If there's one thing that most people in financial services marketing accept – one statement that gets a near-universal show of assenting hands in the conference room – it's that ‘our number-one priority as an industry is restoring trust’. Carried, with very few disagreeing.

But a few do disagree, and your authors are among them. We think this statement is wrong at so many levels that it's hard to know where to start. We'll have a go in a minute. But first we need to disentangle the meaning – or more accurately meanings – of this deceptively simple five-letter word.

A curious phenomenon highlights the need for disentangling. On the one hand, journalists and consultants frequently publish research showing just how little consumers tend to trust financial institutions. (We'll quote from some of it in this chapter.) On the other hand, the institutions themselves, especially banks, regularly publish research showing that consumers do in fact trust them a great deal. What's going on? How can both be right?

There's a simple explanation. There is no single definition of trust. Psychology tells us that there are two fundamentally different kinds. In people's attitudes toward financial services firms, we'd argue there are in fact three.

The two kinds of trust recognised by psychologists carry the kinds of opaque and mystifying names that psychologists like: they call them ‘cognitive’ and ‘associative’ trust. Cognitive trust is about competence. Do I trust my bank to pay my mortgage, transfer some money to my children, to ensure that my savings will still be there next week? The answer is, in most cases, yes, I do. That is the trust that the banks tend to measure and yes, unsurprisingly, their customers do trust them to make payments and not to run away with their savings.

The second form of trust is about intention. Associative trust asks: ‘Do I trust you to have my best interests at heart?’ This is the question that journalists usually ask, and it may not surprise you to hear the answer is commonly ‘No I bloody don't. I think you'll find every way you can to get more money out of me, and/or to sell me things that are in your best interests but certainly not mine.’

Not being psychologists, we don't get much meaning from the terms ‘cognitive’ and ‘associative’, so for the purposes of this chapter we'll replace them, respectively, with the words ‘functional’ and ‘emotional’. For the sake of completeness, we'll also add a third species of trust, not quite the same as either of the other two, which we'll call ‘existential’ trust – that is, trust that the organisation will continue to exist, and won't go bust, taking my money with it (or, in the worst case, that if it did go bust then there'd be a mechanism that would mean I'd get my money back).

In consumers' perception, different kinds of relationship with different kinds of organisation meeting different kinds of need display different profiles across these three kinds of trust. Big, established banks score well on functional and existential trust, but very badly on emotional trust. Small, little-known digital start-ups may score better on emotional trust, but not so well on functional trust and quite possibly rather badly on existential trust. In the wake of some well-publicised crises, defined benefit company pension schemes score much less well on existential trust than they used to. With different relationships displaying different profiles, it's easy to see how anyone commissioning market research into trust can devise their study so as to produce whatever result they're looking for.

At risk of generalisation, overall the level of Existential Trust remains high. That said, on the rare occasions when it does become an issue – as it did for Northern Rock in autumn 2007 – it's a very serious one. National news coverage of panic-stricken customers queuing round the block to get their hands on their money is an epic fail, a PR disaster, an existential vicious circle from which it's hard to see any way back.¹

On the whole, Functional Trust also remains fairly – some might say surprisingly – high. Given many institutions' appalling error rates, and the constant drizzle of media coverage of customer service cock-ups, most people on the whole remain remarkably confident that most institutions will get most things right most of the time. When you ask a bank to make a payment, you expect the payment will be made, to the right person, in the specified period of time, and your account will be debited with the appropriate amount of money. Things go wrong quite often, especially if you're asking for anything special or different, and when they do it's very annoying and horribly difficult to sort out. But, nevertheless, with certain exceptions, we still remain reasonably confident that next time, they'll probably go right – and that if they do make a mistake, they'll correct it.

But in recent years, it's the third category of trust, associative or Emotional Trust, that has become the problematic one. A very large majority of consumers simply do not trust financial institutions to act in their best interests.

There's no shortage of research to substantiate this view. The major global Trust Barometer study carried out by PR giant Edelman, for example, consistently rates financial services as the least trusted of the eight industry sectors it features. In the latest study, published in 2017, there is a slight overall improvement, but a closer analysis reveals an increasingly polarised position, in which what Edelman describes as its ‘informed public’ respondents (drawn from the better-educated and higher-earning groups) show a much higher level of trust than what Edelman calls the ‘general population’, with the former showing some improvement while the latter continues to decline.

In territory like this there's no such thing as a definitive measure, and the Trust Barometer's figures across all respondents are generally higher than those published by Nottingham University Business School in its annual financial services Trust Index. This research distinguishes between ‘base-level trust’ (something very similar to what we're describing here as functional trust) and ‘higher-level trust’ (very similar to what we're describing here as emotional trust, or in other words trust that financial services providers have their customers' best interests at heart). In each of seven financial services sectors, the higher-level trust scores are consistently low: those giving low marks to each sector outnumber those giving high marks by approximately three or four to one.

What's more, the research – undertaken annually since 2003 – provides no evidence of any significant recovery in trust since the financial crisis of 2008. Scores are bumping along at a low level: according to the report, they're ‘nothing special and there is an air of weary resignation about them’.

Another research study, carried out in late 2016 by Opinium Research among a nationally representative sample on behalf of consulting firm 3R Insights, looked at consumers' perceptions of the attitudes and behaviours of the chief executives of financial services firms. CEOs reading the findings must be glad of their gigantic remuneration packages to cheer them up as they come to appreciate the depths of the public's hostility toward them.

The sample – a large, nationally representative one – was asked about their level of confidence that the leaders of financial institutions would put their interests – that is, their customers' interests – first. Here is their reply:

With a very high level of consistency, all respondents – older and younger alike – when asked the question with regard to insurance companies, banks and investment firms, responded by just under seven votes to two that they had little or no confidence.

The researchers asked whether the sample thought financial CEOs cared about the quality of service they provided. This is what respondents said:

The good news is that the answers are slightly more positive. The bad news is that they're not more positive by much: this time those believing the CEOs didn't care much outvoted the others by just about two to one.

And then thirdly, respondents were asked whether they thought financial firms' CEOs cared about providing customers with value for money. Here's how they replied:

This was the most negative response to all the questions, with respondents thinking the CEOs didn't much care outnumbering the others by around four to one (although feeling slightly less negative toward the investment firms' bosses).

Looking at findings like these, it's difficult to distinguish the chicken from the egg: are the CEOs viewed so negatively because their firms are so distrusted, or are the firms so distrusted because their leaders are viewed so negatively?

There is also, of course, a bigger question about whether these findings represent a failure of perception – in other words whether consumers are wrong to hold such negative opinions, or whether they're right and their opinions more or less represent reality. It's difficult to imagine the piece of research that could tackle this question: not many CEOs would admit in an interview to caring little about customer service or value for money, or confirm that they rarely put customers' interests first. But in any case, the question is largely academic. To customers, perceptions like these are their reality.

And not just to customers, but often also to people in the industry. Here is an exchange between two senior Financial Services Forum members – marketers taking part in one of our Financial Services Forum focus groups:

We think that the crisis of emotional trust reflected in this exchange results from a toxic combination of three main ingredients.

• There's a great deal of personal experience. Many millions of people have found themselves personally caught up in the big mis-selling scandals – PPI, personal pensions, mortgage endowments. Millions more have lesser but still uncomfortable tales to tell, often involving poor sales practices, unsuitable or poor value products and poor delivery at key ‘moments of truth’. And millions more with no direct personal experience still have indirect experience, involving close family members or friends.
• These personal experiences are greatly amplified by an unending media blizzard, which provides clear evidence that individuals' personal experiences are not isolated examples, but are part of a much bigger national picture.
• And as a backdrop, it's important to remember that for many, the subject of money is, in itself, difficult and emotionally charged. A Financial Services Forum focus group respondent says: ‘The fact is that the primary responses at a basic human level to thinking about money are fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's almost impossible to stop people feeling those emotions. And it is much easier to blame the bank than to get your own head in order and sort it out for yourself’. There's a reluctance to take much corporate responsibility in that statement – but also more than a grain of truth.

There are of course exceptions to this bleakly distrustful picture, and some are important. For example, most customers tend to have more confidence in the behaviour of their own providers or advisers than in those of which they have no personal experience. Some sectors as a whole enjoy higher levels of emotional trust than others – financial advisers score particularly well in the Nottingham University study, which also suggests a fairly strong residual presumption of innocence toward building societies. And some individual organisations are rated more highly than others – among banks, for example, both the Co-operative Bank and First Direct are thought less likely to behave badly towards their customers than any of the biggest High Street brands.²

(First Direct is perhaps the most striking exception to the overall picture. In a study of 10,000 respondents on customer experience by KPMG Nunwood published in September 2016, First Direct is rated first among the 100 organisations included, ahead of such paragons as John Lewis, Amazon and M&S. ‘Customer experience’ isn't the same thing as trust, but this ranking certainly says something very positive about the feelings of First Direct's customers.)

But still, it's undoubtedly true that the overall picture is very negative. And that being so, it's hardly surprising to find such a high level of agreement among financial services marketing people to that soundbite, ‘Our number one priority is restoring consumer trust’.

At the same time, though, when we explored the issue further in our Financial Services Forum members online research, the findings showed a somewhat more nuanced picture than we expected.

A little under half of the respondents agreed that ‘it's gone and we must do everything possible to get it back’. More than a third of respondents, 37%, thought that while trust might have gone generally, trust in their own organisations remained high (they can't all have been First Direct employees), and 19%, remarkably, agreed that ‘people have more trust in financial services than we imagine’. More remarkably, no-one at all agreed with the statement that ‘it's gone and it's not coming back’. Your authors are clearly out of line with these respondents.

So why do we take such a different view? Why do we think that there are as many as five very good reasons to reject the idea that trust could or should be restored? What could those five reasons be?

To deal with the most obvious and positive reason first, as we've already said it doesn't seem to us that there's any need to restore existential or functional trust, because we don't think there's any widespread crisis in either of these areas. When individual organisations are affected by either, then as far as possible it's certainly necessary to take action, and of course even better not to be affected in the first place. Young and financially weak organisations are wise not to draw attention to their youth or weakness. But there is currently no general crisis in existential or functional trust.

It's emotional trust where there is an overall and widespread crisis. But in four words, we reject the idea of making efforts to restore it across the industry, because we think that trying to do so would be:

1. Immoral
2. Impossible
3. Unnecessary, and
4. Unaffordable.

Consider these four objections in turn:

1. Rebuilding trust in financial services would be immoral. Once upon a time, many years ago, individuals were big on trust. In fact not just individuals – societies as a whole functioned largely on the basis of trust. People tended to trust sources of authority, and individuals and organisations to whom they believed they owed deference and respect. They trusted kings. They trusted priests. They trusted the four estates, the Parliament, legislature, law and the Press. They trusted political leaders. They trusted their elders. They trusted public figures, especially those with reputations for good works.

   Quite often the people they trusted proved worthy recipients of their trust. But quite often they didn't. Sometimes those people were Adolf Hitler, or James Jones of Jonestown Massacre infamy, or Jimmy Savile.

   It's difficult to say exactly when this kind of trust began to wither, but if Don Maclean is right that the date of Buddy Holly's death was ‘the day the music died’, then 1 July 1916, the first day of the first battle of the Somme, could be said to have done much the same for trust. Whether the Allied generals were incompetent, indifferent to their soldiers' well-being or, as some now argue, doing the best they could in impossible circumstances, the fact was that the British 4^th Army lost some 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded on that day – and the expression ‘lions led by donkeys’ stuck as a deeply embittered summary.

   Against that kind of background, we go on to say unhesitatingly that the continuing erosion of trust over the years since has been one of the very best, healthiest and most welcome evolutions in the history of society. People who are sceptical, challenging and hard to persuade are hard to take for a ride.

   Financial services provide less dramatic examples, but there have been plenty of occasions when a more suspicious or challenging attitude might have saved a lot of money heartache. How many debacles could have been avoided if more consumers had called to mind the sceptic's mantra, ‘If it looks too good to be true, it probably is’? Steadily rising scepticism, and an online and social media environment in which it's so much easier than ever before to check whether that irresistible proposition is actually a scam, are gradually making the parting of fools from their money more difficult. No sensible person could want to put the clock back to a time when it was like taking candy from babies.

   For the time being, though, with millions of people still too trusting to be able to resist bad products, manipulative selling, excessive charges and outright scams of all shapes and sizes, we'd prefer to see campaigning to encourage less trust in financial services, not more. If there were steps that could be taken that would encourage people to return to – or remain in – a state of trustful complacency, we'd say it would be against consumers' interests – and, yes, arguably immoral – to take them.

   But it doesn't really matter that seeking to rebuild consumer trust wouldn't be in consumers' interests, because:

2. Rebuilding trust in financial services would be impossible. The reason should be obvious from the previous section. Financial services marketing people may not have noticed, but ever since that date in July 1916 (and arguably for a good deal longer), trust across the whole of society has been eroding at speed.

   These days, we may decide to place our trust in a small number of people with whom we have close personal relationships (and even then, we may find ourselves wishing that we hadn't). But beyond that, forget it. A few minutes' thought brings to mind a long list of institutions, occupations and professions in which levels of trust are much lower than they were say 50 or 100 years ago. The list of those involved in trust crises in recent years might include, in no particular order, politicians, the media, the police, the judiciary, the medical profession, army generals, DJs and TV entertainers famous in the 1960s and 1970s, the food industry, advertising, unelected faceless bureaucrats (especially if non-British Europeans), bishops (especially male and Catholic), winners of the Tour de France, oil companies, energy companies more generally, international companies (especially American), experts (remember Michael Gove saying we've had enough of them?), white people and, especially in the workplace, men.

   We recorded the following exchange in a Financial Services Forum focus group:

   Respondent 1:	Do you trust the petrochemical industry? Do you trust the pharmaceutical industry?
   Respondent 2:	No.
   Respondent 1:	Do you trust the food industry?
   Respondent 2:	Is there anything in this world we trust?
   Respondent 1:	Do you trust big business, full stop? I don't.
   Respondent 2:	No.

   It's difficult to think of any group, from the list above or beyond, that has managed to restore trust after losing it. It may well be that most individuals in many of these groups are entirely blameless. But we have a strange habit of judging by the exception, rather than the rule: if, say, it becomes clear that one bishop has behaved badly, we jump to the conclusion that they all have.

   Amid this general collapse in emotional trust, it's impossible to see how the financial services industry could manage to stand alone in reversing the trend, especially if we assume a continuing flow of reasons for distrust. The task would be truly Sisyphean – a boulder painfully shoved a few metres up the hill, bang, rolling down in a Libor crisis. Start again, another few metres, then rolling down in a US multi-billion-dollar fine for mis-selling sub-prime debt. And so it goes.³

3. Rebuilding emotional trust in financial services is unnecessary. (This section gives a hint of where we're going in the later part of this chapter.)

   It's very important to recognise that even with levels of emotional trust across much of the consumer economy as low as they are, commercial organisations are still able to sell a lot of stuff and make a lot of money. Customers don't trust estate agents or car salesmen much, but they still buy houses and cars. They don't trust Apple, Microsoft or Starbucks to pay their taxes, but most still buy their devices, software and beverages. And they don't trust Sir Philip Green to do the right thing by BHS pensioners, but they still shop at Top Shop.

   True, low levels of trust arguably make it harder and more expensive to do business, creating situations in which many consumers approach firms with excessive caution and reluctance to engage any more than absolutely necessary. If they could easily find and buy a house without dealing with an estate agent, they would. And as they're presented with an ever-growing range of digital alternatives that mean that they don't have to deal with a traditional estate agent, or car dealer, or bank, or insurance company, a growing number are voting with their feet (or, more accurately, as mobile moves up the list of consumers' preferred digital devices, with their thumbs).

   But, even so, currently it clearly isn't the case that a lack of trust makes it impossible – or even all that difficult – to do business. And, similarly, in a market where it's hard to find sources of competitive advantage, not all firms would welcome an increase in trust across the board. A Financial Services Forum focus group respondent says ‘It depends whether you're looking at it from a company level, or an industry level. Do I care that other banks are mistrusted? No. If I could make people trust us more than the others, then competitively I would win’.

   It's just as well that rebuilding trust across the industry is unnecessary, because…

4. Rebuilding trust in financial services is unaffordable. Bear in mind three things:
   1. the influence of the media and social media, and the enormous difficulty in influencing what they have to say;
   2. consumers' propensity, noted above, to judge by the exception rather than the rule; and
   3. crucially, the fact that insofar as levels of trust can be managed either upwards or downwards, doing so depends simply and solely on managing perceptions of trustworthiness.
   On this basis, it seems clear to us that if the industry is to have even the slightest chance of rebuilding consumers' emotional trust, then the industry – and that means all of it – is going to have to start behaving in a totally – and visibly – trustworthy fashion. And that's going to be very, very expensive.

   Just think about a small and random selection of behaviours that currently engender distrust, and that are going to have to stop. (We're not thinking here about the big bad things, the PPI mis-selling disasters that hit the headlines – we're just thinking about the small day-to-day behaviours that people view with suspicion, which make them think that you can't have their interests at heart or else you'd do things differently. Things like:

   • Producing hugely lengthy Terms & Conditions, written in incomprehensible jargon and published in unreadable 8-point type;
   • Punishing customers for their loyalty by increasing their charges while making discounts available to new customers;
   • Maintaining theoretically ‘free’ current account banking, but levying exorbitant and unexpected charges for the most minor infractions of the rules;
   • Selling packaged current accounts that include breakdown insurance to customers with no car, or that include travel insurance to customers who either don't travel, or who have conditions that make them wholly or largely ineligible;
   • Charging interest on uncleared storecard balances of over 29% (as, for example, Top Shop, House of Fraser and Debenhams all do) at a time when base rate is 0.5%;
   • Charging up to 5% p.a., and sometimes more, to manage so-called ‘active’ investment funds that consistently underperform tracker funds that charge a tenth as much.

   Some of these behaviours – and some of the hundreds more we could have cited – are real and current causes of actual day-to-day distrust and dissatisfaction. Others are hostages to fortune – mis-selling stories that may or may not hit the headlines at some point in the future, but with predictably disastrous effects on perceptions of trust if and when they do. All of them are profitable – some very profitable – for the organisations that have adopted them. And if we really wanted to rebuild trust across the industry, they'd all have to stop.

Ultimately, it's much more about an attitude of mind rather than a specific list of changed practices. The attitude of mind is the one that says the only rules are (1) don't break the law, and (2) don't get found out – an attitude that's reflected in this comment made in a Financial Services Forum focus group by a respondent with a very senior role in general insurance:

‘Year on year we know that our loyal customers are becoming better and better risks, but 10% of our customers will get a 20% price increase in year 4. Don't ask me why, it's just the benchmark figure we use. So that is just frankly raping and pillaging the back book, but it's a hard thing to unembed’.

When we discussed that 3R Insights research on perceptions of financial services firms' CEOs quoted earlier in the chapter, we asked whether consumers' cynicism just reflected their perceptions, or reflected current reality. This focus group respondent's comment strongly suggests an answer.

We have no idea what the total price tag of eliminating all these trust-harming behaviours might be, but the cost of compensating customers for just a single one of the big stories – mis-selling Purchase Protection Insurance (PPI) – is already £40 billion and will rise further. Say that the total price tag is three, four, five times that – somewhere between £100 billion and £200 billion. Would it be worth it?

We asked this last question, or a version of it, in our Financial Services Forum online members research. We asked specifically about the cost of maintaining and/or regaining trust, and the findings made us raise our eyebrows.

Only 3% of respondents said that they knew the cost of building trust and knew that it wouldn't be worth it, 15% said they didn't know the cost, 50% said they knew the cost and knew it was worth it, and 32% said it would be worth it whatever the cost – that's 82% saying creating trust is worth the cost.

Frankly, we simply don't believe this. We don't believe anyone knows the cost, and in purely commercial terms we're sure it would hardly ever be worth it. The findings show that our research respondents are good people who want their firms to be trusted, but that's about all.

These are the four reasons why we feel so sure that the financial services industry will never restore consumer trust.

At this point we should add that while we've been questioning the obviously Herculean task of rebuilding trust in financial services as a whole, we don't actually think it's much easier to rebuild trust in any single, specific institution.

This is a controversial statement, so we should explain it carefully and caveat it appropriately. First the caveats.

As we've said, there are three circumstances in which levels of distrust are lower than average. People have less distrust toward their own financial services providers – ‘The banks/financial advisers/insurance companies are all as bad as each other, except that mine is better than most’. They have less distrust toward small, young, usually digital start-ups that haven't done anything bad yet. (We refer here to emotional distrust – they may well feel a higher level of existential or functional distrust.) And they have less distrust towards some types of firm than others – building societies, for example, still occupy a slightly higher rung on the ladder.

But otherwise, the biggest problem for any financial services business seeking to restore trust is that widespread perception that ‘they're all as bad as each other’. Organisation A can run an exemplary business, providing consumers with no reasons at all to distrust it. But if Organisation B, or C, or D – or, even worse, all of them – is found to have been less scrupulous, then Organisation A will find it exceptionally difficult to avoid guilt by association.

This isn't the case in highly branded and strongly differentiated markets. When a packaged goods brand is found to be adulterated or contaminated in some way – as when Perrier mineral water was found to be contaminated with benzene – consumers were generally (and rightly) not concerned that the same might be true of Evian or San Pellegrino.

The situation was more finely balanced in the automotive industry when Volkswagen was found to have faked the results of emissions tests. If one other big manufacturer was shown to have done the same thing, many consumers would have assumed they were all at it, but most hadn't been found out. But for as long as the only certain malefactor was VW, consumers were willing to believe that other firms' hands were clean.⁴

In the largely undifferentiated landscape of financial services, though, consumers tend to assume that even if just one is doing it, they're probably all doing it. And the truth is, consumers are probably right.

For this reason, and bearing in mind the caveats and partial exemptions summarised above, we're very cautious about the idea that single organisations can be seen to be more trustworthy than their peers. If creating trust across the industry is impossible, then creating (and sustaining) trust in a single firm isn't much easier.

So where do we go from here? Are we simply content with the status quo?

Not at all. Our view is that while restoring trust is an impossible task, managing distrust is an entirely possible and vitally important one.

And in the second part we'll discuss how to do this – suggesting, as you'll see, a range of actions and behaviours that aren't so very different from the ones you'd choose if restoring trust was indeed your goal.

This may sound as if our phrase ‘managing distrust’ is something of a semantic conjuring trick, just a way of saying ‘restoring trust’ in different words. But that's really not the case. ‘Restoring trust’ is about trying to do something game-changingly permanent, something that creates a different kind of equilibrium between consumers and financial services going forward. To reiterate a phrase we used earlier, ‘managing distrust’ is about an attitude of mind. It's about remembering that the current distrustful equilibrium isn't going to change, and so every time we want to interact with our market we have to assume, as one of our marketing directors said in a Forum focus group, that many of the people we're wanting to engage with are already asking themselves, ‘Who is this bastard and why is he lying to me?’ Forgive the overdramatic analogy, but it's rather as if our customers are unexploded bombs, with their distrust on a hair trigger and ready to be set off at any moment. One false move, and the credibility of anything you want to say or do has gone.

This situation is inevitably more difficult to manage when the relationship between consumer and financial services provider is closer, longer-lasting and involves more frequent contact. Most consumers have very few of these – even when we hold a product, like a mortgage, life policy or pension, for many years the infrequency of contact means that we have no real sense of what could be called a ‘relationship’. For many of us, the bank that provides our current account is the only real example. When there is a ‘relationship’ like this, though, trust is an essential part of it, in much the same way as it is in relationships in our private life. And that being so, the first priority is to avoid – and keep on avoiding, week by week, month by month and year by year – any false moves.

This requirement applies in all sorts of ways. Many of them are about communication, about what you say and how (and even when) you say it. If you use weasel words – this product ‘can’ do such-and-such, or customers ‘may’ receive so-and-so, then what people hear is ‘will’. If you ‘can’ lose money on this investment, then people are inclined to believe that they will. If there ‘may’ be an exit penalty, many assume that there will be. And everyone knows that when you tell them about ‘new’ charges, what you mean is ‘higher’ charges – if they were lower, you'd say so.

A similar point applies to jargon and small print. Both are assumed to hide bad news. If it isn't bad news, why would you make it so hard to read and understand?

Customers today have very sensitive lie-detection capabilities, but often very little sensitivity is needed. When your IVR system keeps them waiting 20 minutes, but a voice interrupts the hold music twice a minute to tell them their call is important to you, they know perfectly well that it isn't. Insisting otherwise is just silly and counterproductive.

Then there are all those little behaviours that we do almost without thinking, as part of our usual business practice, which still infuriate and generate suspicion. We know, for example, how much existing customers hate seeing preferential treatment and lower prices given to new customers. It's particularly upsetting when firms seem to take advantage of vulnerable customers – your authors are perfectly capable of keeping our insurance premiums low by regular rebroking, but we hate seeing our elderly parents taken for a ride. Over and above the procedures required by regulation, we hate excessively cumbersome security procedures, on the telephone and online – everyone is infuriated by the frequent need to give account number and address details three times before we can actually speak to someone.⁵

There are countless examples. Many are trivial, but remember that hair-trigger – it doesn't take much to set us off. One of your authors receives a regular e-mail from a big asset management firm. It's titled ‘Essential Reading for Investors’. That heading never fails to irritate him. It's not ‘Essential Reading’, it's a flimsy and boring marketing newsletter. What would the firm call an email that really did contain essential reading?

New distrust detonators seem to turn up all the time. An area causing rapidly increasing agitation is the use of data, particularly online. Some of the cleverer things that big data makes possible are alarming to customers. Programmatic advertising is a case in point. How does Facebook know that we're interested in a new credit card? Why is it that as soon as we fill in an online insurance application, we're pursued all round the Internet by price comparison sites? Research shows a high level of ignorance among customers on the whole subject of what data organisations hold, and what uses they make of it. From an industry perspective, the use of big data to personalise and customise is massively to customers' advantage and heralds a welcome improvement in relevance and service, but many customers find it sinister and alarming.

But if having the insight and sensitivity to see these issues, large and small, through customers' eyes is the first requirement, the second is figuring out what to do about them.

There are several options:

1. Carry on as we are. We can't say we love this option, but it clearly does exist. Some firms may take the view that the commercial benefits of a behaviour outweigh the lessening of trust. If a big and apparently irreplaceable part of an insurance company's profit comes from ripping off our mothers, then it may decide to carry on overcharging them and accept the reputational consequences at both micro and macro levels.
2. Stop doing it. On the other hand, it may be that the commercial benefits don't outweigh the negative effect on trust. It might just be best to stop.
3. Present it better. Customers hate the idea that the prices they're paying penalises them for their loyalty, but they do more or less understand that offering an introductory discount is a good way to recruit new customers. For an industry that's often criticised for its fondness for spin, it's strange how many of our most irritating behaviours are simply the result of bad copywriting.
4. Find a way to offset, or counterbalance, the negative. If offering discounts to new customers really is essential to your business model, then how about a parallel initiative to offer bonuses to existing customers – say, rewarding their loyalty after they stay for five years? One of the biggest drivers of distrust is unfairness. You have to be able to demonstrate that what you're doing is fair.
5. Explain what you're doing, and why. If there's a good reason why we have to key in our account number three times before you can talk to us, we'd like to know what it is. Actually, even if there's a bad reason, we'd still like to know what it is.

There are no doubt plenty of examples of these strategies, and probably some other strategies as well. This book isn't intended as a practical guide to customer experience, or customer journey management – there are plenty of good books, consultancies and agencies ready to help with that.

This, as we keep saying, is about an attitude of mind – an attitude that we think is crucially important in the emerging new era of financial services marketing, and an attitude that should be ruthlessly applied to every aspect of the customer experience you provide. It's not very complicated – it's about not treating customers like idiots, not trying to steal their money and not saying or doing things that they don't believe. If you can manage to not do these things, and carry on not doing them over time, then from day to day those explosions of distrust will remain undetonated. Maybe, if you keep it up consistently enough, and for long enough, you might just find that distrust starts to fade away a bit. And as a general principle, when all else fails, try telling the truth.