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.
Unresolved decisions compounded 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.
Trust failures in financial systems rarely begin with data alone. They begin when organisations lose visibility into how decisions, behaviours and incentives interact.
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
Unresolved institutional decisions compounding under scale
Psychological safety as a risk variable
Trust design in AI-augmented systems
Behavioural economics is not soft context. It is operational reality under pressure.
Explore the original Emotional Banking™ essays
The argument was not wrong.
It arrived before the market was ready.
From banking to all organisations
Emotional Banking™
Fixing Culture, Leveraging FinTech, and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands
Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature), 2018
ISBN 978-3-319-75652-3 · 174 pages
Published by Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature imprint) on 27 March 2018 (Print ISBN 978-3-319-75652-3, eBook ISBN 978-3-319-75653-0, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-75653-0).
The book introduces four methods: Money Moments, Build a Voice, Everyone's a Designer, and Intrapreneur Warrior's Guide.
Chapter 4 features: Brett King, Jim Marous, Chris Skinner, Ron Shevlin.
This is also where Human Debt™ was first conceived — the idea that organisations accumulate invisible costs from misalignment and emotional friction.
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. Unresolved decisions compounded 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.
Episodes
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.
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.
Behavioural economics is not soft context. It is operational reality under pressure.
This work is for leaders prepared to examine the human layer before it becomes measurable loss.