LLoyds Bank: Reaching customers in the moments they actually talk about money

The Challenge

People won't talk honestly about money. Not in focus groups, not across a table, not when an interviewer is asking direct questions. Lloyds knew this. The team's qualitative researchers had spent enough time in face-to-face research to recognise the pattern.

When you sit someone down across the table and say this is the task you have to do about money, people shut down. Either they don't tell you about it or they lie.

For a bank trying to design products around real customer behaviour, and especially trying to support vulnerable customers, that was a problem. The most important questions were the ones people most actively avoided: how much went on betting, on the lottery, on the things people don't even tell their partners. The Insight team needed a method that would let customers talk about money in their own time, in their own home, in their own language, not the bank's.

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The Approach

The team designed a three-week longitudinal diary study with Indeemo, recruited 20 participants across three customer segments, and let people respond on their own schedule via photo, video, note or screen recording.

Indirect task design. Instead of asking direct money questions, the team opened with everyday topics like food shopping. The fridge, the takeaway, the supermarket receipt all acted as a natural proxy for affluence and attitude before the harder questions came in.

Open task formats. Contributors picked photo, video, note or screen recording for each response, choosing whatever captured the moment best.

Hands-on moderator engagement. Lucinda commented personally on every post, building real rapport across the three weeks rather than treating the diary as a one-way data dump.

A diverse, geographically spread sample. 20 participants covering high-income professionals, rising metropolitans and homeschooling families, recruited from across the UK rather than the usual London-and-the-South-East default.

The Money Talks task asked contributors to draw a picture of where their money went. Other tasks asked about food shopping, weekly highlights and pain points. Twenty participants felt like the right scale, small enough that one moderator could remember every individual when responding to their posts, large enough to surface segment patterns.

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The Results

I was absolutely amazed at how engaging and personal and human this felt. These people weren't in a chat room. These people were posting their stuff to me.

The three weeks produced more than 500 contextual customer stories, plus a repository of media-rich content the team could come back to and re-analyse against new questions. The everyday food and shopping prompts turned out to be the proxy that made everything else possible. They revealed how affluent or squeezed someone felt, and warmed contributors up before the money-specific questions landed.

The numbers held up too.

19 of 20 contributors completed the full three weeks. The one drop-out was attributed to launch timing across a bank holiday weekend, not the method.

9 out of 10 contributor satisfaction rating, with the team noting it would likely have been higher with a cleaner launch.

Daily-fresh insight, not end-of-study deliverables. Researchers and stakeholders could see responses as they came in and tag content, for example all comments mentioning overdrafts, for instant pull-outs when the wider business asked.

The biggest surprise was operational. The team had assumed faster and cheaper would mean lower quality, that's the usual research trade-off. It didn't here.

This was faster and it was cheap, but it wasn't low quality, which I find very interesting.

Most importantly, contributors opened up about exactly the topics people don't normally surface in research. Spending on betting. The lottery. Overdrafts. The mental models around where money goes and what it's for.