How to Gain Trust as an Online Financial Services Company

Financial Services Website Builds Trust

The single most important thing for an online financial services company is to establish trust with consumers. This is the biggest wall to a customer deciding whether or not to use your financial service. From building trust through communication and incorporating elements for financial web design, there are things you can do to increase your credibility. We are here to teach you how to break that trust wall, gaining their trust as well as teaching you how to maintain it.

This article will put you in customer’s shoes and teach you how to win over their trust.

Why are they So Afraid?

The internet is chocked-full of people

With over a billion website today, people using the internet are always on guard as to what they fill in on a website – especially if it’s an unknown one. Many people are hesitant to enter their sensitive information online with services or businesses they haven’t even seen before – why would they? They only entrust their personal details or credit card info to trusted services, well-established e-commerce websites like Amazon or E-Bay or pay through services like Paypal. The level of engagement you are going to get from an unknown, newly established website is not going to be much.

Not many people understand the technology behind online security

People don’t trust what they can’t understand. When it comes to their money, it is important that your customers feel like they’re placing their money in safe hands. It is often the case they harbour scepticism towards a ‘secure payment system’. For instance, SSL encryption system is the bread and butter of online security but the complexity of the technology doesn’t allow for an easy explanation.

So How Do I Gain Their Trust?

1. Address Their Concerns Before They Can Even Come Up With One

One of the tricks is to answer any questions your customers have before they even have a chance of pondering one. For example, for a financial Services Website, when you ask them to fill in personal information, let them know exactly what information you need. Take Facebook, they had a problem of people not wanting to share their info with affiliates so they dealt with this by writing a small section at the bottom of the page “we will only collect your email, friend list, date of birth but will never post for you” – once you know what they are collecting and why you will lower a part of that wall.

2. Partner Up

Another way is to partner up with more reputable financial services companies. Partnerships can be the quickest and easiest way to overcome trust barriers surrounding your online financial services brand. Your partner’s reputation can boost your reputation, hence increase your conversion. However, as with anything, reputation can be a double-edged sword so be careful in who you partner with otherwise it may backfire.

3. Have A Good Design

For a financial Services Website, you need to bring in the typography, fonts, colours, mood and tone. Paypal uses the colour blue to elicit the feeling of trust from their customers – they used this technique in their early days to build trust and establish an online presence. But there it goes much further than that – good designs add so much more value. Good corporate identity design can help you build trust and a solid first impression. A good investment or company web design is more likely to be trusted. More importantly, your website needs to grab your customers attention and is informative enough for them to understand your business – check out 5 Common Mistakes Businesses Make to avoid the common design pitfalls for your website.

Use photos and video in testimonials. Use industry-standard security methods and explain them visually. Have these in your testimonials help your customers see that your company is run with actual love people. This may sound ridiculous but it’s also ridiculously effective in gaining their trust. Integrate this concept of human interaction into your customer service team and watch the magic work. Instead of ‘John’ your customer is now connecting to the people with faces, not other names on the screen. Just a face or voice can turn a sceptic into a life-long customer.