There are two common truisms you hit quite often:
- One is that the only constant is change
- The other that someone always quotes the above at a conference (I have done it myself).
Of course, the reason that it’s a truism is that it’s, err, true.
And there were three big changes or trends that were front of mind at the MRS Financial Services Conference on the 14th November. Taken together they reflect much of what is exercising the minds of brands and agencies in financial services at the moment.
They were…
- AI. Inevitably it was covered. And it was right to be. Covering its use in LLM scraping/net-nography, it’s use for data collection (in the shape of synthetic respondents), and it’s use for delivering insights to stakeholders (via bots that can be used to ‘talk’ to qual personas). All interesting, showing opportunities for changing the industry and also perhaps a bit scary (the Sarah Connor part of my brain is thinking that if we accept synthetic respondents, how long before we get synthetic researchers…)
- Vulnerability. You can see Consumer Duty as the driving force behind these conversations, maybe not in terms of their importance (it’s obviously always been important), but definitely in its urgency and prominence. It’s great that brands are beginning to take this seriously, although it’s apparent that there is a way to go. Agencies should be pushing this as much as brands, from sample frames through to the approaches we use
- You could probably say the same about sustainability, also covered on the day with some heavyweight discussions. A critical issue for consumers, SMEs, and brands – again seeming to be reaching greater prominence as an issue for all parties.
So, those were the changes. And the foundational truth? That underpinning all of these changes humans are the protagonists; within each theme there are humans acting, avoiding, and procrastinating. It’s something we picked up on in our paper (which was on last – thanks to everyone who stayed) where we looked at how different generations viewed financial services, how they talked about it as a family, and how they differed between GenZs vs GenX vs Boomers. And fundamentally what brands need to do to serve them all better.
If you are interested in this paper, my colleague Ali will be writing about it more next week - and we have got more research coming towards Christmas…
Overall, the conference was great – learnt a lot about some of the big issues facing both the industry itself, and the insight professionals within it.
Looking forward to next year!
Alex Johnston, Nov 24
English (UK) 
English (United States)