Why it’s important to evaluate your competitors through a lens of helpfulness

Read this article to learn how evaluating your competition through a lens of helpfulness can help you create better experiences that drives acquisition.

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Most financial brands talk about “trust” as if it appears at the end of a funnel. Someone compares products, chooses yours, and then—hopefully—trust follows.

But that’s backwards.

Trust is built long before someone clicks “apply.” And it’s built on something very simple: did this brand actually help me?

Finsights, Shiny’s proprietary study of U.S. adults, set out to understand how people think and feel about financial services—and what they expect from providers. It uncovers the mindsets, emotions, and attitudes that shape how individuals approach money and financial institutions. In that work, we saw people wrestling with uncertainty, avoidance, and a basic question they can’t always articulate: “Will anyone actually help me figure this out?”

Competitive research becomes powerful when it’s used to answer that question—not “who has the best features,” but “who is actually helping people the most?”

Competitive research as a study of help

Traditional competitive research tends to stay at the surface: product grids, rate tables, lists of benefits and fees. That might tell you where you sit on paper, but it doesn’t tell you how it feels to be a person trying to get something done.

When we look at competitors, we’re paying attention to something different: how and where each brand delivers (or fails to deliver) help.

• How easy is it to figure out which product is right for me?
• When I have a basic question, how quickly can I get a real answer?
• If I’m nervous, confused, or stuck, does the brand give me guidance—or leave me to figure it out alone?

Some competitors will surprise you with small, smart ways they reduce effort or anxiety. Others will have obvious tripping points where people likely feel lost, pushed, or ignored. Those “unhelpful moments” are not just UX flaws or problematic messaging; they’re trust leaks.

Finding the unhelpful moments

A useful way to approach competitive research is to pick a handful of high-intent journeys and walk them end to end as if you were a real person with a real concern. Look for how help is delivered or missing:

1. Where help is clear and immediate Is the decision explained in human language, or with jargon? Are there tools, guides, or examples that make it easier to choose? Can you see what will happen next, or are you guessing?
2. Where help is hidden or hard to reach Is support buried in a footer or nested menu? Are FAQs answering real questions, or repeating marketing copy? Does “chat” feel like help—or like a wall between you and a human?
3. Where help is missing entirely Are you asked for sensitive information without explanation? Are there moments where the only option is “apply now” with no way to explore, ask, or learn? When something goes wrong, does the experience offer next steps—or just an error message?

Every one of these is a signal. They show you how competitors are shaping feelings in moments that matter: relief, reassurance, clarity—or frustration and doubt.

Turning gaps into helpful experiences

The point of this work isn’t to name and shame competitors, or to obsess over who has one fewer form field. It’s to identify where you can deliver more help than anyone else.

Two kinds of opportunity usually show up.

Places where competitors are genuinely doing something better Maybe a rival has a helpful eligibility explainer that gives confidence to move forward. Those are places where they are doing more to help—and therefore more to earn trust. How could you make this decision even clearer, and less stressful?

Places where competitors are leaving people on their own These are the gaps. The unhelpful error message. The dense legal page with no plain language summary. The application that asks for sensitive info without ever explaining why. Here, the opportunity is sharper:

1. What if we actually explained what’s happening?
2. What if we made it easy to ask questions instead of hoping people won’t?
3. What if we turned this confusing moment into a guided one?

This is how “help equals trust” shows up in practice. You’re not trying to out-design every pixel. You’re trying to be meaningfully more helpful at the exact points where people are most likely to feel exposed, unsure, or overwhelmed.

Competing for trust, not just attention

Remember that choosing new financial products are occasional, high-stakes decisions that sit on top of already complicated financial lives. Finsights makes it clear that many individuals carry stress, avoidance, and uncertainty into these moments—not just curiosity.

Against that backdrop, the brand that consistently shows up as most helpful is the brand that wins trust. And the brand that wins trust is the one that gets chosen, recommended, and returned to.

Competitive research, done this way, is not a race to match what others are doing. It’s a way to:

• See how help (or the lack of it) is currently delivered in your category
• Spot the moments where people are likely to feel alone or unsure
• Design experiences that step into those gaps with clarity, guidance, and real support

When you use competitive research to elevate user experience, you’re not just smoothing out friction. You’re making a deliberate choice to be the financial brand that helps more, and earns more trust, than anyone else in the mix.