How organisations use Data Alchemy to turn complex data into strategic advantage
Intrum & FT Longitude – 20 countries, 20,000 respondents | View the published report
Intrum, Europe's leading credit management company, partnered with FT Longitude to understand the behavioural drivers behind consumer payment behaviour across 20 European markets. With 20,000 respondents, the dataset was rich but complex. Traditional demographic analysis couldn't explain why consumers in similar circumstances made fundamentally different financial decisions.
Created a composite Money Management Index from multiple survey variables, using deep learning to surface the latent structure in how consumers relate to money. This moved the analysis beyond simple income or age brackets into genuine behavioural dimensions.
Applied the Catalyst methodology to distinguish between what consumers say matters (stated importance) and what actually drives behaviour (statistical impact). The finding: psychological relationship with money outweighed economic circumstances.
Identified four distinct Types of Money Manager: behavioural profiles that cut across demographics and geographies, each with distinct attitudes, habits, and vulnerability patterns.
Brought the segments to life through AI-generated personas, making the analytical output immediately actionable for policy teams and client-facing staff across 20 countries.
Three findings that changed how Intrum operates:
The Money Management Index, built through Distillation, revealed that a consumer's income level doesn't reliably predict how well they manage money. 21% of consumers earning average salaries fell into the most financially vulnerable group, while only 26% of high earners qualified as truly resilient. This overturned assumptions that had shaped Intrum's engagement strategies for years.
Catalyst analysis showed that psychological factors, not income or employment, were the strongest predictors of financial vulnerability. Consumers who grew up in households where money caused stress were three times more likely to struggle financially as adults, regardless of what they now earned. Social media pressure and emotional spending patterns mattered more than salary brackets. This shifted the conversation from “how much do they earn?” to “what drives their relationship with money?”
The Segmentation and Persona Engine identified four distinct types of money manager, from self-disciplined optimisers who prefer minimal contact and digital tools, to financially fragile consumers who need human-first, empathetic engagement with clear, jargon-free guidance. These personas are now used by Intrum teams across 20 European countries to tailor communication tone, channel strategy, and payment plan design to individual consumer needs.
The full European Consumer Payment Report 2025 is publicly available on Intrum’s website.
Global Consumer Goods Company
A global consumer goods company was expanding into an emerging product category. Traditional market research could tell them how many consumers were aware of the new category, but not which consumers were psychologically ready to adopt it, or what was holding the rest back. With market entry decisions spanning dozens of countries, they needed a single, comparable measure that could cut through cultural and demographic differences to reveal genuine adoption readiness.
I built a composite index that distilled multiple attitudinal and behavioural variables into a single measure of each consumer’s psychological readiness to adopt the emerging category. This index captured mindset, motivation, and barriers to transition, dimensions that awareness and consideration metrics completely missed. The index was designed to work consistently across diverse markets, making cross-country comparison meaningful for the first time.
Driver analysis revealed which factors genuinely influenced adoption versus those that merely correlated with existing behaviour. This separated the levers the business could actually pull (product experience, messaging, channel strategy) from background noise, allowing marketing investment to focus where it would have real impact.
The analysis uncovered distinct consumer segments defined by their relationship with the category, from enthusiastic early adopters to resistant holdouts, each requiring fundamentally different engagement approaches.
The adoption readiness index became one of the most consequential outputs of the project. The client adopted it into their global consumer tracking programme across dozens of markets, where it became the primary measure for assessing strategic importance and prioritising which markets to enter and when. A metric that started as an analytical output became an operational decision-making tool at global scale.
The segmentation reshaped how the business targeted consumers, shifting from broad demographic targeting to motivation-based engagement tailored to each segment’s psychological relationship with the category.
This project represented an early application of the analytical thinking that would later inform the development of Knowsis’s current equity measurement and brand connection tools, proving that measuring psychological readiness, not just awareness, is what predicts real-world adoption.
