Financial Services Video 2026
In finance, trust is the one asset that compounds. It gets built in the room, on stage, and in a real photograph, long before it ever shows up on a balance sheet.
A field read from a boutique NYC video and photography studio, not a think piece. Most of our finance work is summits, executives on camera, and the closing bell, so this is what we see on set and in the numbers.
This is our read on financial services video. We are a boutique NYC video and photography studio, and most of our finance work is summits, market mixers, executives on camera, award shows, and the closing bell. We also watch what that work does over the years that follow, which is where the real lesson lives.
This paper is about trust, because trust is the product a financial brand is really selling. It pulls together the strongest recent research on how people choose and stay with a financial firm, how brands earn belief, and how a real human moment outlasts a campaign.
We set that against what we see from inside the work, and we flag our opinions as ours. One honest note up front. The research on trust in finance is strong, and the research on events and expertise is strong. The line connecting them to a specific piece is our read, not a lab result, and we say so where it matters.
Trust is the one asset in finance that compounds. It gets built in the room, on stage, and in a real photograph, long before it ever shows up on a balance sheet.
A financial brand can measure almost everything. The one thing that decides whether the numbers grow, it measures worst.
Assets under management, cost of acquisition, net flows, the spread, the fee. The one thing that decides whether any of those grow is the one thing the balance sheet cannot show. Whether people believe you.
Trust in financial services is the whole game, and for years the sector was losing it. That has turned. Over the last five years, trust in financial services climbed about ten points, the only sector to post double-digit growth, and in 2025 it crossed back into trusted territory in the United States for the first time since 2017. 1 2 The industry spent a decade earning that back, slowly, which is the tell. Trust accrues. It builds over years of showing up, which is why a single campaign never delivers it on its own.
That climb took a decade of showing up. Nothing about it looks like a quarter of paid media. It looks like compound interest, which is the whole point of this paper.
That is the frame. Trust in finance behaves like a deposit that compounds. It is slow to build, it pays a little more each year you leave it alone, and it is painful to rebuild once spent. A commercial can announce trust. The work that earns it is human, in the room, and on the record, and it is the work we spend our days making.
A trust barometer is a yearly survey that asks people how much they trust institutions, brands, and whole sectors. When researchers say financial services is trusted, they mean more than half of people said they trust it, a low bar the industry only recently cleared.
We are not here to argue that finance should stop measuring. We are arguing that the most valuable thing a financial brand owns is the one it measures worst, and that the content built to grow it looks nothing like a performance ad. More like a real person on a stage, a room full of the right people, a photograph a viewer can believe. Slow to make, slow to pay, and almost impossible for a competitor to copy once it compounds.
In a category built on money, you would expect money to be the deciding factor. Often it is not.
When Americans pick a financial advisor, trust is the first thing they weigh, ahead of price and ahead of track record. Sixty percent name trust the top factor, against forty eight percent for cost and thirty one percent for historical performance. 3 The product is returns. The purchase is belief.
Trust compounds because financial relationships run long. People keep a primary bank for years, and a checking account for close to two decades. 4 Every year a relationship holds is a year of trust earning on itself, and a year a competitor has to overcome to win the switch. It shows up as lower acquisition cost, because a trusted brand gets chosen without being the cheapest, and as lower churn, because a customer who believes you needs a bigger reason to leave.
Among higher-income people, the ones with the most to move, trust matters more still. In the one category where you would expect the numbers to win, the firm that is believed wins. That is the market you are selling into.
We owe you the counter-case, because it is real. In everyday retail banking, price still moves people. The top reason customers switch a primary bank is lower fees, and a lot of the tenure that looks like loyalty is inertia, people staying out of hassle even when they know a better rate exists. 5 4 So trust is not the whole story for a commodity checking account. Its clearest power shows up where the stakes and the relationship are high, in advice, in wealth, in the business decisions where a wrong choice is expensive and hard to reverse. That is exactly where brand and event content lives.
It helps to see the other side of the compound account, the withdrawals. Trust in finance rarely collapses in one scandal. It leaks, through unexpected fees, funds that arrive a day late, a branch that closes, an error the customer gets blamed for. Data is the sharpest one. People are about three times more likely than average to name protection of their information as the reason they walked. 5 None of those are marketing problems, and marketing cannot fix them. They are the reason a trust balance built over years can still be spent, and the reason the deposits have to keep coming.
Trust is the scarce input in the decisions that matter most in finance, and it compounds over relationships that last for years. A brand that builds it early spends less to keep customers and less to win them. The question is what really builds it.
Here is the uncomfortable part for anyone hoping to solve trust with a media budget. You cannot announce your way into being believed.
Belief comes from showing that you know the subject, and from a real person standing behind the claim. The evidence is blunt. When senior buyers judge whether a firm truly knows its field, they trust its thought leadership over its marketing materials by a wide margin. Seventy three percent say a company's point of view is a more trustworthy basis for judging its capability than its product sheets and ads. 6 The brochure asserts expertise. The talk, the interview, the argument on stage demonstrates it, and demonstration is what earns the meeting.
Thought leadership is content where a company shares a real point of view or expertise instead of a pitch. Done well, it shows you know the subject cold. Done badly, it shows the opposite, in public.
It works on behavior, not just perception. Ninety percent of decision-makers say they are more receptive to hearing from a firm that consistently puts out strong thinking, and most say a single piece of it sent them to research something they had not been considering. 6 That is the compounding motion again. One credible piece does not just get watched. It opens a door that paid outreach has been knocking on for months.
The mechanism is not mysterious. A finance buyer is making a decision they can be blamed for, so they gather evidence before they ever reveal themselves. A firm's public thinking is that evidence. It gets read quietly, on a phone, months before a first call, by the people who will shape the deal. Your best piece is doing its most important work in a room you are not in, for an audience you cannot see, on a timeline you do not control.
There is a catch, and it is the most important line in this paper for a finance marketer. This only works if the work is good. Thin, me-too content does not sit there harmlessly. Nearly half of senior decision-makers, and more than half of the C-suite, say they lost respect for a company over weak thought leadership. 6 In a category selling trust, a forgettable piece is expensive. It quietly spends the very thing you made it to build.
A boring finance video is a small withdrawal from a trust account you spent years filling. If the piece does not clear a high bar for substance and craft, it works against you, and the research says senior buyers are the ones keeping score.
The most trusted marketing channel in the world is not a channel at all. It is a room.
Business buyers rank in-person events as the single most trusted way a brand can reach them, above every digital option.
In-person events top every channel buyers were asked about. 8 And the effect on the brand doing the hosting is large. After an in-person event, ninety five percent of attendees say they trust the brand more, and ninety two percent say the experience improved how they see it. 9 In the same stretch, most brands watched their reputation slip through other channels. The room moved trust up while the feed moved it down.
This is where a boutique studio earns its keep, because the room happens once and the content is the only part that lasts. A summit is a single afternoon. A market mixer is a few hours of the right people in one place. An awards night is over by midnight. Without a camera, the trust generated there stays with the few hundred who attended instead of the thousands who should see that your brand convened it.
Each format does a different job, and knowing which is which changes how you shoot it. A summit is authority. It says your brand can convene serious people around a serious idea, and the footage should carry that weight, the stage, the argument, the room full of the right faces. A market mixer is relationship. Its value is warmth and access, and the camera should feel like a guest rather than a broadcast. An award show is proof. It marks something earned, and the content should let the recognition speak without turning it into a boast. Shoot all three the same way and you flatten what made each one worth the money.
We covered the LSEG Market Mixer, a downtown venue with more than five hundred people in the room to hear leaders from major financial institutions and technology companies work through where AI fits in real financial workflows. We caught the full recap, the stage, the crowd, the energy of the night. Then we pulled the speakers aside and shot them off the stage, delivering their key message straight to camera, close and quiet. The stage footage proves the room existed. The intimate cut makes one viewer believe the point.
Shoot the summit as a library, not a recap. Decide the rooms the footage will live in before the doors open, so one day of the right people becomes a year of evidence. The event is the cheapest trust you will ever generate. Leaving it on the floor is the most expensive thing you can do with it.
Inside all of this sits a smaller, sharper truth. People trust people, and finance keeps hiding its people behind a logo.
The buyers who matter are moved by named humans. More than a third of the quiet, senior people who shape a purchase without ever raising a hand say a specific executive's thinking pushed them to consider a firm. 7 Not the brand. The person. In finance, where the decision is high-stakes and the buyer is cautious, a credible expert on camera does something a brand mark cannot. It gives trust a face to attach to.
A stiff, over-coached executive reading a script off a wall reassures no one. Get it wrong, with a corporate backdrop and a memorized read, and you have shown the buyer exactly the distance you were trying to close.
This is the case for the talking head, and it is stronger than the format's dull reputation suggests. A named leader who genuinely knows the subject, speaking plainly for ninety seconds, earns more belief than a month of brand advertising, and the finance buyer will research that person before they ever make contact. The piece is often the first meeting, held before anyone shakes a hand.
That reframes what a leadership piece is for. It works less like a vanity piece and more like a rehearsal of the relationship, a way for a cautious buyer to decide whether they believe this person before spending an hour with them. Get it right and the real meeting starts warmer, with trust already partly built. The stakes on a talking head run higher in finance than almost anywhere, because the person on screen is standing in for the firm's word.
Put your own experts on camera, not your brand piece's narrator. A real, named person who knows the material builds trust that a logo cannot, and high-stakes buyers go looking for exactly that person before they call. The face is the asset. Light it well and let it speak.
The difference between a talking head that works and one that dies is not the person. It is whether we gave them a reason to forget the camera. Real questions, a real conversation, a set that feels like a room and not a courtroom. Finance leaders are not wooden. They have been shot woodenly. Our job is to get the human back on the record.
Trust is visual before it is verbal, and this is where the AI era changed the math in finance's favor.
People have decided that a real image is a condition of trusting a brand. Ninety eight percent say authentic images and video are pivotal to establishing trust, around nine in ten want to be told when AI made an image, and financial services is named as a sector people specifically expect to be transparent. 10 In a category already fighting to be believed, an obviously fake or stock image reads as a small lie, and finance cannot afford small lies.
There is a measurable penalty for faking it. Learning that a brand's content was AI-generated makes about a third of people trust it less, against a small minority who trust it more. 11 In a category where trust is the product, that is a trade no serious financial brand should want to make with its face-to-the-public imagery.
An authentic image here means a real photograph or piece of footage of real people and real moments, rather than a generated composite. Audiences treat it as a trust signal, and treat the discovery of a fake as a reason to pull back.
This is also where finance differs from a sneaker brand or a soft drink. A playful AI image on a consumer feed is a low-stakes choice. A generated face on a wealth firm's website is a claim about honesty, made by an institution whose entire pitch is that it will be honest with your money. When your product is trust, your imagery carries part of the message itself, and a fake one contradicts the very thing you are trying to say. That is the whole reason the sector keeps getting named in the research on transparency.
We owe you the counter-evidence, and it is worth knowing. People are not blanket-opposed to AI images. A majority will accept them in some contexts, and most cannot reliably tell an AI image from a real one when asked. 11 So the risk is not that every viewer runs a forensic check. The risk is the reveal, the moment a real person learns the confident advisor in your brochure was never real, in an industry that runs on their belief that you would not deceive them about something small because you would not deceive them about their money. The real photograph is insurance against that reveal, and in finance the premium is worth paying.
AI made images cheap and made real ones scarce. For most categories that is a cost question. For finance, where the whole relationship rests on believing you, the real image is a trust asset, and the fake one is a quiet risk to the only thing you are really selling.
None of this happens in open air. Financial content lives inside a compliance wall, and the wall is real, slow, and the main reason so much finance video comes out safe and lifeless.
The rules have teeth. In one 2024 sweep, regulators penalized nine advisory firms more than a million dollars combined for misleading ads, unsubstantiated claims, and testimonials that were not disclosed properly, and on-camera video draws the most scrutiny of any format. 12 Getting a single piece through review can take weeks. Faced with that, most firms reach for the safest possible piece, strip out anything specific or human, and end up with something no one could object to and no one will remember. The wall does more than slow the work. It sands the life off it.
The SEC Marketing Rule is the set of federal rules governing how investment firms advertise, including when and how they can put testimonials and real people on camera. Real people are allowed. They come with conditions, disclosures, and oversight, which is why finance video takes planning that other categories skip. 13
The conditions are specific enough to design around. A client testimonial can run, as long as the disclosures sit close to the claim and the arrangement is clear. A performance figure can appear, as long as it is substantiated and framed the way the rule requires. An executive can speak, as long as what they promise is something the firm can stand behind. 13 Those are constraints a piece can be built around, the same way a location or a budget shapes a shoot, and a studio that knows the shape going in can make something honest and human that also survives the read.
The mistake is treating compliance as a step that happens to a finished piece. By then every expensive choice is locked, and review can only subtract. The work that survives a legal read and still feels human is the work that was designed for both from the first conversation. You plan the claims you can substantiate, the disclosures you will carry, the structure that lets a real person speak without straying into a promise the firm cannot make. Done early, that is a creative brief. Done late, it is a demolition.
Bring compliance into the room before the shoot, not after. The piece that clears review is the one built to clear it, and that is a decision you make on day one, while you can still design around the rules instead of cutting into finished work. Constraints handled early read as confidence. Handled late, they read as fear.
We have made enough regulated content to know the wall is not the enemy of a good piece. A vague one is. When you know the guardrails going in, you can spend your creativity inside them, on the human moment, the real expert, the honest scene. The firms that get burned are the ones who shot first and asked legal later.
The waste in financial content is rarely the production. It is where the trust goes, decided before the shoot and after it.
Watch enough financial content and the same three mistakes repeat, and each one spends trust the firm meant to build. None of the three is a budget failure. A firm can spend heavily and make all three.
Fix the logo where a leader should be, the recap where a library should be, and the legal read that arrived too late to be creative. Fix those three and the same budget starts compounding instead of leaking.
Hiding the people.
The firm has credible experts, and it puts a logo and a voiceover on screen instead of their faces. It feels safe. It throws away the single strongest trust signal the research points to, a real named person who knows the subject, in favor of a brand mark that asks to be believed without giving anyone to believe in.
Treating the event as a memory, not an asset.
A firm spends real money convening the right room, then captures a short recap for the internal newsletter and lets the rest evaporate. The trust generated in that room was the most valuable thing the firm made all quarter, and most of it never reached the people who were not there. One day of proof got filed as a keepsake.
Letting compliance write by subtraction.
Legal comes in at the end and strips out everything specific and human, because nobody planned the disclosures or substantiated the claims up front. What airs is engineered to offend no regulator and move no one. The rules did not have to produce that. The timing did.
None of the three is a budget failure. They are decisions about where the trust goes, made before the shoot and after it, and they are why so much expensive finance content earns so little belief.
We are a boutique studio, so we do not get to hide waste inside a retainer or hide behind a logo. The way we protect a financial client's trust is to treat every shoot as a deposit into that account, planned to keep paying long after the day.
It starts before the camera, with the rooms. Where will this live, who needs to believe something after seeing it, what does it have to prove, how long should it run. That list changes the shoot. A summit shot as a single recap is one afternoon. The same summit shot as a library, the keynote, the leader interviews, the room, the stills, becomes a year of proof that you convened serious people around a serious idea. We wrote about that discipline in our brand video ROI report, and it matters even more in finance, where the currency being compounded is belief.
The tool for it is boring, on purpose. Before a shoot we write a one-page plan, the rooms down one side, and against each the format, the runtime, the disclosure it will carry, and who owns publishing it. In finance that page does double duty, because it is also where compliance lives, named and handled before a frame exists rather than discovered in the edit. When the plan exists first, the summit comes back as a keynote piece, a set of leader interviews, a room reel, and a stills library, each built for a known audience and cleared to run.
We have spent five years making content with the London Stock Exchange Group, and rung enough opening and closing bells at the New York Stock Exchange to know the shape of it. The bell itself is ninety seconds. The trust it marks took years to earn. The piece is how you make those years visible to everyone who was not standing on the floor.
The through-line across all of it stays the same. Real people, real rooms, real moments, captured well enough to run for a year, cleared through compliance because they were built to be. That is less a style than a method, and it is how trust gets made on camera. It is why we would rather make one honest piece for a financial brand than ten forgettable ones. Ten forgettable pieces cost more, run once, and quietly spend the trust the firm hired us to build. One good one keeps paying.
Before you approve a budget, name the belief you want a specific audience to hold after they watch, and the rooms the piece will live in to build it. If a piece is not designed to change what someone believes about your firm, it is decoration, and finance cannot afford decoration priced like trust.
Three moves, near to far.
The forces line up in favor of real, human, in-the-room content. Trust in finance is up but fragile, audiences are turning skeptical of anything that smells synthetic, and transparency pressure is rising fastest in exactly this sector. 10 At the same time, the money is fighting it. Financial marketing budgets are growing, and most of the new dollars are chasing performance and measurable clicks, with the fastest growth in automated and influencer channels. 14 Expect the gap to widen between firms buying attention and firms building belief. The first group will have a strong quarter and a thin brand. The second will look slower on the dashboard and steadier in the market.
Trust stays hard to measure, and that is the whole problem. A summit, an executive who becomes a trusted voice, a library of real images, none report a clean number by Friday, so they keep losing budget arguments to channels that do. The firms that pull ahead will be the ones whose leadership understands that the unmeasured thing is the thing customers are really buying, and who fund it on that conviction. We think a few of them start treating brand and event content as the trust layer, sitting above the performance spend rather than competing with it.
As AI makes generated content free and infinite, the scarce and valuable thing becomes proof that a real firm did a real thing with real people. The believable image, the leader who stood behind a claim on camera, the room your brand convened, all become harder to fake and therefore worth more. The financial brands that spent these years compounding trust in public will find it is the one asset a competitor cannot buy back quickly. The ones who spent the years chasing the click will have a lot of impressions and a trust account they never funded.
Trust, unlike a media plan, cannot be bought back in a hurry. It is the slowest asset to build and the one a rival can do least about, which is exactly what makes it worth the patience now.
Finance sells belief.
Trust is the balance sheet.
People choose the firm they trust over the cheaper or better-performing one, they trust a real point of view over a brochure, they trust a brand more after being in the room with it, and they treat a real image as proof and a fake one as a warning. Every one of those is a case for the work we make. Summits and mixers that put the right people in a room, executives on camera who give trust a face, award shows that mark what you have earned, photography a viewer can believe, all cleared through compliance because it was built to be, and all planned to keep paying for a year. Announce less. Show more. Let the belief accrue.
Start a finance storyRaised Media Co. · financial services video & photography, NYC