There’s a reason why fintechs and other companies highlight their Trustpilot ratings on their websites, pitch decks, brochures, and more. Consumer trust is an intangible but invaluable asset, which can sustain a business—and even help it scale.

Leading brands don’t just highlight the positive relationships they have with their customers. They cultivate those ties and sustain them, often by following established roadmaps.

Listening

Setting off on the right foot requires knowing what customers want. Not just product features, but flows, branding, and tone, too. If market conditions and funding allow for it, an extended beta phase can help cultivate a dedicated following and a sense of community among insider-consumers.

With the right trust established, brands can move from listening into asking—requesting honest reviews on major platforms, consumer testimonials, and other key assets that celebrate this relationship.

Closed loops

But asking for reviews comes with the risk of negative feedback. Instead of treating that as a rupture, leading trust-focused brands approach criticism as an opportunity for further deepening consumer ties, and doing so openly.

Offering expedient and high-touch responses to consumers can help avoid leakages and generate trust. Quickly remediating a fraud incident, for example, can influence how a consumer perceives a fintech’s priorities and appreciate how a fintech differs from a larger, slower, but more established competitor.

Transparency

Fintechs have to contend with relatively fragile consumer relationships, in part because of past scandals in financial and tech sectors. Forced to walk on eggshells more than players in other industries do, fintechs should clearly and quickly communicate how they are addressing problems as they arise—emphasizing both immediate and long-term remediation.

A server outage, for example, requires flagging consumers’ attention to the issue, ongoing updates on the status of servers—and, after the fact, updates on how engineering teams are working internally and with computing partners to prevent future malfunctions.