We’ve taken an in-depth look at the financial services industry and pulled out the most important and exciting figures from our Ipsos iris platform to form this report. Our financial lives are increasingly lived online, a fact borne out by iris data which shows that 93% of UK internet users engaged with financial content in February 2022- near complete coverage.
The biggest individual player in this space is PayPal, which reached 3 in 5 people online in February alone. Our data shows the next biggest site is Santander – reaching 21% of internet users – while Nationwide, NatWest, and Lloyds Bank all reached 17% each.
Nationwide saw nearly 5% growth between Nov ’21 and Feb ’22, when most businesses saw audiences dropping significantly, most notably AMEX which saw a 46% drop in unique visitors over the same period. For financial news, the Mirror is the most popular, reaching 7m people during February, closely followed by the Guardian’s financial content, which attracted an audience of 5m across the month.
The industry as a whole saw increased traffic from October to November, primarily driven by Banking and Investment content, which correlates directly with the rise of cryptocurrency, which reached an all-time high in value over this period. However, much of this is confined to weekdays, as there are significant drops in time spent consuming financial content on weekends, most prominently across banking, investment, and financial news.
Download the full report here.
Ipsos iris also shows the audience composition for the industry: as you might expect, Londoners were more likely to consume financial content, with an even split across genders. While phones are the device of choice for financial news, the 6m desktop users spend over six times more time browsing compared to their handheld counterparts.