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| Lori Ruggiero |
There’s a peculiar irony at the center of financial services communications. The sector outspends nearly every other industry on reputation management, brand advertising and public relations, yet public trust in financial institutions has spent the better part of two decades recovering ground it may never fully reclaim. The 2008 financial crisis delivered the initial blow. Subsequent scandals, opacity around fees, algorithmic complexity and pandemic-era controversies kept the wound open.
The numbers are specific and stubborn. Gallup's 2026 Confidence in Institutions survey found that just 28% of Americans expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in banks – one of the lowest readings in the survey's history.
Most firms respond to this data by spending more. More advertising. More thought leadership. More sponsored content. More spokespeople. The volume increases. The trust gap persists. The industry has concluded it has a communications quantity problem when the actual issue is a credibility problem, and that requires entirely different solutions.
Brand awareness, in most cases, is not the challenge. Consumers and institutional buyers alike can name the major asset managers, the bulge bracket banks, the leading insurance groups, the dominant fintech platforms. Recognition is high; understanding is not.
This is the distinction the industry consistently fails to make. Share of voice, the metric most communications programs are built around, measures how often a brand appears in the conversation. It says nothing about what the audience takes away from that appearance. Share of understanding, a less commonly used but more consequential measure, asks whether audiences comprehend what a firm does, how it differs from competitors and why that difference should matter to them.
In financial services, share of understanding is remarkably low given the investment in share of voice. Ask a sophisticated investor to explain the meaningful difference between two competing wealth management platforms, mid-market private equity firms or ESG-focused asset managers, and the answers tend to be vague or indistinguishable because their communications programs have been optimized for presence rather than comprehension.
Morning Consult's financial services brand intelligence tracking reflects a related change. Firms with high name recognition and favorability scores frequently show weak differentiation metrics, meaning audiences feel positively toward a brand without being able to articulate what distinguishes it. Awareness and understanding are being conflated in the measurement, and therefore in the strategy.
| This article is featured in O'Dwyer's September '26 Financial PR/Investor Relations & Professional Services PR Magazine |
The reasons are structural. Financial products are genuinely complex. Regulatory constraints limit certain claims and push firms toward safety in messaging. The result is a communications landscape populated by variations of the same language such as, "client-centric," "trusted partner," and "proven track record." These phrases appear so uniformly across the sector that they function as white noise. They do not create differentiation.
There’s a convenient explanation for this uniformity that circulates inside financial services communications teams: Compliance made them do it. Legal review flattened the message. Regulatory constraints prevent promotional language. There’s some truth in this. FINRA, the SEC and their international equivalents do impose real constraints on certain claims, particularly around performance and forward-looking statements.
However, regulatory frameworks do not require firms to sound identical. They do not prohibit specificity, narrative, point of view or intellectual honesty about where a firm's approach differs. What compliance review cannot survive, in many organizations, is institutional risk aversion dressed up as legal caution. The firms that cut through are the ones that build communications strategies around what they can say rather than retreating to the lowest common denominator of what they cannot.
The deeper problem is that financial services firms have learned to manage communications events without building credibility. For many large institutions with significant legal exposure, the instinct is to treat every public communication as a liability to be minimized. Announcements are issued. Questions are deflected. Controversies are waited out. The credibility cost of this posture accumulates. Firms that communicate proactively and specifically during difficult periods tend to outperform peers in reputation recovery. Those that go quiet, issue carefully lawyered non-answers or rely on boilerplate expressions of concern find that silence and opacity are interpreted, rationally, as confirmation of whatever the audience already suspects.
Credibility is not built in press releases or earnings call prepared remarks. It’s built or destroyed in unscripted moments. How a firm communicates when a fund underperforms. Whether executive commentary during market volatility is genuinely informative or hedged. How quickly and directly an organization responds when its practices are questioned. Whether a CEO's public voice reflects a point of view or a communications committee's consensus draft.
J.D. Power's retail banking and wealth management satisfaction studies have consistently identified communication clarity and proactive transparency as primary drivers of client trust and retention, ranking above product performance in several recent waves. The financial services sector has a collective comprehension problem that individual firm communications programs cannot solve through advertising alone. When the industry speaks primarily in abstractions, when differentiation is communicated through award logos and AUM figures rather than genuine explanation of approach and philosophy, audiences learn to distrust the category signal entirely. Every indistinguishable message from a competitor makes the next firm's genuine differentiator harder to land.
Firms must shift strategies so that earned media is deployed as a comprehension approach, not a visibility play. A Financial Times or Wall Street Journal placement that explains how a firm's investment process differs from consensus, with a named executive willing to defend a point of view, does more differentiation work than a year of sponsored content. The same applies to trade press in asset management, insurance and fintech, where reporters are actively looking for sources with genuine perspective versus approved talking points. The goal is not coverage volume. It’s coverage that changes what a sophisticated reader understands about the firm after reading it. That requires PR programs structured around intellectual substance and executive voices that are permitted to say something specific.
The second tool is Generative Engine Optimization, and financial services firms are almost universally behind on its implications. When an institutional investor, a CFO or a high-net-worth client turns to ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews to research a firm or a category, the response they receive is assembled from what those systems have indexed as authoritative, clear and consistently sourced. Firms that have invested in specific, well-structured, plainly written content – particularly earned media, published research and attributed expert commentary – are more likely to be represented accurately and favorably. Firms that have optimized for impression volume over substance are likely to be summarized in the same generic terms their competitors are, or worse, omitted entirely.
GEO is not a replacement for a credible communications strategy. It’s a consequence of one. The financial services firms that have built genuine share of understanding through specific claims and transparent communication will find that generative tools reflect that clarity back to the audiences they need to reach. Those that have accumulated share of voice without substance will find that AI surfaces their category position rather than their differentiated one.
The firms that close the trust gap will not do it by outspending the competition. They will do it by giving journalists, analysts and AI systems something specific and credible to say about them. That starts with deciding, at the leadership level, that being understood matters more than being seen.
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Lori Ruggiero is Managing Director, Corporate Communications, Fintech & Financial Services at HUNTER.
Cited Sources:
•Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions (2023)
•Morning Consult Intelligence
•JDPower: Personalized Financial Advice Increasingly Resonates with Retail Bank Customers – Especially Younger Ones, JD Power Finds (2024).
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