Tracking Canadian consumers’ attitudes, behaviour and intentions on key financial products/services.

A joint venture of Clayton Research and Ipsos-NPD Canada, the Financial Industry Research Monitor (FIRM) provides quarterly tracking of Canadian consumers’ attitudes and intentions regarding a range of financial behaviour, including:

• Home and car buying activity;
• Residential mortgage borrowing;
• Borrowing with personal loans and lines of credit; and
• Home and auto insurance.

The FIRM Questionnaire is fielded each quarter (March, June, September and December). Sample households are selected from Ipsos-NPD’s own demographically and geographically balanced panel of over 50,000 households, which is meticulously maintained for accuracy and high response rates. Over 3,000 households respond each quarter to the FIRM survey.

Each quarter, the survey contains a core of essential tracking questions on consumer attitudes and intentions regarding their home and car buying activity, residential mortgage borrowing, their borrowing with personal loans and lines of credit and their home and auto insurance needs.

Additional questions elicit consumer opinions on the latest developments in the housing, mortgage, personal lending, and home and auto insurance markets (for example, special promotions, product innovations, etc.).

A limited number of questions on each survey are also available to individual clients for custom research.

• Representative of all Canadians, not just your current customers;
• Provides an industry-wide, unbiased perspective;
• Data interpretation by senior economists at Clayton Research, Canada’s leading housing and mortgage market experts;
• Builds a large data base of information;
• Supplies a continuous measurement of market developments; and
• Offers a cost effective method of gathering information.

The FIRM Survey focuses on key financial issues for Canadian households, their home and car buying activity, their mortgage borrowing, their borrowing with personal loans and lines of credit and their home and auto insurance decisions.

This focus permits more concentration and accuracy than more general consumer financial surveys. And, unlike telephone surveys, the mail out format allows households to respond more carefully and accurately - and in total confidentiality.

Clients may choose to subscribe to any, or all, of the following components of the survey:

• Residential Mortgages;
• Household Borrowing; and
• Home and Auto Insurance.
  

For each component, FIRM tabulates and reviews the survey results each quarter in light of current economic and market conditions, and presents the results to subscribers at a presentation that encourages questions and discussion.

A written report that highlights the survey results is also provided, along with detailed tabulations, which segment responses for various customer groups (for example, region, age group, income, etc.), as well as for different lenders’ customers.

For more information please contact Patricia Arsenault at (416) 699-5645 or 1-800-689-4425 or by e-mail at parsenault@clayton-research.com