FinTech Trust and Behavioural Economics — Banks Ignored Consumers' Feelings About Money. It Cost Them Trust.
In 2018, Emotional Banking argued that retail banks were misdiagnosing loyalty, behaviour and risk. It was never a CX issue. It was a human one.
Emotional Banking 2.0: Tales from the #FinTech Crypt and the Organisational Trenches examines what followed. AI entered decision systems. Trust weakened. Cultural fragility surfaced. Execution Debt accumulated inside financial institutions. This is not a sequel. It is a record.
Emotional Banking Reframed Customer Centricity
Emotional Banking positioned behavioural economics as operational infrastructure, not marketing language. It proposed a systems view. Consumers do not make financial decisions rationally. Organisations under pressure do not behave rationally either. Culture shapes product design. Fear shapes policy. Trust grows slowly and disappears quickly.
Over the past decade FinTech expanded. AI was inserted into underwriting, fraud detection and decision engines. Regulatory pressure increased. Yet most banks still treat emotion as background noise instead of structural data.
Emotional Banking 2.0 addresses:
- Organisational culture in financial services
- Human-centred design inside fintech
- Execution Debt in banks
- Psychological safety as a risk variable
- Trust design in AI-augmented systems
Behavioural economics is not theory. It is operational reality.
Foundations
Explore the original Emotional Banking essays: writings.duenablomstrom.com/emotionalbanking
The argument was not wrong. It arrived before the market was ready.
The Books
Emotional Banking: Fixing Culture, Leveraging FinTech, and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, — Available Now
ISBN: 978-3-319-75652-3
The book that started it all. Blomstrom tells the story of arriving at the realisation that people's feelings about their money were not investigated — and her quest to explore why banks haven't done so.
Emotional Banking 2.0: Tales from the #FinTech Crypt and the Organisational Trenches
This is not a sequel. It is a record. AI entered decision systems. Trust weakened. Cultural fragility surfaced. Execution Debt accumulated inside financial institutions.
Tales from the FinTech Crypt
The field evidence is already public. Tales from the FinTech Crypt documents: Leadership errors that compound under scale. Cultural blind spots that distort product decisions. Trust failures that could have been prevented. Behavioural misreads inside growth narratives.
Available on podcast and YouTube. These are not promotional conversations. They are structured examinations of how institutions behave when pressure rises.
- S1E8: The Role of FinTech in the AI-driven World of the Future — with Brett King
- S1E4: The State of FinTech in 2024 and Beyond — with Theodora Lau
- S1E1: A Walk Down Memory Lane — The Daddy of Fintech — with Nektarios Liolios
Full playlist: All Episodes on YouTube
Who This Book Is For
Bank executives managing AI-era trust exposure. FinTech founders moving beyond product market fit. Behavioural economists working inside financial systems. Culture leaders responsible for decision quality. Regulators and policy observers tracking institutional risk.
If your work sits at the intersection of money, power and behaviour, this book is relevant.
Receive Field Notes from the FinTech Trenches
Periodic dispatches covering: Trust signals in financial services. Organisational miscalculation patterns. Psychological safety under regulatory strain. AI-driven behavioural risk.
No promotional clutter. No artificial urgency. Clear analysis.
The Shift
Emotional Banking was a warning. Emotional Banking 2.0 documents what became visible once scale, AI and institutional pressure intensified.
Trust in financial services will not return through dashboards or slogans. It will return through behavioural literacy, structural integrity and cultural accountability.
This work is for leaders prepared to examine the human layer before it becomes measurable loss.