Industry expertise

Financial services & insurance

Insync partners with banks, mutual banks, superannuation funds, insurers and financial services firms across Australia, bringing sector-specific benchmarks, research rigour and advisory support to organisations operating in one of the country’s most regulated and competitive talent markets.

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ORGANISATIONS WE’VE PARTNERED WITH

Defence Bank logo: red round crest with a white eagle, crown and swords, next to the black wordmark 'Defence Bank'.
Logo for RateMoney: pink circle with white 'R', 'rate money' text, and a pink banner reading 'HOME LOANS FOR SELF-EMPLOYED'.
Gateway Bank logo featuring a green curved G and navy text spelling 'Gateway' with 'bank' in smaller blue letters above.
Navy Health logo: blue text 'Navy Health' with light blue and dark blue wave icons on the left.
People's Choice Credit Union logo on a dark blue background.
RedZed logo with black lettering and a red stylized Z on a white background, brand wordmark
Great Southern Bank logo with overlapping teal diamond shapes forming a larger diamond motif on the left and the bank name on the right in dark blue text.
The sector right now

A sector where trust is the product

Financial services and insurance run on trust: the trust of customers and members, the trust of regulators, and the trust of the people who work there. All three are under sustained pressure.

Customer expectations have risen sharply. Regulatory scrutiny has stayed intense since the banking royal commission, and the spotlight has widened from financial risk to conduct, culture and how organisations treat their people. Automation and AI are reshaping operational and advisory roles. And competition for skilled people is as fierce as it has ever been.

The organisations that understand what their people and their customers are experiencing are far better placed to keep both. The clients we work with treat measurement not as a compliance response but as a competitive advantage, and increasingly as something their boards need to see.

What we hear from sector leaders

Six challenges every financial services leader recognises

These are the specific pressures that CPOs, CEOs, and P&C leaders in financial services and insurance regularly raise with us.

1

Managing the people side of automation and AI

AI and automation are reshaping operational, processing, advice, underwriting and claims roles faster in financial services than in almost any other sector. That creates real uncertainty for people: which roles are changing, which are at risk, and where they now add value. We don’t sell you an automation strategy, that’s not our lane, but we do measure what the change is doing to your workforce: where it’s lifting job demands and anxiety, where role clarity is slipping, and whether people still feel secure and connected enough to do their best work.

2

Showing the board and the regulator that your people can speak up

Since the Royal Commission, conduct and culture have become governance obligations, not soft issues. APRA and ASIC expect boards to have genuine visibility of non-financial risk and of whether people feel safe to raise concerns, and remuneration frameworks now hang off it. The hard part isn’t believing your culture is sound; it’s demonstrating it with evidence. Our engagement, culture and psychosocial measurement surface whether people actually feel safe to speak up and give your board and your regulator something credible to look at, not just an assurance that all is well.

3

Keeping skilled people in a competitive market

Financial services professionals have options. Understanding what genuinely drives engagement, loyalty and advocacy in your specific workforce takes measurement that goes well beyond salary benchmarking and a generic engagement score.

4

Rebuilding trust with customers and members

The royal commission permanently raised customer and member expectations. Organisations that can show they’re genuinely listening to their customers, and acting on what they hear, rebuild trust in a way compliance alone never will.

5

Aligning employee experience and member or customer experience

The most successful financial services organisations have stopped treating EX and CX as separate. How your people feel about their work directly shapes how customers and members experience you. Measuring both together shows you where to invest, which is something most providers can’t help you do.

6

Holding culture together through transformation

The sector has been through relentless structural change: mergers, regulatory reform and technology transformation. Keeping values and ways of working intact through that disruption takes deliberate culture work, not hope.

Solutions for this sector

Built for financial services and insurance organisations

Most providers do one piece of this. Insync covers the whole picture and ties it all together: employee experience and culture, customer experience, leadership development, and, through our sister brand Insync Boards, board and executive effectiveness. That connection matters more in financial services than almost anywhere, because your board and your regulator increasingly expect a coherent view of conduct, culture and how your people are doing, not four disconnected reports. The same sector team carries the thread across all of it. The services below are the ones financial services clients use most, each applied with sector-specific benchmarks, frameworks and consultant expertise.

Employee experience

Engagement surveys

Measure what drives and what depletes engagement across your workforce, benchmarked against financial services and insurance organisations so your results carry real context.

High-performance cultures in financial services carry specific engagement risks around compliance pressure, change fatigue and role clarity. Our benchmarks are built for this context.
Explore this solution

Customer experience

Voice of the Customer

Understand the experience of your customers, clients and members through a structured, independent feedback program built around your organisation’s specific value proposition and service model.

Member and customer experience in financial services is shaped by trust, transparency and responsiveness. Our VoC frameworks are designed to measure what actually drives loyalty in this sector.
Explore this solution

Employee experience

Psychosocial risk assessment

Identify and manage the psychosocial hazards in your organisation. In financial services, these commonly include high job demands, compliance pressure, change saturation and role ambiguity.

Psychosocial risk obligations are legislated across most Australian jurisdictions. Financial services organisations face specific hazards that generic workplace frameworks do not adequately capture.
Explore this solution

Culture & leadership

Culture assessment

Understand the cultural foundations of your organisation and where culture is supporting or undermining performance, retention and customer outcomes.

Culture in financial services has been under direct regulatory scrutiny. Organisations that understand their culture clearly are better placed to demonstrate genuine improvement to regulators and boards.
Explore this solution

Other solutions for the sector

CLIENT WORK

Seen in practice

Smiling man in glasses hands a tablet to a woman across a glass desk in a modern office lobby setting.

Financial services & insurance Customer experience

Defence Bank: Success and growth underpinned by Employee Experience and Customer Experience

+54 Net Promoter Score at its peak, well ahead of the big four banks
Read the case study

CLIENT VOICES

What our clients say

Financial services & insurance Employee experience

“Data becomes meaningful to create positive impact only when backed by a solid partner to support the entire process – technical, digital, account servicing and consultative. We are grateful for the Insync team of professionals, for their years of continued support and partnership in making Defence Bank a great place to work for our people and bank for our members.”

Financial services & insurance Employee experience

“Undertaking our Engagement and Alignment Survey with Insync is quite simply the most straightforward and seamless process in our annual HR calendar. They consistently deliver an excellent product in a professional and effective way.”

Your sector specialist

The team that will understand your organisation

When you work with Insync’s financial services team, you are working with consultants who understand the regulatory environment, talent dynamics and culture pressures that define this sector.

Dr Erika Szerda

Dr Erika Szerda

Head of Employee Experience

Erika leads Insync’s employee experience portfolio, working with leaders in financial services, professional services, engineering, industrials and mining to build cultures that perform under pressure.

A registered psychologist with a Doctorate in organisational and industrial psychology, Erika brings over 17 years of experience working across Australia and Hong Kong — and a rigorous, evidence-based lens to every engagement.

Despite decades of research on leadership and engagement, many organisations are still going backwards. The gap is rarely ideas — it’s clarity. Erika works closely with leaders to understand the specific context before cutting to what matters — identifying the levers that will actually move the dial and building the confidence to act on them. She led the revalidation of Insync’s proprietary employee diagnostic, ensuring it remains statistically robust, current, and built for the decisions leaders actually need to make.

Her work cuts through the noise to find the signal — and then helps leaders act on it.

Read bio

Erika leads Insync’s employee experience portfolio, working with leaders in financial services, professional services, engineering, industrials and mining to build cultures that perform under pressure.

A registered psychologist with a Doctorate in organisational and industrial psychology, Erika brings over 17 years of experience working across Australia and Hong Kong — and a rigorous, evidence-based lens to every engagement.

Despite decades of research on leadership and engagement, many organisations are still going backwards. The gap is rarely ideas — it’s clarity. Erika works closely with leaders to understand the specific context before cutting to what matters — identifying the levers that will actually move the dial and building the confidence to act on them. She led the revalidation of Insync’s proprietary employee diagnostic, ensuring it remains statistically robust, current, and built for the decisions leaders actually need to make.

Her work cuts through the noise to find the signal — and then helps leaders act on it.

Organisations worked with

Talk to Erika's team

SECTOR INSIGHTS

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Common questions

Things sector leaders ask us

Do your benchmarks include financial services and insurance-specific data?

Yes. Our benchmark pool includes data from banks, mutual banks, insurers, superannuation funds and financial services firms across Australia. Your results are compared to organisations operating in the same regulatory environment and talent market as yours, not averaged against unrelated industries.

Can you help us show our board and regulator that our culture supports good conduct?

Yes, and it’s one of the most common reasons financial services organisations come to us. Our engagement, culture, and psychosocial measurement surfaces whether people feel safe to speak up and whether the culture genuinely supports good conduct, and produces documented, independent evidence your board and regulator can rely on. Through our sister brand Insync Boards, we can extend that into board and executive effectiveness, so the view runs from the front line to the boardroom.

Can you help us measure both employee experience and customer or member experience?

Yes. Insync designs and delivers both EX and CX programs, and we can run them in a coordinated way so your leadership team can see the relationship between the two. Defence Bank is a confirmed example of an organisation that has run aligned EX and CX programs with us.

How do you handle data security and confidentiality in financial services engagements?

All data is stored and managed within Australia. Insync complies with the Australian Privacy Act and applies consistent security practices across its platform. Your data isn’t shared with third parties or used for any purpose beyond your engagement, and we’re happy to provide further details on our security practices on request.

Ready to turn feedback into meaningful action?

Our people are what set us apart. Reach out to a consultant who knows your sector — or subscribe to stay across our latest research and benchmarks.

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