The DMNews article: Financial Services Searchers Shouldnt Be Ignored from DMNews.com reports on the findings from a Compete/Yahoo Search Marketing study.
[The study] concluded that consumers reached with search are attractive for financial services companies since they are both wealthy and of strong credit quality. The finding contradicts the widely held belief that someone who is searching for credit information online may not be creditworthy or a good target for advertisers. Also, such financial searchers are not just searching simply to reach their online banking account. The study, conducted from September to February, tracked 265,000 financial searches from 76,000 searchers across Yahoo, MSN, Google, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and Hotbot. It is titled, “The Role of Search Marketing in Financial Decisions” and is Yahoo Search Marketing’s first study since it dropped the Overture name.”
Postscript: If you’re looking for more info, you can get it here. The YSM team was nice enough to share a presentation (27 pages; PDF) that contains the detailed findings, charts, etc.
Also, more about the study in this Media Post article.