For financial services marketers, the rise of the “finfluencer” has long been a double-edged sword.
Research published in June 2026 by Queen Mary University of London and the Aberdeen Group Charitable Trust confirmed the scale of the challenge.
The study, which analysed around 2,500 independent content creators across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube alongside a survey of 4,200 UK adults, revealed a striking paradox.
While two in five consumers use social media for money guidance, 90% of finfluencer posts fail basic quality, it showed.
Despite a healthy scepticism from audiences, the hunger for relatable, accessible financial content is undeniable.
Nearly a third of UK adults acted on social media guidance in the past year, and 70% of them reported positive outcomes.
For financial PR and marketing teams, this is a clear signal. Audiences want this content, but independent creators are failing to provide the compliance, disclaimers, and verified expertise that regulated firms bring to the table.
Stephanie Wilks-Wiffen, director of marketing (UK & DACH) at eToro, explains that creator-led communication has become relevant because many people no longer trust institutions by default.
“Finfluencers meet audiences where they are, using language, formats and platforms that make investing feel more understandable, relevant and human,” she says.
“But, the line between education, promotion and advice has to be clear from the start. Disclosure cannot be something added at the end if the overall impression of the content is unclear.”
Wilks-Wiffen describes eToro as “pro-influencer,” but within distinct guardrails.
She says: “The goal is not to remove personality from financial content, but to make sure audiences understand the intent of what they are seeing and where education ends and promotion begins.”
For corporate communication teams mapping out video strategies, the Aberdeen report offers specific platform insights. YouTube content, for instance, consistently outperformed Instagram and TikTok in quality measures. Nearly 20% of YouTube posts explicitly state a creator’s expertise, for example, compared to just 2.2% on Instagram and 3.9% on TikTok. Crucially, this extended to YouTube Shorts as well.
Accounts with larger followings also scored higher on transparency and source credibility, suggesting that as finfluencers scale, they naturally move toward the professionalised standards.
For subjects where it can be difficult to gain traction with certain audiences or demographics, influencer marketing can cut through in a way that other channels cannot.
The UK pensions industry successfully used influencer channels to do just this, with campaigns featuring grime artist Big Zu, 80s kids entertainer Timmy Mallett, and Essex personality Gemma “The GC” Collins.
A spokesperson for these industry campaigns is Mark Smith, who works as head of media relations at Pensions UK.
“For the first year, we partnered with the grime TV personality and rapper Big Zu. The whole ethos of that was just to do something unexpected, something that you would never see in pension marketing before.
“There had been various well-meaning, perhaps limited-success attempts in terms of getting people to engage with their pensions up until that point,” Smith says.
Having done that for a year, the pensions industry turned to Timmy Mallett in the second year with, where they leant on nostalgia.
“We tried to encourage people who are perhaps in their 30s, 40s, or 50s to go, ‘Oh my God, look at Timmy Mallett. That reminds me of when I was a child. How old is he now? Oh my god, how old am I now? I’d better go and look at my pension,’ says Smith.
“That was the kind of psychological effect we were trying to have on people.”
Arguably, the campaign that cut through most effectively, however, was the decision to use Gemma Collins. A decision that would later result in several major industry awards.
“We started with something really inspired that genuinely resonated with people because, in some regards, she was our target audience. It turns out that, in reality, she is actually very savvy with her money and manages her finances incredibly well.
“But first impressions, and what public opinion of her might be, is that perhaps this is someone who doesn’t spend every day thinking about their pension. She’s very everyday, very brash, very loud, very eye-catching, and something of a headline machine.”
Distribution shift
There is no argument that, in recent years, the landscape of personal finance has undergone a seismic shift, with players in this market embracing new marketing and distribution methods.
Where retail investors once relied exclusively on brokers, legacy media, or licensed financial advisers to guide capital, the new class of digital opinion leaders has taken centre stage.
To understand this rapidly expanding phenomenon, a landmark study published in the Journal of Business Research by academics Marius Mölders, Lennart Bock, Eloy Barrantes, and Henning Zülch provides a rigorous deep dive.
Titled “Understanding finfluencers: Roles and strategic partnerships in retail investor engagement”, the research explores the structural motivations, economic models, and social consequences of these modern creators.
They discovered that the rise of the finfluencer is fuelled directly by a demographic demand for accessible financial education and low-cost financial advice.
Critics have long cast a sceptical eye on social media finance, pointing to cases of unregulated speculative hype, volatile cryptocurrency promotions, and pump-and-dump schemes.
However, the findings of Mölders and his co-authors present a far more nuanced reality.
Surveying a wide sample of creators, the study reveals that “despite apparent contradictions in their financial motives, finfluencers see themselves as advocates of financial education.”
Rather than viewing themselves purely as salespeople or attention-seeking entertainers, many feel a genuine civic calling to bridge the widespread literacy gaps left unaddressed by traditional schools and institutions.
This bringing together of information and entertainment is precisely what makes them so effective, say their supporters.
“Creators can make financial decision-making feel more concrete, particularly for retail investors who may find traditional financial communications too abstract or intimidating,” Wilks-Wiffen says.
“By showing the reasoning behind decisions, they can reduce the psychological distance between learning about investing and actually getting started.”
eToro’s marketing lead said risk is that creator content can also amplify biases such as FOMO, recency bias and herd behaviour.
“That can affect retail audiences most visibly,” she explains. “…but wholesale and institutional audiences are not immune; the messenger still shapes how information is framed, prioritised and trusted.”
By using relatable humour, dynamic visual editing, and personal anecdotes, it is true that finfluencers can strip away the intimidating jargon that has historically locked everyday people out of capital markets.
However, this also brings inherent risks. While digital creators can make personal finance feel accessible, an April 2026 warning from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) reveals that the digital market is rife with deceptive and unlawful activity.
Retail investors who rely on social media advice face a battlefield of hidden dangers, frequently masked by a curated veneer of wealth.
Rogue creators regularly “use the pretence of a lavish lifestyle, often falsely, to promote success,” baiting vulnerable followers into high-risk financial schemes under the guise of guaranteed prosperity.
This deceptive content is reaching audiences at an alarming scale, often slipping directly past the guardrails of the platforms themselves.
During a targeted international week of action, the FCA identified 1,267 unlawful financial adverts on Meta platforms alone, all of which violated the platforms’ own internal rules.
Alarmingly, these illegal promotions “reached a minimum of 2,338,372 UK accounts,” proving just how easily unauthorised financial advice can flood everyday feeds.
The majority of this content was pushed by repeat offenders, the watchdog said.
“66% of these adverts were from firms or individuals already on the FCA’s Warning List,” it concluded, meaning millions of UK investors are being directly targeted by known bad actors.
Acting on these digital tips carries devastating consequences.
The FCA reminds consumers that “dealing with an unauthorised firm or individual increases the chances it is a scam and means consumers risk losing access to protections, such as the Financial Ombudsman Service and Financial Services Compensation Scheme.”
Without this safety net, investors who fall victim to online scams are entirely on their own. To avoid these pitfalls, the regulator urges savers to bypass social media hype entirely and use the FCA Firm Checker to verify that an advisor is fully authorised before parting with their hard-earned cash.
However, academic researchers argue that marketers should look beyond the negative newsflow, describing finfluencers as “agents of change promoting financial literacy, empowerment, and inclusion.”
By making money a casual topic of discussion over breakfast or between entertainment scrolls, they dismantle long-standing cultural taboos surrounding personal wealth.
One company to have enjoyed huge success through finfluencers is PensionBee. Jasper Martens, chief marketing officer at the company, explains that legal and compliance frameworks must be embedded in the creator process from the start, not bolted on at the end.
He says: “The distinction between education, promotion and advice has a clear regulatory definition. The FCA’s financial promotions regime is explicit about what constitutes a communication that’s likely to lead someone to a transactional decision.
“Every piece of creator content that touches PensionBee is clearly labelled as an AD within the caption. We don’t hide behind ‘gifted’ or vague ‘in association with’ language. We’re explicit.”
Martens says PensionBee briefs creators to be explicit about what they personally do versus what they’re describing as a product feature.
“The ‘I transferred my old pension using PensionBee’ framing is very different from ‘you should transfer your pension to PensionBee.’ One is a personal experience, the other slides towards advice.
“Be super transparent about intent! If you can’t defend the content in front of an FCA supervisor by explaining clearly what it is and what it isn’t, don’t publish it. That’s a useful internal test.”
The Compliance and PR Takeaway
The compliance landscape remains a minefield for consumers, however, according to the Queen Mary poll, creating a reputational risk that brands can help mitigate.
More than half of social media users remain unaware of the legal distinction between regulated “financial advice” and unregulated “financial guidance.”
Furthermore, 40% were surprised to learn that most social media tips fall completely outside existing FCA regulation.
Despite this, companies using influencer strategies say that policymakers need to consider why individuals are turning to social media in the first place.
“Many finfluencers built audiences because traditional financial education failed to reach people,” says eToro’s Wilks-Wiffen.
“That does not remove the need for guardrails, but it explains why their influence matters and why brands should engage with credible voices rather than dismiss the whole category.
“The biggest misconception is that influence in financial services is only a risk problem. It is also a response to a real market failure – people want financial content that is understandable, accessible and relevant to their lives.”