Insurance Behavior Research
Scotiabank · 2017–2019 · Lead Researcher
Methods: In-home ethnographic interviews · Multi-city fieldwork · Behavioral framework development · Journey mapping ·
Scale: 20 participants · 4 Canadian cities · 3-month timeline
The Problem
Scotiabank’s insurance division was preparing to move to a digital and online sales model. Before they could build anything, they needed to understand something more fundamental: what is the actual experience of being an insurance customer?
Not the transactional experience — the forms, the quotes, the policy documents — but the lived experience. How does insurance fit into a family’s life? When does it feel reassuring and when does it feel like a burden? What prompts someone to buy, to renew, or to quietly let coverage lapse? These weren’t product questions. They were human questions, and answering them required research that met people where they actually lived.
The brief was broad: understand the customer experience across life, home, and critical illness insurance products, with enough geographic distribution to capture meaningful variation across Canadian markets. About 37% of Scotiabank’s insurance page views were concentrated in the Toronto area alone — a signal that the team’s understanding of their customers was probably more urban, more digitally fluent, and more financially comfortable than the actual customer base.
Research Approach
I designed a 60-minute in-depth interview protocol targeting participants with recent memorable insurance experiences and those actively considering a purchase. We conducted 20 interviews across four cities chosen to represent meaningfully different market contexts:
- Toronto/GTA — urban density, high digital adoption, financial services saturation
- Montreal — bilingual, culturally distinct attitudes toward financial products and risk, different relationship to English-language financial institutions
- Thunder Bay — rural and remote context, limited banking access, different relationship to financial proximity and trust
- Halifax — Atlantic Canadian perspective, historically different economic patterns and community-based financial relationships
Each city required adapted recruitment. “People who recently had a memorable insurance experience” means something different depending on whether you’re in a major urban center with multiple providers competing for your attention or in a community where options are limited and provider relationships are more personal. Getting to real stories — not the ones people think researchers want to hear — required adjusting how we recruited, how we framed the conversation, and how we asked questions about financial decisions, which many people experience as private or anxiety-producing.
The interviews were structured to move from general financial context into insurance specifically, and from past experiences into current attitudes. We weren’t just collecting facts about coverage levels and product types. We were trying to understand the emotional register of insurance — how it feels, what it means, when it comes to mind and when it doesn’t.
What We Found
Analysis produced 11 behavioral insights. Three of them reframed the strategy conversation in ways that had direct implications for the digital product:
“Fear Factory” — fear was operating as a barrier to action rather than a motivator for purchase. Marketing that leaned into anxieties about illness, death, and financial vulnerability wasn’t prompting people to buy; it was prompting them to look away. The emotional experience of thinking about insurance was aversive enough that people regularly chose not to think about it at all.
“Payment Fatigue” — for many participants, insurance felt like money leaving every month without return. Unlike other financial products, insurance offers no visible progress: no balance growing, no asset accumulating, no feedback that the product is doing anything. Customers who had never filed a claim often couldn’t articulate what they’d gotten for years of premiums. This eroded renewal motivation significantly.
“The Insurance Labyrinth” — complexity was preventing informed decision-making. Participants regularly described not knowing what they were buying, not understanding what would or wouldn’t be covered, and making decisions based primarily on price because they lacked any other legible signal of quality. This wasn’t a literacy problem. It was a design problem.
These findings anchored the Behavioural Framework for Insurance (BFI) — three customer archetypes, each mapped to a 360° journey with distinct needs, emotional patterns, and opportunity spaces:
The Emotional Devotee — driven by love and protection. Insurance is an expression of care for the people who depend on them. They buy readily but want reassurance, not complexity.
The Proactive Carer — organized and forward-thinking. They research carefully, compare options, and want transparent information. They’re the most digitally engaged and the most likely to respond well to self-service tools.
The Cautious Pragmatist — skeptical and financially stressed. They buy when they feel they have to, let coverage lapse when money is tight, and disengage from complexity. They need simplicity, transparency, and evidence of value.
Impact
The BFI became the strategic foundation for the insurance division’s digital transformation. It directly informed product prioritization (which features to build first and for whom), content strategy (how to talk about insurance without triggering avoidance), and channel design (what the digital purchase flow needed to do differently for each archetype).
The framework outlasted the project. It became the team’s shared reference for how they understood and segmented their customers — the kind of durable strategic artifact that earns its keep not once but across every subsequent planning cycle.
Reflection
The city design mattered more than I expected it to. It would have been easier and cheaper to recruit 20 participants in Toronto. The data we got from Thunder Bay and Halifax was qualitatively different — not just in the specific details of people’s experiences, but in what became visible when you put it next to the urban data. The relationship to financial institutions in a community where there’s one branch, where the banker knows your family, is a fundamentally different thing than the relationship to a digital-first product in a city with twenty competing providers. That variation wasn’t just interesting. It was necessary.
The insight about fear as a barrier rather than a motivator was the finding that most changed how I think about framing research questions. We had assumed going in that understanding what people were afraid of would help us understand what would motivate them. It turned out fear was doing the opposite — making people avoid thinking about the subject at all. The implication for the product was significant: a digital insurance experience that led with risk and urgency was pushing customers away at the door. That finding only emerged because the research was generative enough to surface what was actually happening, rather than confirming what we expected.