OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK
When asked, during a recent meeting of bank CEOs, what his bank’s branch strategy was, one CEO responded, “Bastl.” Everyone was confused. When asked to explain, he said, “It’s an acronym for ‘big ass sign, tiny lobby’.”
In the Gen AI age, however, visibility isn’t about being seen around your customers’ town—it’s about being seen in their algorithm.
A new report from Fintel Connect helps banks understand what this means, and what they need to do about it.
The Gen AI Visibility Crisis: Are You in the Feed?
The findings from the Fintel Connect report is equal parts enlightening and alarming:
- 84% of financial brands fail to consistently appear in non-branded search results.
- More than half of banks and credit unions fail to track their performance on review and affiliate sites.
- While fintechs obsess over SEO, affiliate marketing, and third-party reviews, banks are stuck in “build it and they will come” mode.
In a world where 80% of consumers begin their financial product journey online, not showing up in the discovery phase is like not existing at all. This isn’t new news–banks have learned that if they’re not in the top search results, they don’t exist.
Why Visibility ≠ Paid Ads Anymore
Generative AI is rewriting how people discover financial products as AI-generated responses and zero-click searches change consumer behavior. Instead of:
- Searching for “best high-yield savings accounts” and clicking an ad, consumers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google SGE what to do with their savings.
- Comparing rates on ten bank websites, consumers scan an affiliate site, a Reddit thread, and/or NerdWallet’s rankings.
According to Motley Fool, 54% of Americans have used ChatGPT for personal finance recommendations. By 2028, organic search could drop by 50%, and AI search is predicted to overtake Google and other traditional search engines by 2030.
These shifts upend traditional SEO and paid search strategies that financial brands and publishers have relied on for decades. Paid placements—sponsored ads, banners ads, iFrames—are also less visible in conversational outputs, disrupting acquisition funnels.
Don’t get me wrong: SEO, site authority, and brand familiarity still matter. But headlines, structured formats, and third-party authority weigh more heavily in LLM responses than conventional ranking factors.
And no display ad—or ‘big ass’ bank branch sign—is going to help.
Gen AI Models Aren’t All Alike
Fintel Connect’s research revealed significant variability in how the leading LLMs select and weighs information sources. While the four models tested surface financial content from recognizable publishers, the composition and ratio of brand-owned versus third-party sources differed substantially:
- Gemini was the most “organic content friendly,” with 72% of its sources coming from financial institutions’ own websites across all tested prompts. This suggests Google’s ecosystem leans toward rewarding authoritative, first-party content likely influenced by its integration with search data.
- ChatGPT demonstrated the broadest sourcing diversity, referencing the most sources across the prompts used in the research. It combined affiliate listicles, educational articles, and FI-owned content, creating a balanced (though third-party dominant) knowledge set.
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Perplexity and Copilot relied overwhelmingly on affiliate and publisher content,
with direct bank sources representing only 26% and 20% of citations, respectively.
This variability underscores that no single optimization strategy fits all LLMs. Each model operates with distinct content preferences and data pipelines.
What Fintechs Get Right—and Banks Still Miss
The fintechs eating banks’ lunch are:
- Feeding affiliate sites with rich product data (APYs, fees, eligibility criteria).
- Cultivating SEO-friendly content that ranks on queries like “best accounts for freelancers” or “how to build credit in your 20s.”
- Partnering with influencers and trusted creators to amplify credibility.
Banks, meanwhile, are locked into campaign-centric marketing and outdated compliance bottlenecks. Banks aren’t: 1) optimizing content for discoverability; 2) owning review site reputation; or 3) monitoring where—or if—their brand appears in third-party tools like marketplaces or aggregators.
Gen AI Changes the Game (Again)
AI doesn’t care who you are. It cares what it can crawl, synthesize, and rank. In a generative AI-driven discovery journey: 1) Content quality beats brand loyalty; 2) Structured data—like APIs or product feeds—beats static PDFs; and 3) Credibility signals from third parties matter more than your homepage.
If ChatGPT is the new front door to your bank, then you need to train the doorman. That means generative engine optimization (GEO):
- Pushing product metadata to partners in AI-readable formats;
- Optimizing for vector search and semantic understanding—not just keywords; and
- Building a content ecosystem that agents and LLMs can ingest and recommend.
The problem: most banks haven’t adapted their web presence or marketing stack to be AI-compatible.
Affiliates and Aggregators: Frenemies or Force Multipliers?
Bankers often scoff at affiliate partners: “They just want the commission.” But consumers trust them—and AI tools use them. Sites like NerdWallet, Credit Karma, and The Points Guy dominate visibility because they’ve mastered:
- Performance-based content tied to consumer outcomes;
- Search optimization at scale; and
- API integrations that let users compare products in real-time
Partnering with them doesn’t just drive leads, it ensures your brand shows up in the places people—and AI—actually use. Yet more than 50% of banks don’t even track how they appear on these platforms.
Gen AI Visibility is a Flywheel, Not a Funnel
In the Gen AI era, visibility isn’t a top-of-funnel marketing tactic. It’s a continuous performance loop:
- Your content gets picked up by affiliates, AI tools, or search engines;
- Consumers engage, convert, and create feedback loops (reviews, behavior, retention); and
- That data feeds future AI outputs and strengthens your placement.
Every step you take—good or bad—impacts your future visibility. But most banks aren’t managing this flywheel at all.
What Banks Should Do (but Aren’t)
The report outlines a smart framework and defines five moves banks should make:
- Audit your presence on affiliate sites, review platforms, and AI-powered tools.
- Invest in structured content and product feeds to power AI agents and aggregators.
- Build SEO beyond your brand name—focus on lifestyle, use case, and comparison content.
- Partner with trusted voices: creators, influencers, and reviewers with audience and authority.
- Treat visibility like a product, not a campaign. It needs constant iteration, optimization, and ownership.
Visibility shouldn’t sit in a corner of the marketing team. It’s a core growth function.
Competing Where Consumers Actually Look
Banks don’t need to beat the fintechs at TikTok or build GPTs from scratch. But they do need to show up where modern consumers make decisions—and that means playing the visibility game smarter.
AI has flattened the discovery landscape. The winners won’t be the ones with the biggest budget—they’ll be the ones with the most presence.
If you’re not discoverable in a Gen AI world, you’re not competitive. To download the report, click here.