One key question for brokers/advisers is whether they are content merely to gaze down at the likes of banks – now firmly rooted at the bottom of the heap – and to settle for being top of a decidedly stunted pile. In other words, is it possible to truly break away from the pack and to take trust to an altogether different level?
A boutique wealth management firm was recently benchmarked against how respondents in the latest round of data collection perceived their providers in general, particular their brokers/advisers. For each element of trust – overall, base level and higher-level – it returned significantly better approval ratings, reflecting its focus on the drivers of trust and engagement with clients.
Although benchmarking is by no means a perfect science, differences as clear as those uncovered in this instance suggest stasis is not inevitable. They show that consumers still can and do respond to concerted attempts to put their interests first. They indicate that investors and savers, in spite of everything that has happened during the past seven years, have not yet been reduced to a state of incurable apathy. In short, there is still hope.
This could be a point well worth bearing in mind. Consumer trust in the financial services sector may well be recovering, but the pace and extent of the renaissance underscore its innate mediocrity. There is a lot more trust out there, untapped and waiting to be won, if only we would care to find it and earn it.
James Devlin is a professor of financial decision-making at Nottingham University Business School and director of the Centre for Risk, Banking and Financial Services
The trust index: what is it?
The Centre for Risk, Banking and Financial Services has been collecting comprehensive data of consumer perceptions’ of trust in financial services providers since 2005.
Data is collected on an annual basis and is directly comparable back to 2009 – the height of the financial crisis. The information is gathered using a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 participants. It takes place online, in conjunction with a major market-research company and is collected for seven types of financial providers:
• Banks
• Building societies
• General insurers
• Life insurers
• Investment companies
• Brokers/advisers
• Credit card companies.
The following trust-related measures are collected using measurement scales that have been confirmed as valid and reliable:
• Base-level trust: A belief about firms as to their competence, honesty, reliability and dependability – will it do ‘what it says on the tin’?
