Open Banking Trust Gap: Consumers Use Fintechs They Don't Trust

What happened

New data from The Financial Brand reveals a striking paradox at the heart of consumer financial behaviour: a significant proportion of people actively use open banking services and fintech applications while simultaneously reporting that they do not trust them. Rather than trust driving adoption, convenience and necessity appear to be doing the heavy lifting — consumers are sharing financial data and transacting through non-traditional providers even when they harbour meaningful doubts about how their information is handled.

The research points to a widening gap between stated attitudes and actual behaviour. Consumers express scepticism about data privacy, the security practices of fintech firms, and the opacity of open banking data-sharing arrangements — yet they continue to connect bank accounts, use embedded finance tools, and rely on third-party apps for budgeting, payments and lending. The implication is that the barrier to adoption has fallen far below the threshold of trust.

Why it matters

For anyone designing financial services or customer journeys in adjacent sectors, this finding reframes the problem entirely. The conventional CX assumption is that trust must be earned before customers will act. This data suggests the opposite dynamic is at work: people act first, under the pressure of convenience or lack of alternatives, and trust — or the absence of it — becomes a background condition they simply tolerate. That is a fragile foundation. Customers operating in a low-trust, high-usage state are primed to churn the moment a credible, safer-feeling alternative appears, or to disengage sharply after any data incident.

From a behavioural economics perspective, this is a textbook case of the intention–behaviour gap running in reverse. Normally we worry about people intending to act but not following through; here, people act despite negative intentions. Status quo bias, switching costs and the sheer friction of opting out are keeping users inside systems they distrust. Service designers should treat this not as a loyalty signal but as a warning: captured users are not satisfied users.

By the numbers

The source article references survey data but does not surface specific percentages, sample sizes or dates in the material provided. This section is therefore omitted to avoid fabrication.

The Renascence take

Most operators in the open banking and fintech space will read this data as reassuring — usage is up, so the product must be working. That reading misses the structural risk entirely. What the data actually describes is a customer base that has been press-ganged by convenience, not won by experience.

The dangerous comfort of high engagement metrics can mask a trust deficit that compounds silently. In behavioural terms, customers who use a service they distrust are not loyal — they are trapped, and trapped customers are the first to leave and the loudest to complain when something goes wrong. Customer-obsessed operators in fintech and banking should be running trust diagnostics alongside usage analytics: measuring not just whether customers return, but whether they would choose you freely if switching were effortless. The ones who cannot answer that question confidently are building on sand.