Awareness gets you seen, credibility gets you believed

Paul's recent piece on the trust reset made a point that's easy to agree with in theory and much harder to act on in practice: in financial services, trust is no longer simply claimed. It's earned, evidenced, and increasingly audited. The FCA's Consumer Duty, the EU AI Act, and the UK's Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR's) are all, in their own way, forcing firms to prove what they used to be able to just assert.

That shift has implications well beyond compliance teams. It changes what marketing is actually for.

For years, a lot of financial services marketing operated on the assumption that trust was something you could state your way into: a bold and confident line on a homepage, a well-designed brochure, a reassuring tone of voice. The trust reset makes clear that this no longer holds. Regulators want evidence. Increasingly, so do audiences.

But here's where I think it's worth separating two things that often get treated as interchangeable: trust and credibility. They're related, but they're not the same, and they don't always get built at the same point in a customer's journey.

Credibility is immediate. It's the quick, evidence-based judgement someone makes: does this brand know what it's talking about? Is the website easy to find and use? Is it legitimate? Is it in the right places, saying the right things?

Trust is slower. It's cumulative and relational. It's the belief that a brand will act in your interest even when you're not watching closely, built through repeated, consistent experience over time.

Every stage of the marketing funnel is building one of these, sometimes both. And in a sector where regulators are explicitly asking firms to evidence rather than assert, understanding which one you're building at each stage is now a compliance-adjacent skill as much as a marketing one.

Awareness: Credibility through presence, not claims

At the top of the funnel, you're not yet making an argument. You're establishing a presence, and presence itself carries a form of credibility.

Where a brand shows up, how polished it looks, how consistent its message is across placements — all of this signals legitimacy before a single specific claim has landed. Even something as basic as how easy the website is to find plays into it. In a regulated sector, this matters more than it might elsewhere. Your audience, trained to be sceptical of overclaiming, will read sloppy, inconsistent, or overly promotional awareness activity as a warning sign, not a hook.

Repetition helps, but only if it's saying the same thing each time. Under the old model, awareness could get away with being aspirational. Under the trust reset model, even top-of-funnel messaging needs to be something the brand could stand behind if asked to evidence it.

Interest: Credibility through context and restraint

As someone moves further in, they start asking whether the brand is worth taking seriously. This is where context does a lot of the work; appearing in the right places and channels, alongside trusted third parties, aligned with consistent copy, lends credibility by association.

But there's a second factor that matters more now than it used to: restraint. The SDR's marketing rules exist precisely because firms got into the habit of reaching for words like "sustainable" or "impact" without being able to back them up. At the interest stage, credibility is often won not by what a brand claims, but by the discipline it shows in not overclaiming. An audience that's seen enough greenwashing headlines is now quietly reassured by precision, not superlatives.

Consideration: Trust through substance

By the time someone clicks through to learn more, credibility has done its job of getting them there. Now trust takes over, and trust is unforgiving of vagueness.

This is where Consumer Duty's underlying logic is instructive, even outside a strictly regulatory context. The FCA's own reviews of board reporting have flagged that firms often produce plenty of data without clearly explaining what outcome it demonstrates. The same pattern shows up in marketing: plenty of content, not enough clarity about what it actually proves. At the consideration stage, an audience isn't looking for more information. They're looking for information that resolves a specific question or problem they have. Substance beats volume every time.

Conversion: Trust through specificity and relevance

Conversion is often treated as a logistics problem: get the CTA right, reduce friction, simplify the form. But by the time someone is ready to act, register, download, enquire, they've already extended a meaningful amount of trust. What tips them over the line is usually a feeling of specific relevance: that this offer, this content, this next step was built with someone like them in mind.

This is also where AI-driven personalisation is starting to reshape the funnel, and where the EU AI Act's new transparency obligations become directly relevant to marketing, not just to product or risk teams. If a chatbot or AI-driven tool is involved anywhere in that final conversion journey, audiences increasingly need to know it's AI, and they need to trust that disclosure rather than see it as a caveat. Handled well, transparency itself becomes a trust signal. Handled badly, it becomes another thing to evidence after the fact.

Why this matters more now than it did

None of these stages work in isolation. Fragmented marketing — different tone, different claims, different levels of rigour depending on the channel — doesn't only look inconsistent; it actively undermines both credibility and trust, because audiences don't experience a brand channel by channel. They experience it as one continuous journey, and increasingly, so do regulators reviewing that same output for evidence rather than intent.

This is why the trust reset isn't only a compliance story. It's a marketing one. Every stage of the funnel is now implicitly being asked the same question regulators are asking boards: not just what are you claiming, but can you show it's true? Marketing teams that treat credibility and trust as things to be built deliberately, stage by stage, rather than assumed as a byproduct of good creative or bold messaging, are the ones best placed to meet that question head-on.

A quick introduction

This is my first piece for Indulge, so it feels right to close with a proper introduction. I've recently joined the team as Marketing Team Manager, leading our marketing services team and taking on responsibility for the client relationships, projects, and retainers that sit within it. Day to day, that means working closely with our clients to make sure their marketing is delivered well from first brief through to reporting on results, while also helping shape how our team operates: our processes, our tools, and the way we work together.

Financial services marketing is a space I know well, with over 8 years' experience promoting Guernsey as an international finance centre across digital, social, email, website and out-of-home channels, and it's exactly why I found this topic worth writing about. Trust and credibility aren't abstract ideas in this sector; they're the actual currency clients are asking us to help them earn, in an environment where regulators are watching just as closely as customers are. I'm looking forward to exploring more of this territory in future pieces, alongside contributing to the wider thinking coming out of the team here at Indulge.

Listen to the podcast episode

This piece formed the backbone of a longer conversation Tonicha had with Amelia, Paul and Russell on Fin the Week, where the four of them talked through where trust and credibility actually get built across the funnel, and what firms tend to get wrong along the way. Watch the full episode below.