Imagine your financial institution has 50 million clients. Now imagine 12.5 million of them walking away to work with a competing brand.
This isn’t an exercise in cautionary math. This is what happened in 2024, when a quarter of consumers switched banks. The 2024 exodus represented more than four times the average churn rate for financial brands. 2025 saw high signals of account change as well, with close to 20% of banking clients opening first-time accounts with new organizations.
Convenience, interest rates, account fees and location are all parts of the equation to turn this tide in 2026. But whether audiences are opening additional competing accounts (soft-switching) or making a clean break from old accounts, the leading factor is trust—a factor consumers value more than any other when picking a financial institution.
Over decades of marketing for top banking and financial services brands, we’ve validated our belief in content marketing as the ideal avenue to build the trust consumers crave. This article explores seven key topics to help your bank beat soft-switching, keep clients engaged and build lasting trust:
- The trust imperative in financial services: People versus brands
- Redefining trust for financial brands
- Content as evidence, not messaging
- Transparency as a core content strategy for banking brands
- Humanizing your institution through content
- Measuring trust’s impact beyond performance metrics
- Trust as a long-term content commitment with near-term value
I. The trust imperative in financial services: People versus brands
Less than half of consumers trust the average financial institution. It’s probably nothing personal. It’s just that humans are quicker to trust voices that are more like their own—to trust other humans before they trust brands.
Jamie Jeffries, Pace’s strategy lead for numerous financial services clients, says that influencer content consumption has become a particular challenge for brands often driving greater trust than branded content does.
“These influencers don’t typically have a strong resume in financial services,” says Jeffries. “But someone sees content from them and gets familiar with their face, and they come to trust these influencers deeply. When they see content from a banking brand, it’s almost automatically something they’ll disregard or distrust just because it’s coming from a corporation.”
The hunt for human connection plays both to banks’ strengths and weaknesses. It’s a strength to have an office full of experts; these experts can be influencers in their own right. It’s a weakness, however, if those voices are only available during a branch visit (and not at home, in-app or anywhere else that consumers look for answers).
II. Redefining trust for financial brands
Even the banks that recognize the need for audience trust are often hard-pressed to grow it. Trust is qualitative and intangible, unlike the metrics banks or advisors might use to gain it.
To get to the bottom of this quandary, Rivel Banking Research identified four consumer-defined pillars for trust in financial organizations:
- Transparency about fees and services
- Reputation and customer service
- Organizational stability
- Security of both the information and assets consumers share
None of these factors should surprise banks. The challenge is that consumers are demanding banks not only be trustworthy and reliable but convenient and personalized in their interactions with account holders. Think about authenticating your identity to open a bank account, which often requires a branch visit. This is a stark contrast to the ease of opening an account by simply downloading an app.
Convenience has become the top reason consumers open new accounts, heralding a soft switch or a full change of bank. It’s clear, however, that while convenience woos more consumers to open accounts, it’s still trust that keeps the account active over time.
61% of banking audiences prioritize trustworthy information over every other factor in their banking relationship.
2025 Global Consumer Trends Report
III. Content as evidence, not messaging
Content marketing adds direct value, independent of product or service, by informing, guiding and empowering audiences on their own terms. In other words, it’s an opportunity for both convenience and trust. Financial content fails to build trust, however, if it’s focused on the wrong things.
For example, most banks’ content marketing efforts focus on high-level education. This content helps grow top-of-funnel awareness and equips audiences to make smarter, faster decisions. However, educational content isn’t everything clients want before they feel they can trust a bank.
“Banks often think about the transactional focus of the customer journey, and they don’t want to bring content in that might interrupt it,” says Jeffries. “There’s a hesitation, especially on their websites, to incorporate any calls to action or content that might steer their audience in a different direction. This sometimes keeps them from using great content they’ve already made.”
In practice, this makes it difficult for audiences to find product details or fee transparency. Yet banking websites remain the top place audiences expect to find information that advances their decision. Furthermore, Rivel Banking Research suggests that clients will assume product features aren’t available unless banks highlight them.
“Financial brands tend to struggle most in the middle of the funnel, where you have to sort of mix the product with the personal nature of the audience challenge,” says Matt Harrington, a Pace creative director for multiple financial brands. “Sometimes there’s a disconnect between educational content and product content. Losing the connective tissue here often leads brands to just blindly cross-link and hope for the best, instead of really guiding audiences forward to the next decision.”
Pace helps one financial client reach recurring lead generation results with content focused on education about a type of product. The content isn’t specific to the brand’s offering. Rather, it offers smart insights into the value of products in the category. This client has seen qualified lead generation surge up to 2.2 times its benchmark through this type of mid-funnel content.
Providing solutions (not just content)
Content can be more than education. It can be evidence. The combination of proprietary data, in-depth insights, research and relevant product detail makes for a winning combo with both consumer and professional audiences.
“This is where interactive tools really stand out,” says Jeffries. “Calculators, quizzes and interactive modules help audiences see themselves in the content experience. Individuals can apply their own information and get something specific about who they are, helping drive their understanding of their own financial situation, their own moments of change and need.”
Customer stories and case studies likewise establish evidence of financial claims. These types of content play an evolving role in showing relatable proof, not promotion.
“It’s incredibly helpful to let customers see themselves and what they might get out of an engagement with the brand,” says Harrington. “When content pushes a specific product or interrupts education with product offers, that’s where trust gets broken. People don’t want to be sold to. They want to be given solutions.”
“People don’t want to be sold to. They want to be given solutions.”
Matt Harrington | Senior Creative Director, Pace
IV. Transparency as a core content strategy for banking brands
The winners in financial transparency are typically the fintechs. With less regulation on what types of information they can share, these brands are quicker to crack the code on what information audiences really want. The rapid rise of Chime last year exemplified this trend.
Financial institutions can compete by embracing transparency as a central tenet of their content strategies.
Explaining fees, processes and constraints without marketing gloss is one way to execute. Addressing risk and complexity more openly is another. Ultimately, audiences want content to answer more upfront questions, limiting reliance on branch visits or phone calls before they take person-to-person steps like these.
“Banks often cover topics that consumers aren’t interested in until there’s a real problem,” says Jeffries. “Take fraud as an example. Most people don’t think about it actively. It’s just when something goes wrong that banking clients are suddenly going to be concerned. So how the brand shows up in moments of pain and discomfort really makes a difference in winning and keeping trust. And the content they publish is part of that step to show up meaningfully and help their clients.”
V. Humanizing your institution through content
Humans want to get information from humans.
A core factor in deepening trust is shoring up the human expression of a brand’s offering. When brand storytelling mirrors audience experiences, it can address financial anxieties and concerns in a human way.
Financial brands are also seeing success in elevating their internal experts as advisors and voices of influence. This helps build trust in the same ways external influencers do, humanizing the information and building credible connection as audiences engage.
One Pace banking client [MH1] does this through a series of podcasts hosted by employees. The content brings immediate expertise delivered through the consistent, recognizable voice of a person (not through the faceless persona of a brand). Audiences have responded, engaging with podcast content for thousands of hours and taking action that drives account growth for the brand.
VI. Measuring trust’s impact beyond performance metrics
A natural starting point is to audit what audiences think of your brand today. Rivel’s research showed a massive disconnect between how much audiences trusted financial brands and what those brands expected. 90% of executives believed their brand enjoyed high trust from outside audiences. In reality, only 30% of their audiences actually trusted them[ST2] .
The challenge is that trust can’t be measured in clicks or conversions. Brands that want to deepen trust will need to invest not just in content that wins it but in holistic measurement.
“If you look at what younger generations value most in a financial partner, trust outweighs even financial performance,” says Harrington. “When every brand promotes how long they’ve been around or how low their rates are, humanity and ethics can become a differentiator.”
Human-centric content marketing can use qualitative and longitudinal signals to measure trust. Return behavior, brand lift, depth of engagement and sentiment scoring offer strong indicators of trust in the making. Brands that can pair these with human interactions will get an even better picture.
One Pace banking client measured inbound phone calls, for instance, following the launch of a new campaign. These calls—typically seeking a banking partner—were more than a lead generation metric. They gave clear, immediate indicators of trust in what this bank offered.
VII. Conclusion: Trust as a long-term content commitment with near-term value
Content marketing should be a sustained trust practice for financial brands. It lives beyond the surge of conversions in a campaign, as important as that surge might be. It keeps giving back over time.
Circling back to near-term concerns of soft-switching and account turnover, one thing is clear: Velocity isn’t enough for financial brands. It’s too easy for their clients to move yet faster and open accounts with someone else. Credibility is the key to outlasting quick changes in the market and keeping clients engaged over time.
The cleverest campaign in the world won’t keep a bank account open for 19 years. But trust will—and human-centric content builds it.
