Market Research Specialist

Financial Conduct Authority

Regulating financial services firms and financial markets in the UK, https://www.fca.org.uk/careers

Requirements of the role

SPC oversees firms and individuals (supervision), creates and reviews the rules by which they operate (policy) and identifies and remedies ineffective competition in markets (competition).

The FCA’s Market Research Team (MRT) provides vital consumer insights that support regulatory decisions. They deliver the Financial Lives survey – a key, nationally representative study tracking UK consumer attitudes, behaviours and financial experiences. They also deliver other data‑driven consumer, firm and stakeholder insights, through bespoke market research and collaboration with third‑party data providers. The team embeds evidence across the FCA to inform policy, identify emerging issues and keep consumer and firm voices central to regulation.

Role Responsibilities

The holder will be a subject matter expert, who can bring market research best practice and insights and new ideas into the team, and be able to challenge suppliers on the methodologies and designs they offer You will be expected to advise the team on research design, sampling, weighting and analysis, and to take ownership of changes and innovation. This will include helping to improve the Financial Lives survey (FLS) where necessary. Primarily, it will involve designing other research and working with our suppliers and their statisticians so that they design and deliver top-quality research You will co-author/ take on lead authorship of our FLS main report, from producing the outline, to taking the report through governance for its publication. You will be responsible for a series of smaller FLS spotlight reports (which may, for example, dig into a particular topic, or may look at results more widely for a specific cohort), authoring some and supporting others in the team to do so You will also take responsibility for creating and managing a new Consumer Research series on the FCA’s website, which provides a single point of access to the consumer research we conduct other than FLS You will be responsible for one or two of the retail financial sectors or topics covered by the FLS, meaning you deliver the questionnaire, the tabspec and the slides-based report for these sections of the survey. It will be important you take on this work for at least one wave of FLS, so that you understand well the way we manage FLS and what is expected of those working on the survey You will manage or contribute to other complex financial services research projects, from clarifying business/research objectives and writing the Statement of Requirements (SoRs), through assessing bids, and working with winning agencies to deliver high quality outputs, to seeing their reports through to publication You will manage multiple stakeholder relationships, including colleagues across the FCA who commission or use research, suppliers, and external stakeholders. Economics will be a key stakeholder. We want to work more with them on the design and weighting of consumer and firm research. We are looking to provide more qualitative market research to support the large-scale behavioural experiments they run in house The holder will support the team manager and two lead associates (who, respectively manage the FLS and our other work) to manage the work of the team and provide some on-the-job training

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Location

London, Edinburgh, Leeds

Contract type

Full time, Permanent

Profession

Analysis, Financial Services, Research

Working pattern

Flexible working, Hybrid

Closing Date

18/05/2026