Big Tech vs. Big Banks: Does Trust Outweigh Innovation?

Big tech companies have been swiftly disrupting traditional industries, but the most significant target seems to be the financial sector. With Google’s announcement of offering checking accounts to consumers, Apple’s credit card, Facebook’s digital currency, traditional banks are welcoming opportunities to cooperate with tech companies. Moreover, it’s hard for traditional banks like Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America to ignore these trends, for they may miss opportunities that could lead to losing customers due to falling behind on technological innovation. 

However, given the recent missteps by big tech companies with customer data privacy and security, can tech companies gain the trust of consumers with their financial data? Tech companies have massive reach, brand recognition, and technological resources, but is that a big enough incentive on becoming the alternative to traditional banks?

This is what we asked 5,138 of professionals on Blind:

Who do you trust more with your financial data?

  • Big Tech
  • Traditional Banks

Key findings:

  • Traditional banks are far more trusted than big tech. 
    • Overall, 62% of professionals think that traditional banks are more trustworthy than big tech. 
  • Even those who work in tech trust traditional banks more than big tech
    • 57% of tech employees trust traditional banks over tech companies, and this number is even higher for those in finance, with 67% who have more trust in traditional banks. 

 

“The future of the financial system is going to be a mix of banks and non-banks…and the winners are going to be the ones that are rapidly moving to transform themselves.” according to Barefoot.  So the integration of banks and tech companies seems inevitable. Still, we wanted to understand further which company is most likely going to dominate the industry with the trust of the consumers on how financial data is going to be used. 

We surveyed 4,032 of professionals on Blind:

Which tech giant would you be most willing to share your financial data with? 

Key findings:

  • Apple is the most trusted tech company among professionals to share their financial data with compared to the following big tech companies:
  1. Apple (44.45%)
  2. Google (34.03%)
  3. Amazon (17.35%)
  4. Facebook (2.17%)
  5. Uber (2.00%)

 

But do employees at big tech companies trust their own companies?

We were able to gather insight on how much trust professionals working at Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber have in their own companies with their personal financial data. 

  • Apple employees had the most trust in their company with 91% of professionals choosing Apple as the tech giant they are most willing to share financial data with.
  • Rounding out the three companies with the highest percentage of employees with trust in their own company were Google and Amazon with 77.6% and 46.7% respectively.
  • Uber and Facebook employees had the lowest levels of trust in their company’s handling of their personal financial data, with 16.67% and 21.78% respectively.