Trust is the product.
It is not a brand value. It’s not a tagline. And it’s certainly not something you earn by putting the word “trusted” in your About page copy.
Yet, financial services firms continue to treat trust as a marketing asset — something to be claimed, packaged, and broadcast — rather than what it actually is: an outcome. One that takes years to build and seconds to destroy.
And this distinction matters more now than ever.
The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer found that financial services remains one of the least trusted industries globally, trailing healthcare, technology, and even government in several markets. That finding alone should prompt a rethink of how marketing functions inside these firms. Because if customers don’t trust the industry, no amount of campaign spend closes that gap. Strategy has to.
The Credibility Gap Is Getting Wider
The problem isn’t that financial services firms have stopped trying to build trust. Most of them are trying harder than ever. The problem is that the signals they’re sending — polished brand campaigns, award submissions, ESG commitments written at altitude — are out of sync with the signals customers actually use to calibrate trust.
Customers don’t trust banks and insurers because of their advertising. They trust them — or don’t — based on what happens when something goes wrong. How quickly a claim gets processed. Whether the chatbot actually resolves anything. Whether the complaint they lodged six weeks ago has been acknowledged. These are the moments of truth that shape brand perception in financial services, and marketing rarely owns them.
That’s the core tension. Marketing controls the promise. Operations controls the delivery. And trust lives entirely in the gap between the two.
What the Data Actually Shows
Research from Bain & Company on Net Promoter Score performance in financial services consistently shows that the highest-scoring firms — those whose customers actively recommend them — share a cluster of traits that have little to do with brand awareness. They respond faster to service failures. Their product terms are simpler. Their fees are more transparent. Their digital experience removes friction rather than adding it.
Notice what’s missing from that list: advertising. Sponsorships. Social media presence. The stuff most financial services marketing budgets are weighted toward.
That’s not an argument for gutting marketing investment. It’s an argument for directing it differently. The firms winning on trust are the ones deploying marketing dollars to make the experience better — clearer communications, better onboarding, sharper product education — rather than simply making the brand feel bigger.
Transparency as Strategy, Not Compliance
One of the more durable shifts in financial services marketing over the past decade is the move toward transparency as a competitive differentiator. Firms like Vanguard built entire brands on cost transparency. Monzo and Starling disrupted retail banking partly by making it legible — spending notifications, instant statements, plain-English terms. Index-linked products grew market share in part because fee structures were finally understandable.
What these brands grasped is that transparency isn’t just a regulatory obligation. It’s a trust-building mechanism. When customers understand what they’re paying for, what they’re getting, and what happens if things don’t work out, anxiety drops. Anxiety is the enemy of loyalty in financial services. People don’t switch providers because a competitor ran a better ad. They switch because they stopped feeling confident in the one they had.
Marketing’s role here is to advocate for simplicity upstream — in product design, in contract language, in digital UX — not just to communicate about it downstream.
The Problem With Purpose Marketing
The past five years produced a wave of purpose-led campaigns from financial services firms. Banks committed to net zero. Insurers ran campaigns about mental health. Asset managers published lengthy letters about stakeholder capitalism. Some of this is genuine. A lot of it is positioning.
Customers, particularly younger ones, have developed sharp instincts for the difference. The backlash against greenwashing in asset management is the clearest illustration — firms that made sweeping ESG claims without the portfolio data to back them up have faced regulatory scrutiny, media pressure, and measurable drops in institutional confidence.
The lesson isn’t that purpose marketing doesn’t work. It’s that it only works when the purpose is operational, not aspirational. When the commitment is specific, measurable, and auditable, it builds trust. When it’s a values statement on a website that bears no relationship to how the firm actually behaves, it actively destroys it.
What Marketing Can Actually Do
None of this means marketing is powerless in the trust equation. It means the function has to redefine what it’s responsible for.
The most effective financial services marketers are operating less like brand custodians and more like experience architects. They’re mapping every touchpoint in the customer journey and asking where confidence erodes. They’re working with product and compliance teams to simplify disclosures before launch, not after. They’re building content strategies around education — genuine financial literacy content that serves the customer — rather than content that serves the conversion funnel.
They’re also measuring differently. Awareness and recall metrics tell you whether people have heard of you. Trust metrics tell you whether people believe you. Net promoter scores, complaint resolution rates, digital self-service completion rates — these are the numbers that matter for a firm that wants to compete on trust, and they require marketing to have a seat at tables it doesn’t always occupy.
The Long Game
Trust in financial services is built through consistency across time. One good campaign doesn’t move it. One bad news cycle can crater it. That asymmetry is what makes it hard — and what makes it worth treating as a genuine strategic priority rather than a brand exercise.
The firms that will win the next decade of financial services are not the ones with the best creative. They’re the ones that have figured out how to make trust the product — structurally, operationally, and culturally — and then found smart ways to make that legible to the customers who need it most.
That’s the job. Not to claim trust. To earn it, over and over, in the moments that actually count.