NewsCred survey says that banks can rebuild trust by providing better branded content

Content marketing platform NewsCred has released a survey showing, strangely enough, that better branded content from banks would help them gain and retain customers – especially so-called ‘millenials’ aka twenty-somethings.

In the ‘Trust Transaction’ survey if 1000 UK adults, carried out in August by Redshift Research, it emerged that:

– A third of survey respondents don’t trust their bank – but half say they trust their bank more when it offers useful content.
– Half of UK consumers surveyed say useful content keeps them loyal to their bank.
– Millennials more likely to trust their banks and engage positively with content.

58 per cent say that personal finance articles helps them make decisions, while 57 per cent feel that content from a bank helps them understand which products are most beneficial.

Just 20 per cent of respondents say they’d trust content written directly by representatives of the bank, showing, NewsCred says, that banks need to invest in the writers they work with, such as finance journalists or independent experts (trusted respectively by 53 per cent and 54 per cent of consumers).

Whilst it’s clear that less guff and more accurate information would undoubtedly help banks (as it would most companies) the banks, in the UK at least, are in rather a cleft stick. They’re only allowed to promote their own products, many of which are practically worthless as they try to rebuild their balance sheets by, among other things, offering savers offensively low rates of interest.

Even the most malleable specialist financial writer might find it hard to make a convincing case for such practices.