About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Benjamin serves eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals. His research focuses on how consumers perceive, adopt, and use new technologies and what that means for business executives at consumer companies, encompassing topics like customer segmentation, business models, and managing multiple distribution channels.
His research explores how emerging technologies like the Internet and mobile phones affect consumers' behavior, what motivates their use of different channels for different tasks, and how new channels and technologies are changing consumers' media consumption and their relationships with consumer firms like retailers and financial services companies. In particular, he specializes in understanding the effect of the Internet and other new technologies on business models in retail financial services, including payments, banking, lending, investments, and insurance.
During his 13 years at Forrester, Benjamin has worked in the company's Consumer Technographics®, financial services, and eBusiness channel & product management professional teams. He is based in Forrester's London office.
Before he joined Forrester, Benjamin was an analyst at Fletcher Research, the UK Internet research company that Forrester acquired. There, he researched the nascent online retail, online financial services, and online advertising markets. Before joining Fletcher Research, Benjamin worked as a financial journalist in London for four years.
Benjamin has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford.
Ten years ago, Forrester published some research with the slightly awkward title of ‘New Payment Systems’ Survival Guide’. One of our findings was that many successful new payment...
I’ve spent the past two days at Finovate Europe in London, which has rapidly established itself as the leading European retail financial technology event of the year. This year’s event...
When we look at our Technographics data on mobile banking adoption by bank, it’s clear that some banks are doing much better than others. Why? Some banks are lucky. Some banks have distinctive...
Today is, apparently, Cyber Monday in the UK. But there's a more interesting story in the UK's eCommerce market. It's about tax. The debate is about the tax policies of a number of...
I attended a briefing from Visa Europe yesterday, about its V.me digital wallet. Here’s what Visa said: V.me is more than a mobile digital wallet. Customers will be able to use V.me to make...
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at Forrester’s European Customer Experience Forum in London, which was based on the theme of Outside In, Forrester’s new book. One of the most interesting...
The other day, Smile*, one of the banks I have an account with, sent me a new contactless card. The striking thing about this otherwise ordinary event was that the bank didn’t mention that...
This is a guest post from Myriam Da Costa, a researcher serving eBusiness & Channel Strategy professionals. France has been quick to embrace mobile banking. Banks like BNP Paribas and...
In our research on eBusiness and channel strategy, we often come across clusters of innovation where innovation by one company in a sector causes its competitors not only to match it, but to try to...
Back in November 2006, a startup called Wesabe first showed the potential of online money management. Packaged personal financial management (PFM) software for PCs like Intuit's Quicken had...
The longer we spend researching mobile banking, the more convinced I become that mobile banking is the most important innovation, or cluster of innovations, in retail banking in years, arguably in a...
We're looking for a new analyst or senior analyst to join our eBusiness and channel strategy team, based in either Amsterdam or London. We're looking for someone with an analytical mind, good...
These are worrying times for people across Europe as the euro lurches towards another crisis, with leaders talking openly about the possibility of Greece leaving the euro and reports of customers...
The past five years have been awful for most European retail banks. The financial crisis, and the resulting recessions in most of Europe's economies, nearly destroyed some banks and crushed the...
There are a number of firms that we watch closely at Forrester because they stand out for sustained innovation. Behind the technology giants like Google and Apple, there are a number of established...
At our Marketing & Strategy Forum last November, Sean Gilchrist, head of digital banking at Barclays Bank, talked passionately about the importance of customer experience to the work being done by...
A number of people asked me to repeat my blog post from last year with my impressions from Finovate, so I thought I would. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Finovate, it’s a...
I love video as a communication media. The combination of sound and moving pictures so much more engaging and more memorable than text. We wrote in our research last year about how we're starting...
For the second year in succession, the UK's Co-operative Bank has come top in our European Bank Customer Advocacy Rankings, just ahead of Poland's ING Bank Śląski, with Germany's...
Over the past couple of years I have been intrigued by the concept of a 'digital wallet' that will combine mobile payments with a variety of other benefits for customers. The more people I...
In the past week I’ve have the privilege of talking to (or listening to) executives responsible for mobile banking at some of Europe’s biggest banks, including Bankinter, Barclays Bank,...
One of the (many) things I have been working on for the past few months is this year’s European Marketing & Strategy Forum, which is taking place on the 16th and 17th of November at the...
We've just published some new research on online shoppers' payment preferences in Europe. Payment habits across Europe remain diverse, with shoppers in different countries using different,...
After six years at Forrester, Alexander Hesse has decided to leave Forrester to take on a new challenge in a different field. It's always a sad day when you lose a respected colleague and I wish...
[With apologies to all those of you who had already read this, I'm re-publishing this as the Forrester gremlins ate my previous post.] For the past few years, many eBusiness and channel strategy...