By: Meaghan Willis
Meaghan is a senior qualitative research strategist with nearly 20 years of experience partnering with category leaders and globally recognized brands to shape how insight informs business strategy. She has deep expertise across healthcare, financial services/fintech, CPG/retail, luxury, automotive, and beyond, working with audiences ranging from B2B and HNW to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Read More.
Earlier this year, after attending the Consumer Bankers Association (CBA Live) conference, I wrote that the greatest competitive advantage in financial services is not more customer data, it is deeper customer understanding.
Across conversations at the conference, the industry’s biggest priorities were clear: artificial intelligence, personalization, fraud prevention, trust, and the continued evolution of digital experiences. While each represents an important opportunity, they all point back to a fundamental question:
How do organizations create experiences that are genuinely relevant to the people they serve?
Increasingly, the answer depends on understanding customers not simply as account holders or segments, but as people navigating complex financial decisions within the realities of their everyday lives.
Since then, I have been leading qualitative research exploring how consumers approach financial decision-making. That work has reinforced an important shift: financial institutions need to move beyond understanding customers as individuals to understanding the broader context in which financial decisions are made.
The next evolution is not in how customers make decisions – it is in how organizations understand them. It requires looking beyond the individual to the broader ecosystem surrounding financial decisions — the relationships, responsibilities, experiences, and expectations that shape how people define security, evaluate risk, and decide when to act.
For financial institutions, understanding these dynamics creates an opportunity to design more relevant products, more meaningful experiences, and stronger relationships.
The Rise of the Sandwich Generation Reveals a Bigger Shift
Financial services have historically been built around the individual customer. Products are designed for individual needs, journeys are mapped around individual interactions, and relationships are often measured through individual behaviors.
Consumers have always made financial decisions within the context of their families and responsibilities. What has changed is the importance of understanding that context.
Consumers make decisions within a broader network of responsibilities and relationships. A parent considering financial protection is not simply evaluating a policy or premium. They are thinking about their children, their spouse, their parents, their future, and the stability they want to create for the people who depend on them.
For financial institutions, the opportunity is to understand how context shapes customer priorities, influences trade-offs, and ultimately defines what customers are trying to accomplish.
Recognizing that context changes how organizations interpret customer needs. Similar customers may behave differently, prioritize differently, and make different choices because they are navigating different realities.
One example of this shift is the continued growth of the Sandwich Generation—consumers simultaneously supporting children while caring for aging parents.
This is not simply another demographic segment. It represents a broader change in how consumers experience financial responsibility.
For these customers, financial decisions are often about balancing competing priorities across generations. They are managing current needs while preparing for future uncertainty, making decisions that affect not only their own wellbeing, but the wellbeing of others.
The lesson extends far beyond this group. Behind every financial decision is a unique combination of circumstances, responsibilities, and motivations that shapes what customers are ultimately trying to accomplish.
The Job to Be Done Explains What Demographics Can’t
Financial institutions have become increasingly sophisticated in how they segment customers. Yet even the best segmentation cannot fully explain why two seemingly similar customers make very different financial decisions.
Demographics like age, income, geography, language, and household composition remain valuable inputs for identifying opportunities and designing customer strategies.
This is where Jobs to Be Done offers a different lens. Rather than asking who the customer is, it asks what job they are trying to accomplish.
A customer in their forties is not simply part of an age group. They may also be balancing raising children, supporting aging parents, and planning for future uncertainty.
A bilingual customer is not simply defined by language preference. They may also be the person their family relies on to navigate complex financial decisions.
Two households with similar incomes may approach the same financial product differently because they are trying to accomplish different things.
Understanding the underlying need a customer is trying to fulfill—creating stability, protecting loved ones, preparing for the future, reducing uncertainty, or building confidence—often provides deeper insight into behavior than demographics alone.
The goal is not to replace demographic data. It is to make that data more predictive.
Qualitative research plays a critical role by uncovering the motivations, tensions, and unmet needs behind the behaviors organizations can already see.
When demographic, behavioral, and transactional data are combined with a deeper understanding of lived realities, organizations gain a more complete view of their customers—and can make better decisions across marketing, product development, and customer experience.
The Takeaway: The Next Competitive Advantage Is Human Understanding
Understanding customers in context has implications far beyond marketing or segmentation. As financial institutions continue investing heavily in artificial intelligence, personalization, digital transformation, and data capabilities, the organizations that win will be those that combine those investments with a deeper understanding of the people they serve.
But technology alone cannot answer some of the most important questions organizations need to understand:
- Why do customers hesitate even when they understand the value?
- Who influences decisions behind the scenes?
- What responsibilities shape financial priorities?
- What creates confidence?
- What builds trust?
These are fundamentally human questions.
And they are questions qualitative research is uniquely positioned to answer.
If my key takeaway from CBA Live was that customer understanding is becoming the industry’s greatest competitive advantage, my latest work has reinforced what that understanding must actually look like.
It is not simply knowing more about customers. It is understanding the financial ecosystems they navigate every day.
The organizations that understand that context will not simply create better customer experiences. They will build more relevant products, stronger relationships, greater loyalty, and ultimately make better business decisions.
If you enjoyed this post, also check out:
Why Customer Understanding is the Real Competitive Advantage in Banking
More Data, Less Clarity: How Sidelining Qualitative Research Undermines Strategic Decision-Making