UK finance brands lag in paid social ad creativity

Nest Commerce has published research suggesting UK finance brands are falling behind in paid social advertising. The study points to a gap between rising digital ad budgets and the industry's ability to produce enough new ads.

The findings are based on a survey of 50 senior UK finance marketers conducted with research firm NewtonX, alongside interviews with marketing executives from financial institutions and fintechs. It found that 62% of respondents are increasing paid social spend, yet only 10% feel well prepared for the direction of major ad platforms.

Creative volume sits at the centre of the issue. Two-thirds of the finance brands surveyed had 50 or fewer unique ads live at the time of the research, compared with an average of 443 ads run by brands in Nest's eCommerce comparison group.

The data also suggests finance marketers are putting far more money behind each ad. The median finance brand spends about £5,500 a month per ad, compared with £371 across Nest's wider portfolio - a gap of roughly 15 times.

Creative bottleneck

According to Nest, large ad platforms have shifted towards AI systems that test and select from huge volumes of ads at the point they are shown to users. That has increased pressure on marketers to supply a broader range of creative and refresh campaigns more frequently.

Most finance teams are not operating at that pace. While platform systems now favour frequent updates, only 8% of respondents said they launch new creative concepts weekly or more often. Half refresh creative quarterly or less often.

Many teams also rely on a narrow set of campaign ideas. Nearly three-quarters of respondents said they run a small number of core concepts with variations, rather than a broader mix of distinct ideas.

Production limits emerged as the main constraint. When asked what most holds creative back from reaching the market, 48% of finance marketers cited production capacity, ahead of 34% who pointed to compliance sign-off.

That suggests the main obstacle lies not only in regulation, but also in how finance marketing teams are staffed and organised. Even where ad budgets are increasing, creative development has not kept pace with the demands of paid social channels.

Compliance pressure

Compliance remains a major factor in the sector. Almost nine in 10 respondents said finance is more restricted than other industries, and 54% said they wait three weeks or more to get a concept live once approval is taken into account.

One senior marketer at a wealth management platform described the effect of that process on campaign speed.

"Everything we do falls into the definition of financial promotion, so everything needs compliance approval. If that becomes 10 or 20 creatives a week instead of five a month, you understand the difficulty. Even a simple approval step becomes a two-, three- or four-day process. When you have a one-week cycle, four days for approval is too much," said the Chief Marketing Officer of a leading wealth management platform.

The comment reflects a broader mismatch between internal review timelines and the weekly testing cycle that ad platforms now reward. Even minor delays can reduce the number of concepts teams can test in market.

AI adoption

The research also found that AI tools are already widely used in finance marketing, but mostly in limited ways. Almost every respondent said AI is used somewhere in paid social activity, yet only 12% said it is used systematically across creative, analysis and optimisation.

Compliance concerns around AI-generated content were the most commonly cited barrier, identified by 52% of respondents. People and expertise followed at 46%, while only 32% pointed to the technology itself as the main problem.

Nest linked creative scale to commercial performance using data from its eCommerce client base. It said brands that increased creative volume by two to three times recorded a 14% fall in acquisition costs and a 38% rise in revenue, while increasing spend by 13%.

"The algorithms can now analyse millions of potential ads at the point of serving, so they're asking advertisers to give them more to choose from. We're not talking about going from five to 10 ads, we're talking five to 50 to 500. That's a seismic change, and manual processes can't keep up," said Will Ashton, Chief Executive Officer of Nest Commerce.

"Finance marketers know exactly what the platforms demand. The problem is an operating model built for a monthly cycle in a weekly world. The teams that will pull ahead are the ones fixing production, using AI systematically and building compliance into the brief instead of bolting it on at the end," he added.