PayPal tops US survey of most trusted financial services brands – twice more trustworthy than Apple Pay

The financial services industry has been dealing with trust issues ever since the meltdown in 2008. According to the latest Landor Pulse—an analysis conducted by global brand strategy and design firm Landor—retail banks are still struggling to regain that trust. Credit card brands, for the most part, scored higher than retail banks, with online payments brand PayPal the clear leader.

Approximately 30 percent of consumers rank PayPal as trustworthy, compared with 25 percent for Visa, 23 percent for Mastercard, and 17 percent for American Express, which has fallen from a 2006 trust rating of 24. Other e-payment solutions do not fare as well: Apple Pay and Google Wallet are trusted by only 13 percent of consumers, while Venmo, the digital wallet that lets you make and share payments with friends, is at the low end of the scale with just 10 percent of consumers finding it trustworthy. Interestingly, Venmo is a service of PayPal Holdings, Inc.

Retail banks do not rank highly with consumers: just 17 percent think Capital One and Chase are trustworthy, with Bank of America one point below at 16 percent. Unsurprisingly in light of its recent challenges, Wells Fargo fell from a 23 percent rating in 2006 and a 19 percent rating in 2016 to its current ranking of just 14.5 percent. Also a victim of current controversy after having been called a “bubble” by some financial leaders, Bitcoin has the lowest rating of all, with only 6 percent of consumers believing it to be trustworthy.

The Landor Pulse of trusted financial services brands is based on data from the first half of 2017 from the United States BrandAsset® Valuator (BAV). BAV is the world’s largest database of consumer brand perception, comparing statistics for more than 55 financial services brands.

“Financial services brands are still seeing an impact from the 2007–2008 crisis, augmented by ongoing issues facing myriad financial institutions over the past two years,” notes Louis Sciullo, executive director of financial and professional services at Landor.

“We see credit card brands faring better because of their daily place in consumers’ lives and the relative clarity of their fee model. Meanwhile, PayPal’s high trust ranking stems from the amazing job it’s done to establish confidence in its digital platform. It now boasts over 200 million active account holders and has relationships with consumers and merchants that give it a stronghold on the payments market.”

Maarten Lagae, Landor’s senior manager of insights and analytics, continued, “Comparing BAV data over the past 10 years shows that perceptions of trust have eroded in all industry categories, but especially in the financial sector. In addition to secure assets, the “must-have” for financial services brands is trust. Consumers are increasingly wary of institutions serving motives other than customers’ best interests. This is even more true with millennials, who are the first to engage with businesses that provide transparency and disrupt unequal power relationships.”

Source: Landor Pulse