Find out about our flagship Financial Lives survey.
Our latest Financial Lives survey is now live – we encourage you to take part
Only those who kindly participated in our main survey over early February to early June 2024 are invited to take part in this short follow-up survey. Many thanks, if you do so.
Critical Research, an independent research agency, is conducting the survey for us.
We are running this survey to understand what has changed in financial services for people across the UK, and the impact it has had – so that consumer feedback continues to directly inform our ongoing consumer protection work.
Answers to Financial Lives surveys are hugely valuable in helping us to identify the issues that financial services consumers face, and to understand how to protect consumers from harm related to these issues. Most recently, using insights from the Financial Lives surveys we:
- Made permanent the expectations on lenders to support borrowers in financial difficulty, which were introduced during the pandemic, with additional targeted changes designed to improve outcomes for consumers
- Set out a plan to protect access to cashpoints and/or bank branches for consumers and small businesses, meaning banks and building societies will need to understand if local communities lack access to cash services, and under new FCA rules, will be required to provide additional services where they are needed
- Together with the government, set out proposals for extra support to help millions of UK pension savers make better decisions about their pensions
If you have been invited to take part in the latest survey, please do so, whether you feel that anything has changed for you or not. Only by hearing from everyone will we gain a good, reliable picture of how things have changed in financial services for consumers across the UK.
Every response really does make a difference.
As a ‘thank you’ for your help, you will receive a voucher. Those invited to take part in the survey will also have the option to enter a prize draw to win one of 20 shopping vouchers – run by our independent research provider, Critical Research.
Any queries?
To talk to someone at Critical Research about the survey, please contact them at [email protected] or on 0208 189 7829.
If you have any queries for the FCA, see our FAQs. Or get in touch with the FCA’s Contact Centre.
The FCA’s Financial Lives survey is being carried out in the public interest. For more information, see our Privacy Statement.
Read our latest Financial Lives cost of living (Jan 2024) survey and our main report with key findings from the FCA’s Financial Lives 2022 survey
Financial Lives is our flagship, nationally representative survey of UK consumers.
It provides information about:
- consumers’ attitudes towards managing their money
- the financial products they have
- their experiences of engaging with financial services firms
It is unique in the combination of its design, breadth, and size. As a tracking survey, it provides evidence of how things are changing from the point of view of the consumer.
Our first survey ran in April 2017, our second in February 2020, and our third in May 2022. In 2023 we also ran a shorter recontact survey, the Financial Lives cost of living (Jan 2023) recontact survey, to provide more targeted insights. The Financial Lives survey therefore makes it easy to compare how UK adults’ product holdings, finances and experiences have changed over time.
For each survey we have published a report, as well as using the data in more focused publications. Being able to understand the changing consumer landscape is key to delivering our consumer protection and competition objectives. The survey data helps us to identify harm and improve consumer outcomes. The data also provides valuable insights for the financial services industry, the Government, other regulators, policymakers, consumer bodies and academics.
Resources library
As part of our commitment to be more transparent in the way we work, we opened up the results of the survey for wider use by others. For each iteration of the Financial Lives survey, as well as the main and other reports, we publish the full questionnaire, the technical report and multi-volume data tables. These can be found on the pages for the relevant year, with a summary of the available documents in the Resources library.
Raw data from the Financial Lives surveys can be accessed by applying to the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC).