Anxious Banking Consumers Need Help for Today, Not Plans for Tomorrow
By Steve Cocheo, Senior Executive Editor at The Financial Brand
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Executive Summary
- Customers increasingly expect genuine advice from their banks and credit unions, not cloaked sales pitches. If you can’t deliver, they’ll find a branchless neobank that pays higher interest.
- In an age of more mix-and-match financial relationships, becoming a consumer’s advice hub can be a new form of primacy.
- Personalization is key to giving advice, but it has to be real. And sometimes it means helping customers over the hump of confronting their troubled finances.
Many consumers are living in mental financial turmoil, spun around by political and economic headlines and concerns about the state of their money.
“It’s almost anticipatory angst,” says Jennifer White, senior director for banking and payments intelligence at J.D. Power. But this unease is layered on poor personal financial health for many consumers, and “their anxiety is through the roof.”
The firm’s research indicates that only 42% of American consumers consider their finances to be “stable and secure,” and more than two in five see their finances at risk to worsen in the near future.
As a result, White says the company’s 2025 U.S. Retail Banking Advice Satisfaction Study found that from 2021 to this year, consumers’ desire for financial advice has shifted increasingly to short-term concerns. This includes advice on borrowing, tips on how to pay bills on time, ways to build emergency savings, and guidance on sticking to a budget.
Meanwhile, consumers’ focus on perennials like retirement planning has decreased, according to the data.
“At a minimum, people want to know that they haven’t missed something that they should be doing,” says White.
For banks and credit unions, the implication goes beyond simply answering consumers’ questions today. The time and effort taken should be regarded as an investment in the institution’s own future.
White says there’s a feeling among the public that “if you want to be my partner, to help me plan my future, you have to make sure that I’m not missing something today.”
Increasingly, she says, the public has an expectation of advice from their financial institutions. Indeed, they regard it as a tradeoff for many institutions paying meager interest on deposits.
In short, the mindset White sees is this: “I need to get value out of this relationship. If I’m not going to get value, then I’m going to go to the low-cost Chime-type solutions.”
And that advice must be deeper than the financial services equivalent of “Eat your vegetables.”
Advice is the Hub of a New Form of Primacy
White points out that many money decisions are loaded with emotion.
“If you think about those key moments of truth,” she says, “the advice needs to feel like an experience and not like a commodity.”
Accomplishing this hinges especially on asking relevant questions, according to White. “There’s also reflective listening, versus, ‘Here’s our solution. I want to pitch it to you’.”
To White, the institution where a consumer chooses to seek advice becomes their financial hub, even if it doesn’t hold every account that the consumer has. Advice and financial tools — and help implementing them — helps earn trust, which drives connections. Trust will lead consumers to be willing to give their banks access to accounts with other providers, and use digital tools to create a picture of their finances across all relationships, not just those the institution currently has.
In a sense, she says, “it’s a new definition of primacy. It’s where your money is, but it’s also where you are going to interact with your money the most.”
Read more:
- How ‘Lazy Loyalists’ Hide Eroding Customer Retention
- Financial Avoidance: The Fears and Habits Holding Your Customers Back
- They Said It Couldn’t Be Done: Fintechs Gaining in the Race for Primacy
How Leaders Strive to Become Customers’ Financial Hub
In an interview with The Financial Brand, White noted that the highest-ranking large and regional banks in the study have figured this out. The top five players are Bank of America, U.S. Bank, Chase, First Citizens Bank and Citibank.
White says three factors have either propelled institutions further up the study ranking, or helped them keep their places.
The first factor is the volume of periodic advice that customers receive from their institution.
“The tipping point for delighting a customer is when they have had three or more value-added experiences that they’ve recalled within a calendar year,” says White. To be meaningful, these recalled experiences should be spread throughout the year.
“It’s not like they can all just be around tax season,” White says.
Points of advice need not all be face-to-face with a banker, she adds. Even a timely website banner can qualify — if the consumer remembers the messaging as advice.
A caveat regarding digital: The study did find that consumers’ preference for advice delivered digitally has dropped by 10 percentage points from 2021 to 2025, while obtaining advice from a branch representative has held steady over the same period.
The study report suggests that financial health matters can be so emotional that the coldness of a digital interaction may fall flat, while personal service resonates.
The second factor is personalization of the advice.
White acknowledges that “personalization” has become a hackneyed buzzword. But she says the advice must always be personalized now, or it won’t be seen as genuine advice.
Further, “fit” is terribly important. “If you suggest a product or service to a financially vulnerable customer that is not relevant to their needs, you are not only dissatisfying them, but possibly damaging trust,” White says.
The third factor is providing practical help that the customer needs.
“The highest movers in the study seemed to be making gains in helping customers understand how they’re spending their money, whether it is through a sit-down financial wellness review, digital spending categorization tools, or a banner or an email alerting them to where their money is going,” says White.
A critical element of helping consumers in this way is not just confirming the state that the customer thought they were in. This might be the equivalent of tossing an anvil to a drowning swimmer.
White says making comparisons with past patterns can help. For example, showing the consumer how their spending has changed versus a year ago could buck them up, or get them to buckle down. The interaction should also go beyond a simple diagnosis.
“It’s about making a call to action that may not be product-based, but that is around consumer behavior change,” says White. “The more that bankers have that kind of conversations, the more the customer feels like it’s not about ‘Let’s enroll you in a new product.’ Instead, it’s about ‘Let’s move money from X to Y, and it’s about ‘Let’s set a spending limit on this particular category of your spending’.”
White acknowledges that there is a tendency among consumers to try out digital financial tools and to then let them lapse. This can especially happen when someone feels that they have so blown their finances that there is no hope for the future. (The study found that a fifth of respondents to its survey had researched budget management services but wound up never using them.)
This is something many institutions need to work on. White thinks that banks need to communicate specially to these types of customers that things don’t have to stay the same.
Her view: “Personalized content would help them understand that sometimes awareness can lead to a greater sense of empowerment.”
