Over the past year, the way financial services buyers find and choose a provider has changed faster than at almost any point I can remember. More of that journey now runs through AI, and more of it happens before a brand even knows a buyer exists. In 2026, most of us came to understand this was happening. In 2027, the job is to do something about it. Here is how I would think about it.
How buying has changed
People increasingly research providers by asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, or skimming Google’s AI Overviews rather than working down a page of links. The click through economy is thinning. When Google showed an AI summary, Pew found people click through to a website only 8% of the time, and 68% of searches now end without a click at all. Gartner predicted traditional search volume would fall by 25% through 2026, and that shift is now visible.
The practical effect for financial brands is that your story is increasingly told by an AI tool, drawing on sources you do not control. Buyers have taken their decision making with them, and in financial services they have moved further than the B2B average because ours is a considered purchase with several people involved. By the time a buyer gets in touch, most of the work is done.
6sense reports that 94% of B2B buying groups have already ranked their preferred suppliers before that first conversation, and 77% go on to buy from that early favourite. At the final commit stage, Forrester found that more buyers now rate a generative AI tool as a meaningful interaction (30%) than a human product expert (17%).
The catch: AI researches, people still decide
It would be easy to overreact to this and assume buyers now trust whatever the machine tells them, but they do not. Gartner also found that 69% still check AI’s answers with a salesperson, and 51% expect it to mislead them. They treat AI as a quick, capable, slightly unreliable assistant, useful for a shortlist, not for the final call.
That is the important bit because it changes the task. It is not enough to appear in the AI’s answer. You have to appear there and hold up when a careful buyer checks you against everything else they can find. Being present gets you onto the shortlist. Being credible when they verify is what gets you chosen.
Why financial services feels this first
This matters more in our sector than most. Financial decisions carry compliance, legal and risk sign offs, the conditions in which buyers lean hardest on independent, trusted proof rather than a provider’s own claims. It is also why thought leadership does so much work here. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute has found that 73% of senior decision makers trust a company’s thought leadership more than its marketing, and more than 75% say a piece of it has led them to consider a provider they were not previously.
Among institutional investors specifically, Crisil Coalition Greenwich found that two thirds say thought leadership has a high impact on who wins the mandate. Trust in financial services has recovered in recent years, but it remains fragile, and AI driven misinformation is already testing it. That makes credible, verifiable presence more valuable.
From awareness to action
Most of the financial services brands we work with at Vested now understand all of this, and many of them are acting on it. But according to Semrush, only 22% of teams have genuinely integrated AI search into how they work and just 9% can measure the metrics that now matter. That gap is the opportunity, and 2027 belongs to the brands that close it.
What to do about it
1. Make your content easy to cite
Lead every important page with the answer in the first line or two. Use clear headings, FAQs, comparison tables, and plain English definitions of the regulatory and product terms buyers actually search. Cite primary sources inline. In finance, this works in our favour. The named author, the qualified reviewer, the disclaimer, and the “last reviewed” date are precisely the signals that earn a citation. Keep current figures in crawlable text, not buried in PDFs or gated decks.
2. Publish your own data
Original numbers, rate trackers, benchmark studies, and transaction research are the things AI cannot find anywhere else, so they get cited far more than recycled commentary. In our sector, proprietary data is both a marketing asset and a discovery one.
3. Fix the sources AI reads about you
For financial questions, AI mostly quotes the sources it trusts about a brand, not the brand itself. Trade titles, tier one financial media, comparison sites, Wikipedia and LinkedIn shape the picture. That makes earned media and thought leadership a form of AI optimisation. It also means auditing your third party footprint – outdated fact sheets, stale Wikipedia entries, legacy press releases – and correcting them at source.
4. Answer the hidden decision makers
Financial buying groups are large, and compliance, risk, legal and procurement colleagues often research quietly and never speak to sales. Give them answers they can find. Clear pages on regulatory permissions, security posture, audit processes, data residency and model risk.
5. Keep people in the loop at the right moment
Self service has limits. Buyers who use a provider’s digital tools alongside a person are far more likely to make a good decision. The aim is not to remove the human, but to make the right expert available at the moment research turns into a decision.
6. Measure what now matters
Clicks tell you less every quarter, and AI mediated discovery is largely clickless. Track how often, and how well, you appear in AI answers for your category’s questions. Lean on marketing mix modelling and incrementality testing rather than last click attribution.
7. Run it through compliance
Everything above still has to be fair, clear and not misleading, and where you serve retail customers it has to meet Consumer Duty. Build financial promotions sign off into the content workflow, including for anything AI has helped draft. Under FCA rules, you can be accountable for content you cause to be made, so keep an eye on how AI is representing your products too.
The bottom line
None of this is about buyers needing us less. It is that they form a view of us earlier, faster and more privately than before, often through a machine they trust just enough to begin with and not enough to finish. Being present in that machine is now the price of entry. Being credible, trusted and human when the decision is made is how you win. In 2026 we learned that. In 2027, the financial brands that act on it with the rigour our sector demands will shape the buying journey long before it reaches them.
