CFD TRADING IN THE UAE
/// A qualitative research engagement for a UAE-based investment services firm planning to enter the retail CFD trading market. The brief was to understand the current CFD trading experience in the UAE: what drives broker selection, where existing platforms create friction, and what would cause traders to switch. Findings would inform the client's strategy and proposition for a new trading platform.
/// The client was building a CFD trading platform to launch into a competitive UAE market. Before committing to product direction, they needed to understand the landscape from the trader's perspective: which brokers people use and why, what their actual experience looks like beyond marketing claims, and where the openings might be for a new entrant. They had internal hypotheses about traders but no primary evidence.
/// The client arrived with a long list of hypotheses to test, more than could realistically be covered in a one-hour interview. Prioritising what was essential versus what could be parked required pushback on the brief.
/// The client also brought pre-built personas that were hypothesis-based rather than evidence-based; restructuring them after the research wasn't in the original scope, but the data made it necessary, so I did it anyway.
/// Recruitment was the third challenge: CFD traders in the UAE are a narrow, hard-to-reach segment, and the recruitment agency I worked with had no prior experience with this subject matter. Owning the screener, briefing the agency on the distinction between traders and Introducing Brokers, and maintaining quality control through screening were all part of getting to the right participants.
/// Started by mapping the client's hypotheses against what could realistically be tested in qualitative interviews and proposed a reduced, prioritised set. Designed the screener and briefed the recruitment agency on profile criteria and the distinctions between trader and IB segments. Built a discussion guide structured around the prioritised hypotheses, with each section mapped explicitly to what it was testing. Ran 15 interviews with CFD traders across the UAE. Analysed the data thematically and tested each hypothesis against the findings to determine which held and which didn't. Restructured the client's predefined personas based on the behavioural patterns that emerged from the data.
/// The deliverable was a full research report covering analysed findings, hypotheses validated and invalidated against the data, and a revised set of behavioural personas grounded in the interviews. Walked the client through the results and answered their questions in a debrief session. Whether the findings informed the product decisions sat with the client; the engagement ended at handover.
