2025 has been another fantastic year at Seven. We’ve welcomed new faces to our team, and new clients to our books, whilst continuing to work with our much-valued existing portfolio of clients across tech and innovation, as well as key journalists and media partners.

With the year drawing to a close, we’ve taken a look back at some of our most memorable achievements from the past 12 months. We’re so proud of everything we’ve accomplished, and can’t wait to see what opportunities the New Year has in store!

International Women’s Day with Mastercard

Ahead of International Women’s Day, Seven developed global research with Mastercard that focused on female entrepreneurship. Findings highlighted a strong sense of female entrepreneurialism across global markets – particularly among Gen Z and millennials in the UK – and unveiled some of the leading challenges faced by those starting and running businesses.

We launched the findings at a breakfast event held at The Shard in London, bringing together leading journalists from the likes of Hello and The Telegraph. Guests heard from a range of inspiring female entrepreneurs – from small business owners to content creators – making for a thoughtful and highly successful event, and a fitting way to platform Mastercard’s new research.

Continued success across our Challenge Works portfolio

Our partnership with Challenge Works, part of Nesta, definitely kept us busy this year. With multiple projects launching and meeting major milestones, there’s plenty to celebrate. Here are just a few of the many wins …

We kicked off the year with the announcement that the Ofwat Innovation Fund had been extended for five years, doubling its funding to £400 million to support projects that could help to solve the many challenges the water sector faces. Other announcements have included the sixth Water Breakthrough Challenge – offering £50 million to the most groundbreaking innovations – and the first Water Efficiency Lab – aimed at driving a transformative reduction in water demand across England and Wales.

The announcement of the Aqualunar Challenge winner in March was another standout moment. We secured an exclusive interview with The Guardian, platforming the winning solution: a technology that uses microwaves and ultrasound to defrost and purify water frozen as ice on the Moon. Alongside the exclusive, we secured leading international coverage across nationals, a collaboration with BBC Sky at Night on The One Show, and multiple trade verticals.

In June, we led on the launch of The Longitude Prize on ALS: a £7.5 million global challenge prize to incentivise researchers and innovators to use AI to identify the highest potential drug targets for ALS – the most common form of motor neuron disease (MND). We delivered a high-profile, integrated communications campaign, securing a BBC Breakfast exclusive, an interview on Radio 4 and the BBC Breakfast sofa, 1.7K pieces of coverage across the world, and a digital reach of 9M+ in 99 countries. Being a five-year campaign, we’re excited to continuing working with the team to ensure the prize is a huge international success.

We also oversaw the launch of two new challenge prizes: the Good Start Challenge, which seeks to advance innovative solutions to improve the wellbeing of parents and caregivers in underserved communities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and the West Yorkshire Mayor’s Big Ideas Challenge, which calls upon small businesses to come up with bright ideas to reduce the region’s health inequalities.

Successes among our tech clients

The 2025 Employee Benefits Report with Zest and Epassi UK

In May, we secured an exclusive interview for Zest and Epassi UK’s CEO, Matt Russell, in The Times. This was followed by the launch of the annual Employee Benefits Report, which highlighted the growing importance of benefits packages in delivering a competitive employee proposition, and also landed print and online coverage in The Times.

Leading coverage announcing Raindrop’s new partnership

Our client Raindrop, a top pension-finding fintech, secured a partnership with Aegon to enable the location of £36 million in lost pensions from over 3,300 pots. With over £31.1 billion in lost pension pots across the UK – and fewer than one in three UK adults having arranged their finances for later life – this is an important partnership that will support the quest to reunite pension pots with owners.

Seven led on this announcement, generating press coverage and demonstrating impact in Which? and Yahoo Finance – among other leading titles.

Across the year, Raindrop’s announcements have been covered by highly respected journalists – with 81% of coverage within Tier 1 media, including The Mail on Sunday, FT Adviser, The Sun, Daily Mirror and The Times Money Mentor.

Currensea’s response to soaring travel costs

Cost of living stories have continued to dominate the news agenda over the past year – with many families being hit hard and willing to do whatever they can to save money, including travelling outside of the school holidays, even if they face a fine. 

With this being a hot topic, we developed new research for travel debit card, Currensea, to understand just how many parents planned on taking children out of school during term to avoid peak travels costs. The results revealed that nearly 2 million parents planned on doing this in the summer term, with a quarter (23%) happy to pay a fine. 

Anchoring the research in such a contemporary debate meant we secured coverage across top tier publications including The Times, ITV’s This Morning, Sky, The Independent, and The Mail.

CRIF Banking on Banks report launch

We once again developed and wrote CRIF’s annual Banking on Banks report. Since 2022, this report series has analysed trends shaping consumers’ relationships with banks, insurers, and financial providers, covering topics such as trust, new technologies (including open banking and AI) and customer service expectations.

This year, we launched not one but two in-depth reports reviewing the past decade in financial services and the decade ahead, combining consumer and financial workers’ perspectives. We adopted a focused approach with strong Tier 1 exclusives, resulting in Banking on Banks’ highest audience reach to date: 91 pieces of coverage – 53% of which was within Tier 1 media outlets – with an audience of 339M.

Creating local, market-specific toolkits to accompany each report further amplified the research and helped to support key lead generation for CRIF.

Securing key Budget coverage for InvestEngine

InvestEngine is an online investment platform with a mission to help more people invest smarter. We have worked together for several years, helping them build their profile as a sector leader. With much noise around this year’s Budget, we worked to help InvestEngine secure a strong share of voice for commentary around taxes, pensions and ISAs.

We drafted and issued statements on multiple issues that impact InvestEngine’s customers in advance of the Budget – responding to media speculation – and quickly after the speech took place.

We also issued a press release the following morning calculating how many people would be affected by the ISA rule changes. In total, we secured over 300 pieces of coverage for InvestEngine in November alone – including in the Standard, Express, Mail, Independent, Yahoo!, GB News and MoneyWeek. This level of media engagement doesn’t happen overnight but demonstrates the value of a targeted long-term PR strategy in building a trusted brand with media.

Welcoming payabl.

Early in the year, we began working with payabl. – a leading financial technology provider that offers a comprehensive range of payment products for retailers and other merchants. Ahead of November’s Black Friday, we teased research from a new report on fraud risk that we have created, securing nearly 200 pieces of coverage – including The Independent, The i Paper, LBC and The Scotsman.

It’s been busy and this is just a snapshot of what we’ve been up to – with too many successes to include on the one page! We’re so proud of all that our team has managed to deliver amid an ever-changing media climate.

We also want to extend a huge thanks to all of our clients, media partners and various contacts that have supported this year’s success.

Roll on 2026 …