MacroMonitor: 30 Years and Still Counting
It is hard to imagine what they were thinking, 30 years ago, when some of SRI's financial professionals discussed doing a massive study of all of consumers' financial needs. Most financial research at that time tended to focus on one industry, product, segment, or channel only. In anticipation of the impending convergence in the financial-services industry, these SRI visionaries sought to understand the choices, trade-offs, and motivations behind consumers' choices among all their financial needs. To do so, they recognized that they would need to include measures of every type of financial product, service, and channel. They would also need to collect a complete set of demographics and accurate financial measures. What would set this project apart from all others before (and after) would be that, in addition to including comprehensive coverage of all financial areas, this groundbreaking research would include a broad range of financial attitudes—including preferences, propensities, motivations, and goals. From this unique combination, researchers, analysts, marketers, and strategists would be able to divine insights into the reasons behind consumers' financial decisions.
SRI convened a team of research professionals—including sociologists, psychologists, and economists—to put together as complete a questionnaire as they could. The SRI team selected The Gallup Organization to pretest and collect the data and, subsequently, in 1978, fielded an 88-page questionnaire to more than 3,000 households! In so doing, SRI International provided sponsoring financial institutions with a single, representative dataset that accurately and comprehensively portrayed U.S. financial consumers.
As Figure 1 shows, even back in 1978, we included measures of life events—in addition to product incidences and amounts (checking, saving, investing, insurance, retirement, credit cards, financial advice, and so forth) and institutional coverage (banks, S&Ls, credit unions, brokers, insurers, mutual funds, and so forth)—because of the integral role that they play in shifting financial needs:
Fast forward 30 years, and we're still doing the same work, the questionnaire is 95 pages, and the sample has grown to almost 4,000 households, with a concentration among the affluent. The list of covered products and services has increased, as have the types of covered delivery channels and financial institutions. The life events, financial attitudes, motivations, and goals that we gather have also increased significantly. But most important, after 30 years, our ability to interpret the trends and derive insights about the implications for strategists, product managers, marketers, and anyone who needs to understand consumers' financial decisions has expanded and deepened.
Thirty years ago, the SRI visionaries began tracking financial-consumer changes and following the shifts in the financial-services industry, the markets, the economy, and the environment. Three decades later, the MacroMonitor continues to contribute leading-edge thinking and provide a reliable consumer-oriented perspective and the most comprehensive understanding of the financial-services industry.
