Building consumer trust in fintech

Establishing public trust in fintech is an uphill battle. Fintechs have to balance setting themselves apart from incumbents while avoiding appearing too disruptive. What’s more, according to research by Morning Consult, more than 40% of consumers don’t even know what fintech is.

How should fintechs show that they’re not like the other guys, define themselves as a category, and all the while keep the other-guy qualities that consumers enjoy?

Products prioritizing the following features are effective conduits for consumer trust—helping brands set themselves apart from competitors, while buoying confidence in fintech as an aggregate.

Consistency

Tech teams have seen some success leaning into the “move fast break things” ethos as a way to establish early dominance against competitors. But the fintech realm isn’t like other startup worlds; with money at the sector’s core, using this approach is destined to fail and lead to disillusioned—if not litigious—customers.

Rather, fintechs do better when they extend their user research and beta phases. Combining resilient technical cores and intuitive flows can help avoid bugs and flaunt a fintech’s modern approach to key financial activities.

Security

Maintaining secure financial products entails visible and behind-the-scenes decisions. Consumers should feel secure, which can be accomplished through branding efforts as well as security protocols integrated within product flows. Dual-factor authentication, location-based logins, and the like.

Fintechs arguably have more to lose from security breaches than larger incumbents. Although the latter may have more customers, they also enjoy longer track records with customers, who are then less likely to abandon ship in the face of a less-than-secure product.

Remediation

Consumer dissatisfaction inevitably happens—but how it’s addressed isn’t uniform. Building in intuitive security and support flows can help overwhelmed consumers quickly reach out for assistance, and can allow support teams to address customer crises expediently and at scale.