In financial services, credibility is everything. Unfortunately, many brands are slowly destroying this on social media because they’ve got their strategies completely wrong.
There are a lot of regulatory hoops that banks, brokers, and fintech brands must jump through when publishing content. Because of this, many brands’ instinct is to create overly produced, polished content to ensure they’re adhering to the rules. They are nervous to embrace more platform-native styles and trends for fear of falling foul of compliance rules.
Consequently, these brands end up posting content that shows they don’t understand their customer or what the platform actually rewards. The posts feel like they’re lecturing their audience, and all sense of humanity is lost. PwC’s Trust in Business Survey found that 71% of consumers are unlikely to buy from a company that loses their trust, with 73% saying they’d spend significantly less as a result. The good news is that if financial services brands can adopt the right strategies on social media, they can actually increase their credibility and reach new audiences.
Why Financial Services Brands Struggle With Credibility On Social
If you ask most financial services marketers why their social content underperforms, they’ll say it’s compliance restrictions. They’re not wrong, but that’s also not the whole story.
On social media, there are strict rules and restrictions around what you can and can’t say when discussing financial information. All content must be fair, clear, and not misleading, provide a balanced view of both benefits and risks, and carry prescribed risk warnings where required.
Because of this, content approval typically involves script review, compliance assessment, legal consultation, final sign-off by qualified principals, and documentation for regulatory record-keeping, before a post goes live. This is a very real, and very limiting, bottleneck in many teams’ processes. It makes reacting to events and trends challenging because the approval process means that by the time a post is ready to go live, the moment has already passed.
So, instead of trying to keep up with timely, reactive social media content, financial services brands end up sticking to default, often cold and boring, content forms. They use logos, disclaimers and very formal language to portray authority. But audiences aren’t buying it. The lack of humanity makes the content unengaging, and audiences scroll on past. This pattern is particularly apparent on TikTok, where the gap between what the platform rewards and what financial brands actually post is wider than almost anywhere else – something we’ve explored in depth when it comes to challenger banks.
Financial services sits at 63% in Edelman’s global Trust Barometer, which is near the bottom of 17 industries measured. But the data also tells a more encouraging story. The same report states that banking has gained 10 net trust points since 2021, suggesting that when financial brands get their approach right, audiences do respond.
What Credibility Looks Like In Financial Services
Credibility on social media is built through consistency. Audiences can tell the difference between a brand that’s performing trustworthiness and one that’s actually earned it.
Many brands are creating polished content that is overly complex and speaks at the audience, rather than to them. Audiences don’t want that. People trust brands that feel human and accessible. They want educational content in simple terms, honest takes on market conditions that aren’t trying to sell them anything, and timely responses to financial news. The cadence, tone and content mix matter more than the production value, helping financial services brands establish credibility over time.
Monzo is a brand that does a great job of building credibility by understanding the expectations of their audience. Monzo’s Head of Social has noted that rather than posting intricate financial advice laden with disclaimers, they deliberately steer toward lifestyle-driven posts that resonate with their audience, turning regulatory constraints into a content opportunity. The approach has translated into real commercial results, with Monzo reporting a 31% increase in customers in 2024. Monzo isn’t the only brand worth looking at. The way investment brands are approaching Instagram to reach the next generation of investors is another strong example of financial services brands finding their footing on social.
Content Strategy and Compliance
So, what does it look like in practice to build credibility? Getting social media right in financial services comes down to two things: knowing what to post, and having a process that lets you post it.
First, Define Your Content Pillars
The first part of the strategy is to determine what you’re trying to say. Brands struggle with this because every week they’re trying to answer this question from scratch. If you have content pillars, you remove the first obstacle to posting more consistently.
For financial services brands, there are four pillars that tend to work well: educational, social proof, human/behind-the-scenes, and timely/reactive. Once established, you can start aligning each piece of content to these and to a pre-approved workflow that will help speed up the approval process.
Educational Content Should Be Your Highest-Value Pillar
Educational content on social media doesn’t mean just webinars and whitepapers repurposed for LinkedIn. It means plain-English explainers, myth-busting, and answers to the questions your customers are asking. It should be the backbone of the entire content strategy.
Financial audiences are actively searching for this content. The rise of FinTok and personal finance communities on Reddit has shown that people want to understand their money, they just haven’t historically trusted financial services brands to explain it to them in a way that feels accessible. That’s the gap financial services brands should be trying to fill with their social media content.
To learn more, see our guide to building content strategies for challenger banks.
Create Pre-Approved Frameworks
The biggest hurdle social media teams for financial services brands face is the approval process. A bottleneck happens when teams try to attain approval for each post individually.
What the team should be doing is building a pre-approved framework to work with. Rather than submitting individual posts for review, get compliance sign-off on formats, templates, and content structures. Then you can use this framework when creating each piece of content, in turn making the review process much quicker.
To make this work properly, you need to involve the compliance team early in the creation of this framework. Brief them on the tone, the formats, and the platforms you’re working with before content creation begins. They will then help you determine what you can and can’t do, and you build from there.
A Note on Disclaimers
Disclaimers are a fact of life for financial services brands on social media. Under the FCA’s 2024 finalised guidance, they can’t be treated as an afterthought. Risk warnings must be prominent and visible within the promotion itself. Hiding them in captions, fine print, or behind a ‘see more’ link doesn’t meet the standard.
But how and where they appear makes a significant difference to how disruptive they feel. For video content, on-screen text or a verbal disclaimer at the end of the clip will usually satisfy the requirement without interrupting the flow of the narrative. For static posts, building the disclaimer into the visual as a design element from the start produces a much cleaner result than just adding it as a banner at the bottom of a finished post. Think of it as just another thing to design around.
The Long Game: Platform Strategy That Builds Credibility Over Time
Sadly, you’re not going to change your social media strategy and then suddenly gain the trust of the whole industry by next week. Credibility is a long game and is built on consistency. For financial services brands, that means making smart decisions about where to invest your effort, and then actually sticking to the plan.
Pick Your Platforms
You don’t need to be everywhere all of the time. This is a quick path to inconsistent and lacklustre content that gets pushed out with little consideration. It will dilute your impact more than support it.
LinkedIn is the default platform for most financial services brands, so start here. It has a professional audience, longer-form content tolerance, and a thought leadership culture, which makes it a natural fit.
If your services are more consumer-facing, then Instagram is a platform worth throwing into the mix. It suits lifestyle-driven content, visual storytelling, and younger audiences. There’s also a huge boom in “finfluencers” on this platform that can help financial services brands stretch their reach even further. The FCA’s 2024-25 Annual Report found that 62% of UK adults aged 18-29 follow financial influencers on social media, 74% trust their advice, and 9 in 10 have been encouraged to change their financial behaviour as a result. These figures make a strong case for taking this platform seriously.
TikTok is worth considering for brands targeting younger audiences, particularly for financial education content. There’s no need for highly polished content, meaning it’s much quicker and easier to produce, and engagement potential is high.
The takeaway is to pick the platforms where your audience already is and focus on them. You can build the rest later.
The Six-Month Rule
A polished product or service launch followed by six weeks of silence will do more damage to a financial services brand’s credibility than never launching at all. Audiences notice when brands go quiet, and the inconsistency comes across as unreliability.
You don’t need to have huge budgets on social media. You just need to show up regularly, share content that is genuinely useful, and repeat. The more you show up on someone’s feed when your competitors aren’t, the more your brand becomes recognised as dependable in their mind.
Set yourself a six-month review point. Six months of consistent posting content in line with your pillars at a sustainable cadence. By the end of it, you should have a content library and an engaged audience built on the consistency and credibility you’ve established.
Conversations Build More Credibility Than Content
It’s not enough to simply post content on social media. You need to engage with your audience too. 71% of social users say that if a brand doesn’t respond to customer service questions on social media, they will choose to buy from a competitor instead.
Community management is one of the most underrated trust-building tools available to financial services brands. Most brands put the majority of their resource into content creation and treat engagement as an afterthought. But for audiences making decisions about who to trust with their money, how a brand behaves in the comments matters as much as what it posts.
Good community management means responding promptly, acknowledging questions publicly, and handling complaints with transparency. You need your brand to feel present in the community, not just broadcast to it.
Responsive brands attract more comments. More comments create more opportunities to demonstrate credibility. And over time, that accumulated credibility is worth more than any piece of content.
For more on how social proof and community engagement work together, see our guide to testimonials, UGC, and influencer marketing.
Conclusion
Building credibility on social media for financial services brands is the result of making the right strategic decisions, such as what to post, where to post it, and how to show up consistently, and then actually sticking to them.
Brands need to stop treating social media like a broadcast channel and actually start joining in the conversations with their audience. Credibility in financial services is hard-won and easily lost. But if you’re willing to play the long game on social media, you’re already one step ahead of most competitors.
