Former Ipsos Execs Launch Verified Canadian Panel Firm

In Vancouver, Canada two former Ipsos executives, Mike Rodenburgh and Josh Cormie, have launched a company called SquareKnot Analytics, aiming to addresses the challenges of unreliable consumer recall and fraudulent survey responses.

Billed as 'Canada's first survey panel and personal budgeting app', SquareKnot taps verified Canadian users and combines actual consumer spending data with surveys

Rodenburgh (pictured top) joined Ipsos in 2011 as VP of Product Development for its innovation center the Open Thinking Exchange, having earlier worked for panels and research tech firm Vision Critical, and public opinion and marketing research firm Pollara. In January 2014 he was promoted to EVP Western Canada, leading the client services teams across all the group's strategic business units in the region - and he spent ten years in the role. Cormie (pictured below) was EVP Audience Measurement Lead at Ipsos for five years, after nearly five years at Fresh Intelligence, latterly as CEO. Earlier he worked for Millward Brown, Northstar Research Partners and between 2007 and 2012 as a VP at Ipsos ASI.

Rodenburgh says of the launch: 'A recent industry report from Greenbook found that 27% of research buyers feel they have made a poor business decision because of bad sample. When the wrong decision can cost a business tens of millions of dollars, this is simply unacceptable. By having our users connect to their bank accounts, we guarantee the authenticity of our Canadian panelists, enhancing the credibility of our data'.

Web site: www.squareknotanalytics.com .