What Financial Brands Can Learn From Brands Like Netflix and Amazon

Here’s the trap: you benchmark your digital experience against other banks as a best practice, right? That might tell you what your peers are doing. But it won’t tell you what your customers expect.

They’re not spending all day comparing bank apps. They’re living in the worlds of brands like Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, YouTube—brands that have redefined what intuitive, seamless, helpful experiences feel like. That’s your competition—just as much as the bank down the street.

That’s why we use digital expectation research to ruthlessly challenge our Clients’ assumptions about what their customers want. It helps financial brands:

• See how real customers interact with non-financial platforms
• Identify which expectations are transferable to banking
• Find opportunities to stand out by adapting—not copying

Here’s what we’ve learned:

Digital friction isn’t always about speed. It’s about clarity.
Our 2024 Finsights study [add link]of financial attitudes in the US showed that 28% of people who don’t use online banking simply say they don’t need it. That’s not a usability issue. That’s a relevance issue.

When we study how people use apps like Amazon or YouTube, we’re not just looking at buttons and screens. We’re looking at the mental model and dig into how these platforms structure decisions:

• How much context is presented before asking users to act?
• How do they streamline choice without making users feel boxed in?
• What design patterns give people a sense of control rather than confusion?

That insight reshapes how we think about banking flows. Because you can optimize for speed all day—but if people don’t trust what’s happening on screen, they won’t convert.

Digital expectation research lets you break out of the financial services echo chamber.
It challenges the idea that everything has to look and feel “banky.”

And that’s a good thing. Because in a category where products feel the same, UX is one of the last places you can still create true differentiation.

It also gets you out of thinking that if you can just be a bit better than the bank down the street you’ve done your job. Ultimately that’s not your only competition in the digital space… it’s delivering on the expectations people have for what a best-in-class digital experience feels like which means your competition is more YouTube than YourCurrentBank.

Want to create a digital experience that feels intuitive—not just compliant? Digital expectation research helps you look beyond the usual suspects to really know what your customers expect from you.