January 15th, 2024, Lesley Simeon
Choosing the right financial and investment products often requires quite a bit of understanding, learning and maybe, experience. Leaning into reviews or suggestions offered by other consumers can be of help when buying financial products - but each consumer’s need for such products could be very different. In this piece, we look at whether consumers look up online reviews and ratings when buying financial and investment products.
Across 17 markets, on average, one in five consumers say they consider online reviews when purchasing financial and investment products (19%). In comparison, consumers are more likely to look up online ratings for hotels (44%), restaurants (43%), and electronics (42%).
Moving on to demographic data, men (21%) are more likely to use online reviews compared to women (17%).
Let’s now see how the figures stand across individual markets.
Asians are more likely than Europeans to use online reviews when buying financial products
Hong Kongers top the list (45%), followed by Indians (36%) and Indonesians (32%).
Conversely, consumers in France (9%) and Italy (11%) and Denmark (11%) are the least likely across all markets to say they use online reviews when making purchases for financial and investments products.
In Europe particularly, consumers in Poland (20%) are the most likely to refer to online reviews for financial products. As for Britain and the US, at least one in 10 consider online ratings (11% and 14% respectively).
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 17 markets with sample sizes varying between 501 and 2004 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in October 2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.