Banks Don't sell money, They sell belief.

Every major bank runs a brand tracker, asking individuals about awareness, consideration, trust, and NPS, then averaging the answers and reporting them each quarter.

Imagine yours says six in ten customers trust you. That's useful as far as it goes, because it tells you what a representative sample thinks, but it can't tell you what a community believes.

Think about how people actually choose a bank, and the comparison table plays a much smaller part than the industry likes to assume. According to the FCA's Financial Lives survey, 31 per cent of people who recently opened a current account chose their bank partly on the recommendation of family, friends or colleagues, three times the 10 per cent who cited a comparison site.

And once people have chosen, they rarely leave. Seven in ten long-standing customers have never switched, and fewer than one in 50 account holders switched at all in 2025. Only 2 per cent of those who stay say it's because they couldn't find a better rate, while around a quarter of those who do move cite a switching incentive. The rational case barely registers, so the market has to pay people to move.

There's a subtlety here, though. Our own data shows that spikes in word of mouth don't reliably move switching; one major bank's word of mouth peaked in the very quarter it lost 22,000 customers. The volume of conversation is not the same as a community's verdict. Put simply, talk is noise, and belief is what people act on.

Trust in finance, then, is not an opinion people hold alone but a legitimacy that a group grants and can withdraw. Your tracker can give you the six in ten, but it can't tell you which communities are lending you that trust or, just as importantly, which are quietly taking it back and why.

Finance already knows this. It just learns it in a crisis

On 9 March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank's customers requested around $42bn of withdrawals in roughly eight hours, according to California's banking regulator, and Federal Reserve Vice Chair Michael Barr later testified that a further $100bn was queued to leave the next morning.

The cause was on the balance sheet, but the Federal Reserve's own review credits social media and a concentrated, networked depositor base with the speed of the run: a tightly connected group of founders and investors telling each other to move, all at once.

A bank run is collective belief at its most visible, a shared conviction travelling through a group faster than any individual decision could. The industry files bank runs under risk, yet they are also the clearest evidence we have that culture moves money.

The same force that can empty a bank in a day fills it slowly every other day; the difference is that nobody measures it on the way up.

When products converge, legitimacy is what's left

Savings rates track the base rate, apps look alike, and Consumer Duty rightly limits how far anyone can differentiate on terms. Customers notice: among people who didn't shop around for their account, 15 per cent say there's no real difference between providers. Our early scan of distinctiveness across UK banks and challengers shows the same thing from the brand side, with the category clustering tightly.

So what is left to compete on? Not what you offer, but who you are seen to stand with, and whether people believe you belong to them.

The challengers understood this early. The first wave did it on the high street, with stores people talked about and service that felt like a point of view, while the second did it on phones. In March 2016, Monzo raised £1m from 1,861 people in 96 seconds on Crowdcube, turning customers into owners before most of them even had a card. Both waves built communities first and customer bases second, treating early customers as participants rather than an audience.

Established banks have responded by investing seriously in their presence in culture through sponsorship, partnerships and brand campaigns, and much of that investment works hard. The opportunity now is to understand which of it is building genuine belonging and legitimacy, and which is building visibility alone, because the two are not the same thing. A brand can be everywhere and belong nowhere.

Challenger is a mindset, not an age

Cultural power is never banked for good. A brand that once changed what people expected from a bank can see that legitimacy drift even while its stores are still full and its oldest customers remain loyal.

The early signals rarely show up in the tracker first. They appear when the brand stops being mentioned in the forums where people ask each other for advice, when its search interest flattens as a newer rival's climbs, or when younger and older customers start describing two different banks. By the time any of this reaches a quarterly score, the culture around the brand has already moved on.

Being a challenger was never about being the new name on the high street; it means continuing to challenge convention long after you've become one.

What measuring culture actually looks like

With Oxford Saïd Business School's Future of Marketing Initiative, we set out to answer a simple question: is culture's contribution to brand equity real, and can it be measured?

The model tracks influence across three layers: what brands put into the world, from campaigns and partnerships to sponsorships and product; how communities respond, whether they adopt, amplify, reshape or reject it; and the wider culturescape both sit inside, meaning the movements, platforms and category shifts acting on brand and customer at once.

Across categories, up to 32.8 per cent of the variance in brand equity was explained by cultural structure and dynamics. That's nearly a third of what drives a brand's strength, sitting entirely outside what traditional measurement captures.

The six questions culture asks of a bank

We turn the model into practice through six dimensions.

Our early scan of UK financial services brands showed around 30 per cent less variance in distinctiveness than the average category, by far the tightest of the nine industries we measured.

We found:

• One high-street bank is seen everywhere but believed no more than its peers, scoring high on Cut-through but only middling on Credibility.

• One challenger has the strongest community in the category but a weaker sense of what it stands for, leading on Connection while trailing on Conviction.

• One established brand is the only genuinely well-rounded profile, sitting at or above average on almost every dimension after one of the more impressive turnarounds in the sector.

The more interesting pattern is which dimensions travel with market share and switching. Our first read suggests that Credibility matters for everyone, but that beyond it, established brands appear to win on Conviction while challengers win on Connection.

That poses a sharp question for any bank that started as a challenger and has since become established: Connection may have got it here, but Conviction may be what keeps it here, and it probably needs both.

Coherency is where most brands feel the strain. Where consistency means saying the same thing everywhere, coherency means being recognisably yourself anywhere. A bank can be warm and human in the branch yet frustrating in the app, and customers don't experience that as two channels but as one broken promise. It can spend millions telling people it's on their side, then undo it all in a single support conversation that ends up on TikTok.

Four questions your tracker can't answer

If you run marketing at a bank, insurer or wealth manager, these are worth putting to your next brand review:

• Which communities grant us legitimacy, and which are withdrawing it? We mean communities rather than segments, each with its own norms and its own verdict on you.

• Is our sponsorship buying visibility or building belonging? UK financial services brands spent £170.5m on sport sponsorship alone in 2025.

• Evaluation is getting more sophisticated, with several of the sector's biggest names now bringing sponsorship into their econometric models, yet across industries 69 per cent of brands say they struggle to demonstrate sponsorship value internally and 66 per cent struggle with attribution. Even the best models can tell you what a sponsorship returned, but they can't yet tell you whether fans now see you as one of them.

• Where is culture moving before it shows up in our numbers? By the time a shift reaches a quarterly tracker, someone else has usually already built a community around it.

• What is the cost of the third we can't see? If culture explains anything like the share it does elsewhere, even the most sophisticated brand plans may be optimising against only two thirds of the picture.

Where this goes next

Financial services is the next category we're opening up the model for and it's a genuine test rather than a foregone conclusion, and we want to run it with the people who will use it.

There are already early hints of what we might find. In our first scan, only one brand showed rising brand metrics translating cleanly into people switching to it, and it was also the brand with the strongest community. One brand isn't a finding, but it is a reason to look.

We expect to find cultural power showing up in the numbers a bank already cares about: how sticky deposits are, what it costs to win a customer, how long they stay and what a sponsorship actually returns. These are the questions a CFO will ask of any brand plan, and for the first time marketing should be able to answer them with more than instinct.

Culture can take the deposits out of a bank in a day, and the banks that win the next decade will be the ones that understand it's also what keeps them in. Because in the end, customers don't stay with a bank for its products. They stay because they believe in it, and because they believe it believes in them.

Karen Boswell is M+C Saatchi Group's global chief transformation officer