Finance marketers are investing more in paid social than ever. However, most feel they have not yet cracked it. The platforms that dominate digital ad spend are rebuilding their businesses around AI and the promise of true personalisation, and their algorithms now reward the brands that supply the most creative volume and variety.

To understand how finance marketers are adapting, we partnered with NewtonX to survey 50 senior UK finance marketers across established institutions like HSBC and Barclays and fintechs like Revolut and Trading 212, run in-depth interviews, and set the findings alongside Nest’s own performance data. The picture is of a sector aware that it’s falling behind. Paid social spend is rising, 62% plan to invest more this year, yet nine in ten do not feel ahead of where they need to be.

The pinch point is creative. 92% cannot scale it comfortably, most refresh on a timescale the platforms stopped rewarding, and few run the creative variety the algorithms now need. Nest’s own data shows the size of the gap: in our cohort of leading ecommerce brands, the average brand now runs 443 distinct ads, while two-thirds of the finance brands we surveyed run 50 or fewer.

Compliance makes it harder still. 88% say their sector is more restricted than others, and more than half wait three weeks or more to get a concept live. AI could offer a solution to many of the challenges, but although widely used, it is rarely embedded. Only 12% use it systematically, and the barrier is expertise more than the technology.

This is an operating-model challenge as much as a marketing one, and closing it means rebuilding how creative gets produced, analysed and learned from. This report maps where the gaps are across the sector, and threads through it a set of strategic questions every finance team should be asking itself, and its leadership, to close them.

443 vs 50: closing finance’s creative gap

The average Nest ecommerce client runs 443 distinct ads. Two-thirds of the finance brands we surveyed run 50 or fewer. Our report mapped the gap. This morning closes it.

You’ll hear what Meta’s AI wants from finance advertisers straight from the people who built it.

Then we’ll show you the system Nest built to feed it: creative variety at scale, production at pace, and compliance encoded before a single ad exists.

Date

2nd September, 9am

Venue

Meta Brock Street

Hosted by

Nest Commerce x Meta

Save your spot →

Of all the sectors AI is reshaping, few are as impacted as advertising. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg describes what AI is doing to advertising as nothing short of “a redefinition of the category.”

Paid social sits at the coal face of this new industrial revolution. Meta, TikTok and Google, which dominate digital ad spend, have spent the last few years pouring money into the infrastructure behind their ad businesses: the chips, data centres and models. The reason? The quest for true personalisation. Matching the right user to the right ad at the right time to trigger a response.

Meta’s Andromeda engine, for example, sifts through tens of millions of ads at the moment a user’s feed loads, drawing on years of behavioural signals to pick the single ad most likely to land with that person at that time.

So what does this mean for finance marketers? The sharper that matching gets, the more the platforms ask of you. The way to win is to feed the algorithm more to choose from. Volume and variety are now the main lever on performance, ahead of media budget. Nest’s own testing bears this out: last year, brands that scaled creative volume 2-3x saw CPA fall 14% and revenue climb 38%, on 13% more spend.

The twin challenge for finance marketers: creative volume and FCA compliance

For finance, there is a twin challenge. Producing creative at this pace and scale is hard enough. Producing it in a sector where regulation constrains what can be said, who can be reached, and what data can be used is harder still.

The research bears this out. Three in four finance marketers say they are only reasonably set up for where the platforms are heading, with gaps to close.

For most, paid social is now one of several channels relied on equally

New rules: Meta’s financial services category removes detailed targeting

The platforms and the regulator have tightened the rules for finance in particular. Financial services ads sit in Meta’s restricted Financial Products and Services category, which strips back much of the targeting toolkit other verticals still use: detailed and interest targeting and lookalike audiences are removed, and tighter age and location controls are imposed.

Privacy changes have narrowed the signal available too. Apple’s tracking prompt and browser restrictions have cut the offsite data platforms receive. For financial domains, certain conversion events are restricted from optimisation. Finance feels this more acutely because customer journeys are long. A mortgage or insurance decision can take weeks or months, leaving standard attribution windows too short to capture the full path.

The practical consequence: when you can no longer hand the algorithm a tightly drawn audience, the ad has to find the right person itself. Creative becomes the main lever. But if creative is the battleground, finance marketers are fighting with constraints rivals don’t face.

The toolkit finance loses on Meta — creative is the lever that remains

Caught between rules and reach: when every ad is a financial promotion

Finance marketers are being pulled in two directions. On one side, the platforms demand ever more creative. On the other, compliance pulls back, tightening what they can say and what data they can use to optimise.

Every new piece of creative is another thing to get right and another thing to get approved, so a pressure felt right across the market bites perhaps hardest in finance. A CMO at a leading wealth management platform described it:

For crypto brands, social platforms are the home ground, where audiences are socially native. But the channels where reach is greatest are also where regulatory constraints bite hardest. Creators, one of social’s most powerful tools, are heavily restricted in finance.

Performance is holding, not soaring: just 10% saw significant improvement

The strain is showing in the results. Half of finance marketers say paid social improved on last year, but only 10% significantly. Meanwhile, 38% saw no change and 12% went backwards. Yet 62% plan to invest more in the coming year.

62% plan to invest more over the coming year

Confidence is lower than spending suggests. Nine in ten say they’re not yet ahead of where they need to be. When asked to rank their biggest challenges, three emerge: generating leads that convert is the most common number-one challenge, ranked first by 30%. Proving return to stakeholders is the most widespread, in the top three for 54%, with measurement over long decision windows close behind at 40%. Creative volume and compliance follow and as this report shows, those two increasingly shape the first three.

Proving return to stakeholders is the most common top-three challenge; converting leads is most often ranked first

An acquisitions lead at a global fintech company captured a core problem:

In performance marketing, one phrase now comes up as frequently as platform attribution claims: ‘creative is the new targeting’. For finance brands, with less access to audience tools much of the rest of the market still uses, it is less a slogan than a description of daily life. The ad itself is the lever. Yet the research reveals only 8% of finance marketers say they can scale their creative up easily when they need to. Knowing the lever and being able to pull it are very different things.

For finance marketers, this is really a lead-quality problem. Generating leads that convert was the single most common number-one challenge in our survey, and it connects directly to creative. With targeting pared back, the algorithm takes its cue from the ad rather than a defined audience, so the creative is doing more of the work of finding the right person.

Asked what happens when they need to make more creative, 72% say they can stretch a little before hitting a ceiling, and another 20% are already at or beyond capacity. For more than nine in ten finance marketers, the production system cannot comfortably feed the channel.

They are also well behind the pace the platforms now move at. Only 8% put new concepts live weekly or faster, the pace the algorithms now favour. Half do so quarterly or less. Most finance brands are refreshing creative on a timescale the platforms stopped rewarding a while ago.

Just 8% ship new concepts weekly or faster, the pace the algorithms favour

A narrow set of ideas, repeated: 74% run variations, not distinct concepts

It is not only about creative volume. Creative variety is anaemic too. Almost three-quarters, 74%, run a handful of core ideas with variations layered on top, and just 4% run many distinct concepts at once. The algorithm is a powerful engine, and creative is its fuel. It runs best on a full tank of varied ideas, yet most finance advertisers are feeding it a trickle.

An engine only works with what you give it, so a thin, repetitive supply caps performance while rivals in the same auction pull away. Ecommerce brands are accelerating while too much of finance is left idling.

The treadmill runs fast in finance: why market-linked products need weekly creative

Behind the numbers is a pace problem that can hit finance harder than other sectors. Products tied to markets and headlines have to stay current, so the creative has to move at the speed of the news, a weekly and sometimes daily demand, rendering ads with rapidly out of date financial information redundant.

The CMO of a leading wealth management platform described creative fatigue as “probably the biggest killer” of performance in their social media campaigns.

Umbrella companies accumulate volume by default — more brands, more markets, more ads running simultaneously. Yet volume without variety stalls performance. One fintech acquisitions lead described the gap:

The learning loop is slow: 68% of finance teams report slow creative feedback

Volume and variety only pay off if what you learn feeds what you make next. For most finance marketers, that loop is in slow motion in a world of warp speed. Only 24% say insight from performance feeds quickly into the next round of creative. 68% say it feeds through slowly. Three in four are, in effect, learning too slowly to keep up with the creative they are trying to produce.

74% run a handful of core ideas with variations; just 4% run many distinct concepts

Only 24% feed what they learn quickly into the next round

Where it jams: production capacity (48%) beats compliance sign-off (34%)

Asked for the single biggest thing holding creative back from market, finance marketers name production capacity first, at 48%, ahead of compliance sign-off at 34%. The bottleneck turns out to be making the work, whether in-house or through a partner, more than the compliance teams’ safety first approach. For teams that outsource creative, the partner is often the constraint.

Production capacity, at 48%, outranks compliance sign-off as the biggest brake

Cost sits underneath that. One reason marketers hold back on testing is simple: making more is not free.

Two-thirds of the finance brands surveyed run 50 or fewer distinct ads; the average Nest ecommerce client runs 443

In finance, most product and acquisition advertising is a financial promotion, and a financial promotion can’t run until it’s been signed off against the FCA’s rules. That one fact shapes how finance creative gets made. It is why 88% of the marketers we surveyed say their sector is more restricted than others, with 30% calling it ‘far more restricted’.

But compliance is more than a gate at the end. Its bigger effect comes earlier, on what gets made at all.

Where FCA rules restrict paid social creative

Content is where the rules really sting. 76% say they restrict what a brand can say or show in an ad. 40% say they limit the data available to optimise. Half point to slower approval and sign-off. Compliance narrows the message, the imagery and the targeting signal, and it does most of that before a single asset is built.

Content bites hardest: 76% are restricted in what an ad can say or show

The pressure is not felt evenly across finance. Payments and wealth marketers report the tightest constraints, while retail and commercial banks, the largest group in our sample, feel them least. Compliance bites in different ways depending on the product.

Newer sectors like crypto face even more compliance hurdles. On top of the usual rules, crypto brands face limits on the channels and influencers they can use at all, and a single global account can be caught by UK regulation.

For investment platforms, the creative constraints are acute. Mandatory risk warnings consume the entire creative space. A two-page disclaimer doesn’t fit in a 300×250 banner. Add regulations against giving specific advice and restrictions on naming individual stocks, and whole categories of performance creative become impossible before production even starts.

Meanwhile the VP of Growth at a crypto and digital-money platform made the point that “you can’t use influencers unless they’re FCA registered, or it counts as financial advice.”

Compliance reaches back further than the final check, into the ideas themselves. If you cannot promise performance without a two-page warning, cannot give advice, and cannot use what you know about a customer to tailor the message, whole categories of creative are ruled out before anyone opens a design file.

The speed tax: why financial promotion sign-off takes three weeks

Then there is time. Getting a finished concept live, once sign-off is factored in, takes three weeks or more for 54% of finance marketers. One in five wait more than a month. Set that against the weekly refresh the platforms now reward, and the gap speaks for itself.

54% wait three weeks or more once sign-off is factored in; one in five wait over a month

For a large institution, the delay is structural. Every external communication runs a gauntlet of sign-offs.

Volume makes it worse, because in a regulated category, there is the potential for a large share of ads to never run at all. The compliance drag is a direct cause of the creative squeeze.

Finance brands need more creative than ever, yet more of what they make gets stopped before it reaches the auction, whether at internal sign-off or platform review.

It is not always about slowing down: how top finance teams clear sign-off in days

Compliance is usually cast as the enemy of speed, but there is a clear split between the big institutions and the more nimble digital players. The best-run teams clear sign-off in days, because marketing and compliance work in close coordination and they rarely produce anything that trips the rules.

For a trust-driven category, that discipline pays off. The real cost of compliance is rarely the hours it adds. It is the ideas it takes off the table, and the speed it drains from teams that leave it to the end. The lesson is that compliance is a design constraint. Build it into the brief from the start, and it stops competing with speed.

Almost every finance marketer is now using AI in some aspect of paid social. However the data suggest very few have made it a systematic part of how they work, across work streams. Just 12% use it widely, across creative, analysis and optimisation. The other 88% are somewhere earlier, a scatter of use cases and experiments with nothing yet embedded.

Where AI is earning its place: 54% use it for creative, 32% for optimisation

AI is helping most at the two ends of the process. 54% use it to generate or adapt creative, and 50% use it for reporting and insight. It is used far less for the decisions that steer the budget: only 32% for campaign optimisation and 30% for audience and targeting. In other words the sort of systematic work that could really improve outcomes across the business is missing.

AI clusters at the ends of the process: creative and reporting lead, the decisions closest to spend lag

One wealth marketer has put AI to work exactly where the manual effort was heaviest:

Where AI disappoints: brand safety and quality control in regulated creative

AI adoption is lowest for optimisation and targeting, the decisions closest to spend. One marketer we interviewed put it down to the platforms’ own optimisation tools underdelivering.

That scepticism shows up in the barriers. Beyond compliance, 46% cite brand safety and quality control, and 32% say the results are still too inconsistent to lean on.

And the volume AI creates still meets a human wall. One crypto marketer described AI output stacking up in compliance review, with every asset needing sign-off before it can run.

The barrier is expertise, not technology: 46% cite people over tools

46% of finance marketers say the biggest barrier to AI is having the people and expertise to use it well. Only 32% point to the technology itself.

People and expertise outrank the technology itself as the biggest barrier

Not everyone agrees the gap is people. For another large bank, the tools themselves fall short.

The compliance question: 52% cite AI compliance uncertainty as the top barrier

The clearest signal from the survey is caution. Compliance uncertainty around AI-generated content is the single most cited barrier, named by 52% of the base. For most finance marketers, the worry about getting AI content or analysis wrong in a regulated category is a real brake on adoption.

Compliance uncertainty around AI-generated content leads at 52%, ahead of brand safety at 46%

One fintech acquisitions lead noted that compliance need not be a barrier to AI if you structure it correctly:

Taken together, these accounts point back to where the section began. The 12% who use AI systematically are set apart by how they have organised around it, bringing compliance in early and building the expertise to judge what to automate and what to check. The brands still treating AI as a scatter of individual experiments are the ones at risk of falling behind.

Every pressure in this report converges on the same point, as our research shows. The operating model most finance teams run on can’t keep pace with what paid social now demands: more creative volume and variety, refreshed at a pace manual production cannot support. Compliance narrows what can be made and slows approval. AI could carry much of that load, but in most teams it remains scattered experiments.

So, what is the answer? Nest’s solution to this is threefold:

1. The foundation is a senior strategist who bridges brand goals and performance marketing, turning customer research into the angles the creative gets built on.
2. It is fuelled by aggressive creative volume and variety, with formats spanning studio, creator and AI-assisted content.
3. And it is delivered at pace by Hummingbird, whose automated ad analysis and creative insight close the loop, so what performs shapes what gets made next, at a speed that is impossible with traditional creative production.

Creative diversity starts with strategy, not volume: persona-led planning for finance

The creative squeeze section showed that a finance brand can run plenty of ads and still watch them underperform, because every ad is a variation on the same idea. Our multi-brand trading interviewee ran more ads than anyone else we surveyed and was still short of what she needed, “more variety, speaking to different audiences”. That is a strategy gap before it is a production one.

The solution is to build a creative plan around personas: distinct pictures of the customers a brand serves, each one a different reason to buy.

Personas create the variety. A handful running across your product range turns each product into several distinct ads, each speaking to a different motivation. Each persona gets its own full creative treatment — distinct hooks, casting, visual strategy — not just copy variations, because the algorithm reads all of them.

This is “creative is the new targeting” as a working method. Run each persona’s creative broad and the platform segments: people who see themselves in an ad respond, delivery sharpens with every signal. Instead of picking the right audience and handing it to the platform, you’re giving it creative distinct enough to find each audience on its own.

Handing back the reach: personas replace the targeting Meta removed

For finance, this delivers on two fronts. It builds deliberate variety. And it gives you back precision: you can no longer ask the platforms for a tightly drawn audience, so your creative does that work instead. Distinct brand expressions, each calibrated to a different motivation, not targeting data.

Take one product, three expressions. A first-time investor wanting simplicity. A busy professional wanting hands-off. Someone planning for later life. That’s three audiences, three sets of creative, built with zero personal data. It’s compliant by design because it targets motivations, not individuals.

Compliance built in, not bolted on: encoding FCA rules at the brief stage

The compliance section showed that sign-off is the real speed tax, and that legal review of every finished asset is the bottleneck. The answer is to move sign-off upstream, from a check on each completed ad to a set of rules encoded once, at the point the creative is generated. Compliance becomes built-in from the start, not a final gate.

The system is only as good as the inputs behind it, so before a single ad is generated, the rules have to be written down. We have done this in other regulated categories. For the men’s health brand Hims, we built the brand’s compliance guidelines directly into Hummingbird, turning legal constraints into generative ones.

Here is an example of a compliance checklist built for AI to read:

Compliance at scale: 52 optimisation cycles a year, not 12

Creative throughput is the ceiling on growth. A team producing new creative monthly gets twelve chances a year to optimise. A team producing weekly gets fifty-two. Speed of production is the difference.

However, for a sector where compliance uncertainty is the single most cited barrier to AI adoption, generative AI creative can sound like risk at volume. Hummingbird has three checks that ensure compliance at scale:

1. Your compliance team’s requirements go into the system, so every ad is generated against your bar from the start.
2. We screen against what each platform will and will not run, discounting anything restricted before it wastes a cycle.
3. Every ad still comes to your team for sign-off in the platform, so the final call stays with you.

The AI section found the barrier to AI is expertise more than the tools. The whole Hummingbird system runs as a managed service: strategy, production and platform together, specialists making the calls on what the technology surfaces.

And the technology never stands still. As the models improve, we swap the best of them into Hummingbird, so brands keep pace when technology moves ever faster. That’s the systematic approach to AI only 12% of finance marketers have reached.

None of the three parts is the answer on its own. Run as one loop, what performs shapes what gets made next, and the gains compound, because every cycle starts from a higher base than the last. A team that fixes its bottleneck gets faster once. A system that closes the loop gets faster every week it runs. The algorithms will keep asking for more. For the first time, finance marketers can keep saying yes.

443 vs 50: closing finance’s creative gap

The average Nest ecommerce client runs 443 distinct ads. Two-thirds of the finance brands we surveyed run 50 or fewer. Our report mapped the gap. This morning closes it.

You’ll hear what Meta’s AI wants from finance advertisers straight from the people who built it.

Then we’ll show you the system Nest built to feed it: creative variety at scale, production at pace, and compliance encoded before a single ad exists.

Date

2nd September, 9am

Venue

Meta Brock Street

Hosted by

Nest Commerce x Meta

Save your spot →