also loves music and plays drums in the Edinburgh Samba School band.

James Pereira-Stubbs, Chief Client Officer, Oxford Risk
James Pereira-Stubbs is the Chief Client Officer of Oxford Risk. Oxford Risk seeks to help investors make the best financial decisions over their lifetimes. We do this by combing innovative behavioural finance, data science, quantitative finance, and technology into software that our clients can use to assess an individual's risk profile, emotional capacity to take risk and the aspects of their financial personality which may sway their investment decisions.  
Prior to joining Oxford Risk, James spent almost 20 years in senior roles within the wealth management industry where the human side of investing was studiously ignored.

Jonathan Byrne, CEO, Virgin Money Investments
Jonathan is an experienced executive with extensive experience in a variety of roles within a number of complex regulated firms. Jonathan is CEO of Virgin Money Investments, a joint venture between Virgin Money UK and abrdn. Prior to taking up this role Jonathan was Business Distribution Director in the Business Division of Virgin Money UK where he led the customer facing teams covering all segments and business types. Jonathan has worked with Virgin Money UK since 2017. Prior to this Jonathan held senior leadership roles in HSBC UK across personal, mortgages and wealth customer segments in both strategy formulation and channel execution roles. Jonathan worked with Bank of Ireland in Dublin from 2004 to 2013 and was a member of the Irish executive leadership team from 2012. Prior to Bank of Ireland Jonathan worked with Vodafone where he worked in the telecommunications sector delivering new to market customer propositions. Jonathan started his career in Ulster Bank. Jonathan holds an MBA with Dublin City University. 

Mark Long, Director, BVA BDRC
Mark is a ‘life-long’ financial services researcher. Before joining BVA BDRC in 2004 he worked on the client-side at Barclaycard and Santander. Following a stint as Head of Research at NMG, Mark joined BDRC as a Client Services Director.
Since then, Mark has been heavily involved in building a range of successful multi-client propositions for FS providers, with a particular focus on the UK’s mortgage market. Mark led the beta ‘First User’ panel research project for NewDay being discussed today, and has been the NewDay account lead since 2017.

Nick Watkins, Partner, the Big Window
Nick joined the Big Window earlier this year after retiring from the Money and Pensions Service, where he was Head of Insight and Evaluation. Prior to that Nick was Managing Director of GfK’s UK Financial Services business. The Big Window is wholly owned by Saga. Nick is therefore now focussing on the 50-plus population, looking at how age affects consumers' attitudes and behaviours and how brands can help older people have the most positive experience. Nick is a member of the Understanding Society Strategic Oversight Board, winner of the AURA ‘Inspiring Leadership’ Award and Fellow of the Market Research Society. 

Russell Bradshaw, Senior Statistician, Money and Pensions Service 
Russell Bradshaw is Senior Statistician at the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS), providing inhouse expertise on measurement methods, local area modelling, market sizing and demand forecasting. He is an accomplished market researcher, statistician and data analyst having conducted hundreds of studies in his 25+ years of experience. Prior to joining MaPS, Russell has held director roles at Kantar and GfK, contributing to senior level decision making for a variety of business sectors, including; technology, media and financial services. He has spoken at various conferences on data analytics and data science, as well as running ESOMAR training on segmentation techniques.

Sacha Romanovitch, CEO, Fair4All Finance
Sacha is CEO of Fair4All Finance, which has been founded to increase the financial wellbeing of people in vulnerable circumstances through access to fair, affordable and appropriate financial products and services. Sacha is also a member of the Levelling Up Advisory Council in which she provides advice to the government on policy development to deliver the levelling up agenda; in this she also leads the Social Infrastructure working group of the council. She is a non-executive director of Leapfrog Investments.
Prior to this in 2015 she became the first female CEO of a major global accountancy firm when she took up leadership of Grant Thornton in the UK. Through a focus on a purpose led strategy the firm grew to over £500m income with over 5,000 UK employees. She was also a member of the global board of Grant Thornton, and led governance oversight of member firms in 140 countries employing over 50,000 around the world.
Sacha is also a certified coach and NLP practitioner and she has worked with many leadership teams on transforming leadership and culture to deliver long term sustainable results.

Simon Shaw, Director, Trinity McQueen
Simon works with clients across sectors focusing on audience understanding, communications and behaviour change. He sits on the board of the Association for Qualitative Research (AQR) and is a judge on the Market Research Society’s Excellence Awards. His article ‘Consumers are becoming wise to your nudge’ was Behavioural Scientist magazine’s most read article of 2019.

Stephen Brooks, member of the co-creation group 
Stephen is the Regional Director for a National Charity based in Birmingham. He lives by Christian values that motivate and challenge him daily.
He has worked within the Social Enterprise and Community Education sector for over thirty years and has initiated several personal development initiatives, Community Development Finance and social enterprise business courses.
He is a Board/Committee member of several national and regional organisations (including political, community, faith and business) and is committed to working to effect positive change especially for the most disadvantaged and marginalised. He is currently a board member of the Black Country Urban Industrial Mission supporting work based Chaplaincy, and the Amos Bursary helping underrepresented young people into Higher Education.
His work has been recognised by numerous organisations in the Public, Private and Charity sectors for his contribution to local and national community initiatives.
Since 2007 he has worked closely with the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) Chaired by Ian Duncan Smith MP. He has also been an external advisor to Ofqual.
As a qualified Adult Education teacher and Business Advisor he frequently speaks in schools, universities and professional forums about reducing the education gap. He is passionate about turning potential into performance.

Sophie Jenkins-Anderson, Head of Research, Auden Finance
Sophie is Head of Research at Auden and has a background in psychology where she focused her study on personalities and pre-disposition to certain behaviours. Sophie is an experienced researcher in both qual and quant methodologies, specialising in the development of customer understanding and personas. Her key responsibility at Auden is to ensure customers are at the heart of business strategy by identifying their unmet needs through research and experimentation.
During Sophie’s time at Auden has research has been citied in Parliament and shared by many key organisations within the Responsible Finance, tech, and regulatory sectors.

Victoria Gosling OBE, Chief Strategy Officer, Auden Finance
After 21 years’ service within the RAF, culminating with the prestigious rank of Group Captain, Vicky become CEO for Invictus Games 2016 in Orlando and the Military Project Lead for the first Invictus Games (London 2014), inspiring 14 nations and over 400 athletes.
Her sporting career continued as the CEO of GB Snowsport and Chair of British Surfing; board member for the British Olympic Association and custodian for the Rugby Centurions.
Seeing how ex-military and sportspeople could struggle with finances in ‘normal life’, Vicky soon realised financial health and wellbeing was a wider problem, especially among younger people without access to mainstream services. This led her to Fintech, where she is Managing Director and Director of Impact at Auden, a socially responsible fintech with a mission to help those who are under served, over charged or excluded by mainstream financial services. Vicky also sits on the board of Responsible Finance, the national membership body for responsible finance providers.

Zoe Willment, Customer Research Manager, NatWest Group 
Zoë Willment is an Insight Lead at NatWest Group.  With over 30 years of research and insight experience across financial services she is currently working on the Bank’s strategic Customer Closeness programme, encouraging Senior Leadership to listen to and act upon customers’ experiences and views.  In previous roles she has specialised in brand, CX and proposition insight related to commercial banking, insurance and life and pension; working at brands including Lloyds of London.  Zoë is also a qualified people coach; passionate about supporting and developing her team to achieve their potential.  Outside of work Zoë is a strong supporter of the Arts, and of the Retired Greyhound Trust.