Consumer Finance in a Mobile Age: Methods for Researching Changing User Behaviour

Abstract

Consumer finance markets are being transformed by the increasing mobility of people, products, technology, and information. This presents challenges for understanding changing consumer behaviour and building adaptable business models. Researchers are rising to meet these challenges by adapting their frameworks and methods to take account of mobility's effects. I present three cases of method adaptation to consumer finance research (financial diaries, object‐centred interviews, social network analysis) and discuss their contributions. The complexity and personalisation of consumer finance requires us to not only be more creative with how we approach research, but also more robust in questioning our assumptions, framing appropriate questions, and designing research that draws frameworks and methods from multiple disciplines.One can only understand and apply all these new innovations by playing close to the ball and understanding customers’ needs and expectations. It is no longer possible to say what the world is going to look like five years from now. In the past, bankers were ‘scenario thinkers,’ who ran the bank by making strategic choices far in advance. Today, we have to grant more space to short‐cycle thinking and optionality. (Alexander Zwart, Senior Product Manager at Rabobank, quoted in Ifrim, Mual and Innopay 2017)