I spent 15 years in institutional banking before founding AllMarkets.io, and one pattern I observed repeatedly was this: firms that needed proprietary research were forced to choose between two bad options.

Option one: pay a global agency a significant premium for a study written by a researcher who had never worked in a finance function. The methodology would be sound. The analysis would lack the contextual understanding that makes research actionable. The account team would be charming. The senior analyst who understood your sector would be largely invisible after the scoping call.

Option two: conduct research internally, producing something that lacked methodological rigour and would not withstand scrutiny from investors, regulators, or the press. Cheaper on paper. Rarely worth the trade-off.

The agency pricing model persists because it bundles multiple services, including survey design, panel recruitment, fieldwork management, analysis, and report writing, into a single engagement with multiple layers of margin applied at each stage. Industry benchmarks suggest that a custom primary research project typically runs between £20,000 and £50,000, and B2B research targeting verified professional audiences runs 2x to 3x the cost of consumer research, given lower incidence rates and higher participant incentives.

When your target audience is CFOs, Fund Managers, or Treasury professionals rather than general consumers, you are already operating at the expensive end of that range before the analysis begins. A meaningful share of what you are paying for is overhead and account management infrastructure that contributes nothing to the intellectual quality of the final deliverable.

What the modern panel technology landscape has changed is not analysis but access. Platforms for verified professional respondent recruitment have matured considerably over the past decade, reducing the cost of reaching qualified finance professionals relative to the legacy panel arrangements many large agencies still rely on. For most B2B studies, the sweet spot between rigour and cost efficiency lies in well-designed hybrid quantitative research, which is precisely where modern boutique research models compete most effectively with traditional agency infrastructure.

What has not been commoditised is interpretation. The ability to look at survey data from CFOs and understand what it actually means, in the context of what is happening in credit markets, capital allocation cycles, or regulatory regimes, remains genuinely scarce. A competent junior researcher at a global agency can produce charts. They cannot tell you that a particular response pattern echoes what happened in European corporate lending in 2018 and what that implies for positioning today.

This is the gap AllMarkets.io fills. Institutional-grade methodology, verified professional panels, and analysis written by a CFA Charterholder who has sat in the seats our respondents occupy. The result is research that costs 50 to 70% less than agency alternatives and carries significantly more analytical depth.

If you are currently spending £20,000 or more on research studies and wondering whether the premium is genuinely justified, I would welcome a conversation about what we can deliver for less.

This article draws on market research pricing benchmarks from The Farnsworth Group, MainBrain Research, and Nexus Expert Research.