Fintech has found its product. It’s digital, it’s AI-driven, it’s frictionless. It’s beautifully designed. In many cases, it’s objectively better than the banking products it set out to disrupt. So why isn’t fintech marketing hitting home?
A 2026 fintech analysis shows customer acquisition costs remain among the highest of any industry. Not only that, they rose by around 40-60% between 2023 to 2025. It’s clear that companies are struggling to attract new users and that fintech’s current playbook is becoming harder to sustain.
In fact, Klarna’s CMO David Sandstrom recently claimed the organisation is abandoning conventional fintech advertising – which he sees as overly corporate and lacking creativity – and shifting towards more emotionally engaging brand campaigns, illuminating a growing feeling across the industry.
So what’s going wrong? And is it really that important?
We like to believe we make financial decisions rationally: Better exchange rates, lower fees, faster transfers, stronger security. But in reality, that’s not how people choose where their salary lands every month. Because long before customers experience your technology, they’ve experienced your brand. And that’s where the real decision is made. Yes, competence and experience matter, but neither come before trust. And trust isn’t built with features, it’s built with feeling.
Imagine someone asked you to leave your children with a complete stranger. What would you consider? Not whether they’re the cheapest. Not whether they have the slickest app. Not whether they can generate an AI bedtime story.
You’d consider one thing – do I trust them?
Managing our money isn’t much different. For the first generation of fintech, that consideration almost didn’t matter. Monzo, Revolut and Wise didn’t just improve banking; they reinvented it with instant notifications, frictionless onboarding, cards that actually worked abroad and transparent fees. Banking suddenly felt like the future arriving years ahead of schedule. The product was the brand. For a while, that was enough.
But then everyone caught up. Today, great features have become table stakes. AI is accelerating product parity at a pace we’ve never seen before. Every fintech promises simplicity, security and speed. Every app has beautifully crafted dashboards, intelligent spending insights and personalised recommendations. Competitive advantage measured in functionality now lasts months, not years.
The next competitive advantage won’t come from what your product does. It will come from how your brand makes people feel. Not in the sense of sentimental advertising or another slow-motion film set to an acoustic piano track, but something far more fundamental.
The advantage will be the confidence that someone is looking after you. The reassurance that this company understands your life, not just your transactions. The feeling that there are real people behind the software. It’s been reported that just 37% of US adults trust fintechs generally, and 43% say they trust digital banks – both well below the numbers for traditional banks (66%).
Traditional banks understood this idea instinctively because banking used to be deeply human. You walked into a branch. You knew your bank manager. They knew when you’d just bought a house or when business wasn’t going so well. Trust was built through familiarity, conversation and time.
Digital banking removed almost all of that. Ironically, just as financial services became more personal than ever, tracking every purchase, every salary payment, every mortgage application, the relationship itself became almost entirely impersonal.
That’s the creative challenge now facing fintech.
For marketing teams, this will mean extending their efforts beyond what the last decade of Fintech marketing was built on: performance data, growth loops and referral mechanics. Now that the market is maturing and differentiation is harder, the next battleground is brand craft: visual identity, storytelling and production quality to help win trust and the new customers that come with it.
Revolut’s recent Welcome to My Bank campaign was an important step. It shifted the conversation beyond product features towards identity and lifestyle. Wise has spent years building one of the strongest long-term marketing platforms in the category with Money Without Borders. Chip and Kroo have both also done excellent work in establishing themselves respectively, and both feel just a few strong marketing ideas away from the rocket fuel of momentum they need to go to the next level.
Too much fintech communication still feels like software marketing. It explains, but it rarely reassures. The brands know exactly what they do, but they’re less certain about what they want people to feel. The irony is that fintech companies obsess over the user experience inside the product while paying comparatively little attention to the emotional experience outside it.
But customers don’t fall in love with products. They fall in love with stories. With values. With brands that understand who they are.
What do the steps towards doing that look like?
The first step is surprisingly simple: stop asking what you want customers to know and start asking what you want them to feel. Every campaign, every sponsorship, every product launch and every social post should reinforce the same emotional promise. If the answer changes every quarter, you don’t have a brand; you have a marketing calendar.
That also means investing in disciplines fintech has often treated as secondary. Creative excellence is no longer decoration. Distinctive visual identity, memorable storytelling and consistent brand assets make companies easier to recognise, easier to remember and ultimately easier to trust.
Equally, let customers see the humans behind the technology. Tell stories about the problems you’re solving, the people you’re helping and the values guiding the business. The objective isn’t to appear bigger or more sophisticated, it’s to appear more familiar and trustworthy.
The fintech companies that dominate the next decade won’t necessarily have the smartest engineers or the fastest AI. They’ll be the ones that make people feel understood before asking them to trust them with their salary, their savings and their future. Because eventually every feature becomes a commodity. Every interface gets copied. Every AI capability becomes expected.
The brands that win won’t simply build better banking. They’ll build better relationships. And in the end, that’s what people have been looking for all along.
Fintech has mastered the app. It has not yet mastered the feeling before you open the app. That is the creative frontier, and the brands that get there first will own trust in a category where trust is the only defensible asset.
