Financial Services Research Conference 2023

Esin Balcisoy, Senior Research Manager, Human8
Working on both ad hoc and structural research for a portfolio of clients, she’s particularly fascinated by customer communities and how they can bring about a genuine closeness to organisations which ultimately bridges the empathy gap and inspires action. She is always curious to identify the inherent dynamics of research communities as they are about what people really think and feel about brands, products and services, how they actually behave in the real and digital world, and how they would like to make or shape the future. Ultimately, the real prize for Esin is bringing the customer voice into client organisations through commercially focussed, actionable insights that help insight teams to advocate for the audiences that matter to them.
Esin is an active advocate of company-wide initiatives for parents and carers and employee wellbeing.

 Jo Caley, Senior Insight Manager, Paragon Bank
Jo is a Senior Insight Manager at Paragon bank, with financial services experience spanning over two decades.  Jo joined Paragon in 2019 and is passionate about making connections to uncover insights and drive improvements for customers.  Jo is part of the bank’s Insight team that blends in-house research approaches with projects in partnership with agencies.

Anna Cliffe, Managing Director, Trinity McQueen
Anna is the Founder of Trinity McQueen, a full service behavioural market research agency based in Leeds and London which has just celebrated it’s 10-year anniversary. Anna has been working in research for 25 years, and is passionate about understanding people, and using that process to bring people together in client side organisations to make the best decisions. Anna’s experience includes working for major financial service companies and retailers globally.

Dr. Nick Coates, Consumer Expert and Global Consultancy Director, C Space

James Dell, Client Framework Design Lead, Solomon
James is an independent consultant with 20 plus years of experience working in the financial services industry undertaking a variety of roles including business analysis, compliance and client research. In the latter part of his career he has specialised in working with Financial Advice firms to develop client centric propositions and developing strategies to ensure firms have operational structures that allow them to be client focused.  James is currently leading a client experience program for Solomon that will reimagine how financial advice is delivered to clients, he passionately believes in the value of financial planning and that everyone should have a financial plan.  He is an expert in service design techniques, process engineering and operational design.

Kathy Ellison, Director, Savanta
Kathy has been working in insight for over 30 years and is a financial research specialist, working mainly client-side but moving agency-side nearly 10 years ago. She currently works with a wide variety of financial clients across many different product lines including lending, banking, payments, pensions, protection and insurance researching all audiences - businesses, consumers & intermediaries. Her recent focus has been on different generations and on vulnerable customers and she is currently leading on a large number of projects on Consumer Duty.

Sarah Emmerson, Insight Manager, Visa Europe
Sarah is responsible for pan-European work across Visa Europe. She helps the business and its partners - from banks and fintechs to merchants - understand ever changing consumer and SMB needs, using storytelling skills developed over a decade agency side. She has a particular passion for the business's impact questions, helping stakeholders navigate society's needs when it comes to sustainability and social impact.

Natalia Gomez - Behavioural Research Manager, Cowry Consulting
As the Behavioural Research Manager at Cowry Consulting, Natalia adapts and implements innovative research methods that identify the role of conscious, unconscious, and contextual variables in human behaviour and decision making. Her main motivation is to collect impactful primary insights for clients in different sectors, and to inform the development of effective behaviour change strategies. Natalia has worked with important brands from the public and private sectors including governmental institutions, financial services, insurance, and retail companies, in Latin America and the UK.

Josephine Hansom, VP & Youth Practice Lead, Savanta
Josephine is a Fellow of the Market Research Society and has spent most of her career focused on understanding Gen Z.
As part of the senior team at Savanta she leads it’s Next Gen practice. She was the Managing Director of YouthSight research until it was acquired and before that she spent nearly a decade at GfK.
Josephine is an active member of the MRS, sitting on its Board as well as sitting on the steering group of MRSpride. She co-hosts the podcast OUTsights and is passionate about making market research an industry where everyone can succeed.
Josephine is also a regular on the international conference circuit, sharing her take on generational theory supported by Savanta’s unique State of the Youth Nation tracking data.
Listen to Josephine talk about the Youth Market on Radio 4’s The Bottom Line https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b080xk99

Rebecca Henson, Senior Researcher, Skipton Building Society
Rebecca has over 25 years of experience working in the financial services industry and 9 years as a client-side researcher, helping Skipton Building Society better understand its members, and playing a key role in developing its research capabilities.  
Rebecca describes herself as having held a life-long fascination with the intricacies of human behaviour, and her love and enthusiasm for consumer research are underpinned by her academic training in psychological research methods.

Rebecca Harries, Research Director, Flume~
Rebecca is a researcher with over 20 years’ experience, beginning her career at Millward Brown (now Kantar), before spending time heading up an international team client-side and now working as a qualitative specialist at Flume.~She is driven by a curiosity for understanding what drives consumer thinking and behaviour, and how this applies across categories from FMCG to retail and electricals to finance.~Her interest in financial research specifically is underpinned by getting to the heart of the human stories which inform many of the biggest decisions consumers make during their lives, and helping brands deliver best in class products and solutions to support them.

 Jenny Lovell, Head of UK Insights, eBay
Jenny leads Customer Insight for eBay in the UK, where her role is to ensure a consumer centric approach to decision making.  She has previously partnered with C Space on various programmes of work to bring the business closer to the customer, and deliver real time insights that allow us to respond to the changing needs of our customers.

Wei Lun Huang, Head of Product Strategy and Proposition, HSBC
Wei-Lun has been working in the financial services industry for over a decade, with experience spanning across various roles and geographies.  He is currently the Global Head of Product Strategy and Proposition for the Retail Wealth Management business of HSBC.  In this capacity, he is responsible for developing customer-centric wealth propositions and wealth product solutions to fulfill the needs of the customers of HSBC.  Wei-Lun is both a practitioner and advocate of insights led design thinking, which has been critical to the success of his launch of flagship customer propositions for HSBC.     

Tom Johnson, Managing Director, Trajectory Partnership 
Tom is a researcher and forecaster with 15 years of experience helping organisations from a range of sectors understand how their customers and the wider world is changing. In recent years he’s led global studies on the future of tertiary education and work exploring the impact of the pandemic on bereaved people. Tom leads many of Trajectory’s most complex and multi-methodology projects, including those involving hard to reach audiences and vulnerable or marginalised consumers. He’s an expert in trends analysis and strategic insight, including designing methodologies that overcome the restrictions of conventional research.

Phoebe Kent - Head of Behavioural Innovation, Cowry Consulting
As Head of Behavioural Innovation, Phoebe uses her background in Applied
Psychology and Behavioural Economics to develop creative and
scientifically-robust solutions using Cowry’s bespoke innovation framework.
Phoebe has worked closely with leading brands to design new experiences
with behavioural science at the heart, embed behavioural science capability
at scale and solve high-priority behavioural challenges.

Faith Kitchen, Customer Segment Director, Ecclesiastical Insurance
Faith is Customer Segment Director at Ecclesiastical Insurance, responsible for Customer Insight, Thought Leadership and Proposition Development as well as representing ‘voice of the customer’ within the organisation.  Faith also maintains and develops key relationships within the industry sectors’ Ecclesiastical serves.  She has over 24 year experience within Financial Services, with an Underwriting and Marketing background.  She’s also a qualified Counsellor and has a keen interest in people and psychology.

Peter Lee, Research Specialist, The People’s Partnership

Brittney McGeough, Customer Insights Manager, HSBC 
Brittney drove Global CEOs and executive communications for 7 years at UBS and HSBC, before becoming a customer insights manager for Wealth and Personal Banking. She specialises in activating owned and subscribed insights, external benchmarking capabilities and co-leads the creation of our new online customer platform coming 2024. She is dual US and UK citizen, living in London.

Neha Mittal, Practice Director, C Space
Neha leads the CX/UX research practice at C Space, where she uses her global experience and deep understanding of tech and financial services to amplify the voices of underserved audiences, driving positive change in product development and business strategy.

Jamie Morawiec, Associate Partner Data Science and Insight, CACI
Jamie is an expert in segmentation, predictive modelling and spatial analytics. For more than 15 years, he’s worked alongside high street banks, retailers and other consumer brands to solve problems and challenge thinking. 
In recent years, Jamie has worked with the industry on access to banking, access to cash, and understanding the importance of these to vulnerable customers. At CACI he leads a team of data scientists, combining rigour and robustness with a passion for common sense and explainable solutions that work in the real world.

Jeremy Mugridge, Marketing Director, Quilter

Richard Owen, Firefish
A proven research innovator over a 30 year career, spanning three continents and mixing agency side with technology starts ups and transformation roles. Now firmly focused on the opportunities and challenges AI brings to the industry.
Introduced a wide range of technologies to create new ways of gathering insight and integrated distillation and curation technologies into company workflows to drive efficiency improvements in analysis and delivery.
As a proven builder of businesses, he started his career at Kantar Millward Brown in the UK before heading to the US, joining Hall & Partners to launch their Chicago office and helping scale the business prior to its sale to Omnicom. On his return to the UK he built the CrowdLab mobile platform which scaled and eventually sold to Dynata.
He joined the Board of Firefish in February this year when he leads on keeping the agency and their offer at the cutting edge of research innovation.

Lauren Peel, Director of Consumer Insights and Propositions, Fair4All Finance
Lauren is an expert in designing solutions that meet the needs of consumers, and in her role at Fair4All Finance works with banks, building societies, FinTechs and other organsiations to ensure that the whole sector is working to meet the needs of people in financially vulnerable circumstances. The compounded impacts of Covid-19 and the Cost of Living crisis, as well as the requirements of the Consumer Duty, mean that all organisations should be considering how they can better serve the 17.5m people experiencing financial vulnerability.
Fair4All Finance is a publicly funded non-profit working to increase the financial resilience and wellbeing of people in vulnerable circumstances.

Matt Picton, Head of Strategic Insight, Differentology

Sam Robertson, Director Strategic Insight, Differentology
Sam has most recently led exploratory, multi-market projects for global clients like HSBC. Last year he ran a landmark futures piece for Sky Media exploring the future of the customer journey (3-5 year horizon), specifically looking at the role of tech. Previously, he has worked in a cultural insights agency and led a study on Man vs Machine in the early days of AI’s ascent. He is Australian born and bred for his sins. 

Stephanie Shaarwi, Managing Director, Irrational Agency
Steph has worked in research for more than 20 years; she started her career at Ipsos, going on to then work for Future Thinking, Hall and Partners and Basis Research. She is a multi-method international researcher who specialises in delivering insight at the most senior levels. Since joining Irrational Agency she has focused on bringing award winning behavioural research to clients in a broad range of sectors including tech, finance, fmcg and pharma. Some of her areas of expertise include therapeutic qual, segmentations, behaviour change and minority/at risk audiences.

Becky Swarbrick, Customer Insight Consultant, Allianz
Becky has over 25 years' insight expertise, having working in both agency and client-side roles. With experience gained both in the UK and internationally, she has recently returned from working overseas to pursue her current role at Allianz, leading the delivery of Customer Experience and Consumer Duty research for the Commercial business.

Ric Tizard, Head of Customer Insight, NEST (National Savings Employment Trust)
Ric is Head of Customer Insight at Nest. He has had a lifelong career in research and analysis, working in various sectors including telecommunications, utilities, transport, spirits and financial services. Ric’s career shows real diversity, with experience managing international tracking studies on preference and usage of mobile phones and whisky (not at the same time!), developing customer satisfaction programmes for BT, new product development in the building industry and innovative specialist binoculars for bird watchers. During his time at Nest Ric has been at the forefront of customer insight initiatives which have supported the development of Nest’s products, service and communications, including establishing their Voice of the Customer Programme and Nest’s Your Way member research community.

Maria Twigge, CSO, FlexMR
Maria has been with FlexMR for 13 years, having studied Psychology Maria joined the team as a researcher and has delivered research for brands including ITV, VISA, British Gas and Morrisons. Maria now leads new business partnerships, designing innovative and agile solutions to insight problems with the FlexMR team to join technology and expertise for business success.

Nick Watkins, Director of Research, SAGA

Mark Webster, Head of Innovation, the numbers lab
Over a decade of experience partnering with some of the world’s most iconic brands in placing insight at the centre of marketing decision making, including some of the UK’s largest financial services organisations.
Holds a particular passion for utilising future-facing data-driven methods to shape brand, media and communications effectiveness. Beyond pioneering new methods this also includes the development and implementation of brand equity and guidance philosophy and frameworks.
Initial career started within Kantar (formally Millward Brown), and now functions of Head of Innovation for The Numbers Lab, future-proofing our quantitative toolkit as part of Firefish’s wider data, culture and human understanding offer.