About Us
Our story.
The Financial Well-Being Monitor (FWBM) emerged from the partnership between Adhoc Research and SEAL, uniting Adhoc’s sociological expertise with SEAL's strength in economic and quantitative research.
The First Spark
The Financial Well-Being Monitor (FWBM) originated from a strategic collaboration between Adhoc Research and SEAL. This partnership combines Adhoc’s long-standing experience in sociological inquiry, cultural analysis, and methodological design with SEAL’s advanced capabilities in economic analytics, impact evaluation, and data-driven research. Together, the two organizations built FWBM to provide a unique platform that not only measures financial stress and resilience at the household level but also translates these insights into actionable knowledge for policymakers, businesses, and civil society.
Together, we designed the Financial Well-Being Monitor (FWBM) to go beyond macro indicators and deliver household-level insights that capture financial security, emotional resilience, and lived experiences. This collaboration bridges data and empathy, structure and subjectivity—turning evidence into actionable intelligence for policy, business, and civil society.
Our journey began with the recognition of a micro-economic data gap in Turkey—an area long overshadowed by macro statistics. Traditional figures existed, yet they left households’ lived realities invisible: daily struggles, vulnerabilities, and shifting hopes for the future. From this void, we combined our experiences to build FWBM. What started as an idea has now grown into a rapidly expanding ecosystem of researchers, institutions, and decision-makers.
“FWBM emerged from a simple but powerful insight: without micro-data on households, we are steering in the dark. We exist to illuminate the unseen wave beneath the economy.”
Executive Team
The founding partners and leads of FWBM.
Beyza Polat
Founder - Managing Partner
Beyza Polat is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of SEAL Consulting. She is an applied microeconomist with an expertise on the analysis of large-scale datasets and development and implementation of quantitative research tools to contribute to the decision-making process of public and private enterprises. Since 2014, she has been working as a team leader and/or a consultant in projects with the Ministry of Industry and Technology, Ministry of Trade, The World Bank, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Unites Nations Development Program, Turkish Employment Agency and SAS Institute.
She has experience in quantitative impact evaluation, program evaluation, regional economic analysis, labor market assessments and sectoral economic analysis. She also gives executive training to the public officials and the private sector on data analytics and impact evaluation. She previously worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at Özyeğin University where she taught Statistics, Econometrics and Applied Microeconometrics courses. She also taught undergraduate and graduate level courses at Bilkent University and LSE. Beyza holds an undergraduate degree in Business Administration from Bilkent University and graduate degrees in Economics from Bilkent University and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Saygın Vedat Alkurt
Founder - Managing Partner
Saygın Vedat Alkurt holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Sociology from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ), Ankara. With over 15+ years of interdisciplinary research experience, he has contributed to and led numerous academic, public, and civil society projects across Turkey, particularly in fields such as political sociology, communication, youth studies, and strategic consultancy. He currently serves as the General Director of Adhoc Research and Consultancy, which he co-founded, and as the Chairperson of CORE Institute (Collective Research Association), an NGO focusing on generational change, urban mobility, and socio-cultural transformation.
He is also a lecturer at Kadir Has University’s Faculty of Communication and sits on the Advisory Board of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the same university.
Alkurt’s portfolio spans research design, qualitative and quantitative analysis, monitoring and evaluation, and data-driven policy consulting for international organizations such as UNDP, European Union institutions, and TUBITAK. He is known for bridging data and narrative, combining robust field methodologies with participatory approaches to produce actionable insights for social impact. Throughout his career, he has maintained a strong focus on public interest research and the intersection of societal behavior, governance, and policy.
Ata Onat
Partner
Ata Onat is the Founder and CEO of GA Capital, an AI-native M&A advisory firm, and AnalystAI, a market intelligence platform transforming fragmented private-market data into structured, decision-ready insights for investors. Prior to founding GA Capital, Ata led corporate development for Southeast Asia at EMP Belstar SuperFreeze, the logistics platform of EMP Belstar, a $2B AUM alternative asset manager. He executed major expansion initiatives across the region, including a $70M+ cold storage facility in Singapore and multiple infrastructure projects in Indonesia and Vietnam.
Before EMP, Ata spent 3 years managing a portfolio Company in Vietnam on behalf of Bravia Capital, a private equity firm in NY.Initially the Interim CFO and later as an Executive Committee member of Bac Ky Logistics, Ata sold the company to a Vietnamese conglomerate in 2022. Before Vietnam, Ata was based in New York, doing investments and portfolio management at Bravia Capital. He completed, advised, and participated in M&A deals worth +$6B in the Transportation, Logistics, and Aviation sectors across US, UK, Vietnam, Brazil, Ghana, China and Turkey.
Advisory Board
Experts contributing to FWBM’s strategic direction.
Prof. Dr. Banu Demir
Department of Economics
Oxford University
Necati Celik, Ph.D
Research Manager
Financial Health Network
Prof. Dr. Ömer Turan
Department of Political Sciences
İstanbul Bilgi University
Orkun Özkan
Managing Partner
Pekin & Pekin
Prof. Dr. Burak Özçetin
Department of Communication and Desing
Bilkent University