Consumer confidence in the financial sector is at an all-time high: Here's how to build and retain brand trust

Consumer trust in the financial sector is on the rise. And brand analysts face increasing pressure to act quickly and effectively to nurture and maintain it.

From proving ROI to responding agilely to fintech competitors, analysts must provide a clear strategic pathway for CMOs looking to act on increasing consumer trust and respond to competitors. 

TL;DR: 

• Ad budgets in the U.S. are predicted to hit $1.22 billion by the end of 2026, but an increase in ad spend means more pressure on brand analysts to prove ROI, justify ad spending and ensure profitability. 

• Brand trust must become the guiding metric for creative success. As consumer trust in the financial sector rises to 64%, the highest it’s been in years, analysts must prove how ads and creative campaigns focused on transparency, integrity and value can deliver strong ROI and promote long-term customer acquisition and retention.

• Zappi offers 60% more predictive accuracy than legacy pre-testing and can explain 80% of the relationship between creative and sales, making it easy to track ROI and demonstrate profitability. 

As mentioned above, consumers' trust in financial providers is on the rise. In fact, Edelman and Smithfield reports that consumers trust financial services companies in 17 out of the 28 countries they surveyed.

And higher trust means higher ad spending. Why? Because finance brands want to maintain that increased trust and get their name front and center as one of the well-known brands to turn to. Industry forecasters predict that U.S. financial media network ad spend will jump from $640 million to $1.22 billion by the end of 2026. While global total ad spending is predicted to surpass $1 trillion for the first time in 2025.

But as budgets grow, so does the pressure on brand analysts to prove ROI. Analysts face increasing pressure to justify ad spending and ensure profitability. But leadership pressures for fast results, disparate platforms, unintegrated systems and huge amounts of siloed customer and consumer data make it a challenge for analysts to centralize, analyze, act on data insights and connect ad campaigns to ROI. 

Global financial services trust among consumers rose two points in 2025 to 64%, rising 15-points from a steep low in 2015, while consumers rank banking as the most trusted subsector since 2023. 

However, many consumers still remain skeptical of the financial services industry since the 2008 financial crisis. Many have spent several years feeling resentful and angry at unethical practices, grossly overpaid executives, and what they perceive as a lack of strong regulations and effective safeguarding policies. 

PWC says: 

"The message is that many consumers assume financial services businesses are ‘all the same’. This is the challenge that companies must now confront—those that do so successfully have an opportunity to break through the apathy and win new customers. In our view, this will require genuine cultural change where the customer comes first and the product comes second."

While trust is on the rise, financial providers must work to mitigate years of poor reputation and lack of consumer confidence. That’s why it’s essential that campaigns are centered around reliability and trust. 

For example, in the UK, 46% of consumers say that the biggest change financial service providers can make to continue to rebuild their trust is to deliver greater transparency on their products and services. Clarity around products, terms and conditions, fees, business practices and value are all core components of continuing to strengthen consumer trust. 

Brand trust must become an analyst's North Star for creative success. Creative must act as a bridge, providing the transparency consumers need to continue to rebuild their confidence and trust in the wider sector and individual financial institutions. Analysts must show that creative campaigns are a profitable investment in long-term brand equity and be able to measurably prove that transparency on business policy and practices results in a higher ROI and long-term customer acquisition and retention.

Fintechs continue to be one of the biggest industry disruptors, providing some of the strongest competition to traditional financial institutions. Consumers, particularly younger tech-natives, often prefer fintech providers because they feel they offer greater security, speed, lower costs, a more user-friendly digital experience and more flexibility. 

Revenues of fintechs increased by 21% in 2024, growing far more rapidly than incumbent financial institutions at 6%. Additionally for challenger banks, annual revenue has reached over $500 million and deposits are growing at 37% annually, putting them 30 percentage points ahead of traditional financial institutions. 

As a brand analyst, you need fast, validated insights to track how consumers see the main disruptors on the market and show you how you can successfully differentiate with creative that responds to competitor moves and real-time consumer perceptions. 

Zappi’s consumer insights platform can help give you the strategic rigor you need to concretize brand trust with tangible metrics and defend ad spend. 

You can use Zappi to measure essential metrics tied to brand trust and get in-depth insights into the level of brand trust and confidence consumers across segments feel towards your brand. This can be seen by measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) like brand familiarity, brand sentiment and purchase intent, and then benchmarking this performance against your main competitors.

Zappi’s platform can also provide diagnostics across your digital-first campaigns—including apps, mobile, OOH, social; allowing you to track campaign performance from the earliest stages of development and enabling continuous brand tracking on every channel throughout the later stages of your campaigns. This enables continuous measurement and insight generation and helps you to make sure that the messaging on brand trust remains consistent across all your channels. 

What’s more, Zappi's advertising system can explain 80% of the relationship with sales prediction and marketing mix modeling, in comparison to legacy solutions which can account for approximately 50%. This allows you to gain 60% more predictive accuracy, enabling you to de-risk creative concepts and confidently justify the ROI of your ad spend.

Plus, Zappi's AI Quick Reports can deliver the market and consumer insights you need to help you make strategic decisions faster, typically cutting down your research time from weeks and months to hours. This allows you to respond agilely to shifts in consumer perceptions and behavior and competitor activity.