AUTHOR: MARC HOLBROOK
READ TIME: 6 MINS

Senior Digital Strategist Marc Holbrook outlines 6 key considerations for scaleups and legacy players in the world of fintech. 

Across financial services, the half-life of a competitive advantage continues to shorten. Features get copied quickly, interfaces can be easily replicated, and most functional advantages are absorbed by the market within a year or two. What remains is harder to imitate: a sustained sense, held by the customer, that one brand helps them understand their situation, decide what to do, act with confidence and recover when things go wrong, better than the alternatives they have tried. 

For fintech scaleups, this is the bridge between product-led growth and durable loyalty. For incumbents, it is the route from inherited trust to renewed relevance. In both cases, the work involves six shifts in how the experience is conceived, designed and run.

1. Own the customer problem, not the product category

Most financial brands still define themselves by what they sell: payments, business banking, lending, insurance, wealth, spend management. These categories are useful internally but largely irrelevant to the customer, whose mental model is organised around problems. Customers are trying to work out whether they can afford a decision, whether their money will arrive safely, how to protect their business from a risk, or how to fix something that has gone wrong. 

The starting point for a defensible experience is to own one of those problems more clearly than anyone else. Stripe sells a payments product, but the problem it owns is making it economically viable to build and scale a business on the internet. Wise sells transfers, but the problem it owns is the anxiety of moving money across borders without being overcharged. Once the problem is owned in this way, every service interaction has a clearer job, which is to reinforce that the brand understands the problem better than its competitors do.

2. Treat complexity as where confidence gets built

Financial services will always carry complexity that cannot be designed away: regulation, eligibility, fees, fraud risk, identity, credit and consent all sit underneath even the simplest interfaces. The question is not how to remove complexity, but how to handle it well. The default instinct may be to design complexity away to a clean surface, but this often produces the opposite of the intended effect. If customers sense something has been concealed, they’ll become more cautious rather than more confident. 

The better posture is to treat the difficult moments as the places where the brand earns trust. A well-designed onboarding flow explains why each piece of information is needed. A dashboard helps the user interpret why a number has changed, instead of simply displaying it. A declined transaction screen tells the customer what happened, why, and what to do next. Brands that consistently make difficult financial moments feel clear tend to stop being compared on price alone. 

3. Translate the brand promise into product behaviour

The trust that financial brands describe in their marketing has to be earned in the behaviour of the product across thousands of small interactions: the fraud alert that is timely and proportionate; the transfer journey that shows status without being asked; the dashboard that explains a change in balance. These carry far more weight than the word alone.  

A promise of transparency should be visible as fees and trade-offs that appear before the customer notices. A promise of control should be visible as permissions, approval rules and audit trails. A promise of expertise should be visible as interpretation and well-timed human support, rather than a chatbot built to regurgitate FAQs. Digitally native challengers have generally outperformed incumbents here because their promise had to be embedded in the product for the business to exist at all. Incumbents have a structural advantage they often underuse, which is the scale, regulatory depth and service infrastructure that most challengers will take years to build. 

4. Locate the moat in repeat-use rituals, not in acquisition

A great deal of investment in financial services experience is concentrated in the acquisition funnel: signing up, applying, activating, converting. This work is necessary but it’s not where the moat is built. The moat is built in the repeat behaviours: the weekly cash-flow review, the approval workflow for outgoing payments, the renewal decision, the progress check on an open claim, the periodic review of performance with an advisor. 

Identify the three repeat behaviours that drive the most value for a given segment, and invest disproportionately in making them easier, clearer and more reassuring every time they happen. Durable retention is built when the product becomes part of how the customer lives their life. 

5. Make service the sharpest edge of the experience

Customers form their most lasting judgements of a financial brand in the moments when something has gone wrong – which is also the area where most brands invest least. The recurring failure moments are well known and consistent across the industry, like a blocked account, a fraud concern or a rejected application. Each one contributes to the customer’s view of whether the relationship is worth continuing. 

These moments deserve to be designed as the most premium node of the experience – not as an edge case. The customer needs to know what has happened, why, what is being done, what they need to do and how long resolution will take. Each of those needs has implications that reach well beyond the front-end, into case management, support tooling, CRM and the rules that govern when a human is brought in.

6. Design the owned ecosystem as one coherent experience

The basis of differentiation is now determined by what a product does to help customers make progress. That progress plays out across an ecosystem that almost no organisation currently treats as a single entity: website, app, dashboard, portal, onboarding, alerting, service, reporting, advisor tooling, partner platforms. The pressure on this ecosystem is increasing, as AI assistants, aggregators and embedded finance partners flatten how financial brands are discovered. This means a growing share of customers will form their first impression outside the brand’s direct control. 

The change required is from managing digital touchpoints as separate assets – often owned by separate teams with separate roadmaps – to designing them as one coherent system with a shared logic. The website carries the promise, onboarding builds initial confidence, the dashboard creates a sense of control, service protects trust when something has gone wrong, and the brand system holds it together, so the customer feels they are dealing with one organisation rather than five. 

The shape of the moat

The financial brands that will lead the next decade will be distinguished by the quality of the human-centred experience designs they deliver around those features: a designed set of behaviours, moments and rituals that are useful enough to return to, trusted enough to rely on, and distinctive enough for customers to actively prefer. 

If you’d like to discuss how we can design robust and cohesive digital experiences for your financial brand, click here to get in touch.