Gil Caldwell-Dunn, Strategy Director, Grey London
Money is one of the most emotionally charged parts of our lives, but we don’t feel anywhere near as much attachment to the brands who hold it for us. In fact, if all banks rebranded tomorrow to ‘Your Bank’, I doubt anyone would get mad.
As the fintechs mature and the category begins to homogenise, the question left to answer is: what’s the value in a bank brand?
Bank brands are currently in a dangerous situation. Physical availability has entirely disappeared; once prominent high-street real estate and flashy gold or coral cards on a restaurant table, most banks are now a few pixels in a folder and a quick tap of ApplePay. And most people rarely find themselves face to face with an ATM anymore.
On top of this, a lack of differentiation has also put mental availability at risk. As the traditional banks play catch-up and fintechs expand their offering to look like traditional banks, standing out has become a game of marginal gains, where a shiny new button or feature has to do a lot of heavy lifting for the brand. According to Kantar, the average ‘difference’ score for the once disruptive fintechs has been declining annually to the point of convergence with the old banks.
So how do you decide who to choose?
The category’s current solution seems to be a sea of rather vague and hollow promises. Lofty declarations of achievement stare you in the face on the tube while the economy sits in disrepair: Tomorrow Today! A world of possibility! Say hello to life! Take your money to new places! Marginally better claims compete to make money easier, give you better APR, or offer higher rewards to switch.
But real people don’t trust the used car salesman who promises them the world.
Much like the election, trust isn’t really won through big promises or detailed policies, it’s won in ideology. We vote for the party that matches our ideology: a view of how the world should work. When the product is table stakes, we buy on belief. Today, banks have confused trust with competence over conviction. But you can’t believe in someone who doesn’t believe in anything.Managing your money, promising a bright future or just being a ‘disruptor’ isn’t a belief, there’s nothing to identify with. Banks now need to dig deep and ask themselves what they believe in if they expect consumers to believe in a bank that’s practically similar to all the others.
In today’s increasingly contradictory and tension-filled world, there’s a lot to build an ideology around when you take a step back. In a world where everyone is a global citizen, why is our money still so constrained by borders? In a world where communities have knocked institutions off their pedestal, shouldn’t finance feel less top-down? If younger generations are locked out of traditional wealth, how can banks help people build new definitions of prosperity? In an industry that famously extracts value from people, who’s the one giving back opportunity?
Coinbase are capitalising on the traditional banks’ apathy in their latest work, ‘Your way out’, giving viewers an ideology to get behind, a belief in a decentralized system where you should control your money, no one else. In a financial system designed to keep you passive, they exist to give you control back, to give you a ‘way out of their world’.
Interestingly, Nationwide are now number 1 for affinity and trust in their category, and the only bank increasing in ‘difference’ versus all other banks over the last few years. And they have a clear conviction: your money should only be used to help you, not a bank’s shareholders.
Money is so much more than buying a house or retiring, it’s freedom, rebellion, independence, it’s saying yes and saying no, it’s hope and fear, time and space. Much like politics it forms a fundamental part of how we see the world, and the banks aren’t spending enough time asking themselves how they see it too.
Banking’s biggest danger is no longer new shiny fintechs, it’s the misconception that to be trusted they need to be helpful, friendly and ultimately generic. But consumers are demanding more than blanket sponsorships, vague promises and free cinema tickets. When institutional trust is collapsing, the economy is jumping from crisis to crisis and we face constant political upheaval, consumers aren’t looking for another brand sat on the sidelines.