FlexMR headed to the MRS Financial Services conference on 12th November 2024, as both presenters at and sponsors of the event. FlexMR’s CEO, Paul Hudson, presented an experiment with Aegon’s Insight Senior Consultant, Tereza Anderson, in the firm’s first foray into synthetic data.
This talk was one of the few covered by Liam Key-McClean's write-up of the event in an article published on Research Live. Liam's article, entitled How can AI support financial services research?, covers three popular topics that were talked about in-depth at the event, with Paul and Tereza's showcase of the synthetic data experiment being one of those prominent topics.
How Can AI Support Financial Services Research?
Financial wellbeing is a complex, sensitive and changeable measure. The Aegon Financial Wellbeing tracker has provided regular, timely insight but ensuring a consistently accurate and representative sample requires prudent management.
In the search for measures that might reduce such a burden, FlexMR and Aegon embarked on a series of experiments with synthetic data – seeking to answer whether sufficiently trained AI models could play a role in helping both financial institutions and insight experts to obtain larger quantities of accurate data in a timely fashion for successful stakeholder decision-making.
Liam's write up of the experiment report focussed on the topic itself, the results so far, and the challenges that cropped up:
"Anderson said that many long-term tracker studies come with challenges in keeping response rates high, mainly due to challenges in long-term engagement that necessitated exercises to boost interaction with the panel or refreshing the sample to add in new respondents. However, Anderson said “it is a constant battle to keep response levels high”, and the decision was taken to examine how AI could support a tracker study and boost responses.
Hudson detailed an experiment to test filling incomplete responses and making them complete with the use of synthetic data, as well as using synthetic data is to fill quotas for surveys, therefore building new responses. "
In addition to the synthetic data section, Liam also covered Michael Fisher's AI platform that predicts which people are the most financially vulnerable and why, and Ben Skelton's examination of how driving up digital capability helped tackle financial vulnerability.
Read Liam's full article to discover more.
About Research Live
Research Live is the world's leading source of industry news, opinions, special reports and feature articles for market and social researchers, data analysts and consumer insight professionals. Covering the latest trends and techniques from behavioural economics to big data analytics, as well as hot topics like polling and privacy. The publication is operated by the Market Research Society.
