Nest Commerce, the technology-led performance and creative agency, has released new research showing that UK finance brands are falling behind other sectors in paid social advertising because they cannot generate ad creative at the volume that platform algorithms now reward.
The study, carried out alongside B2B research firm NewtonX, the specialist market research provider, questioned 50 senior UK finance marketers spanning a range of institutions and FinTechs, supported by a series of in-depth interviews.
It found that two-thirds of the finance brands surveyed had 50 or fewer unique ads running at any given time, compared with an average of 443 among the ecommerce brands in Nest’s own client base, a gap of roughly nine times.
Spend patterns told a similar story, with the typical finance brand putting around £5,500 a month behind each ad, versus £371 across Nest’s wider portfolio, about 15 times higher.
Despite this, 62% of the finance marketers polled said they intend to raise their paid social budgets this year, yet only one in ten felt properly prepared for the direction the major ad platforms are heading.
The report attributes this to the way leading platforms have redesigned their systems around AI models that pick from millions of ads at the exact moment of serving, meaning performance improves the more creative variety an advertiser can supply. Citing its own performance data, Nest noted that brands which scaled their creative output two to three times over last year saw customer acquisition costs drop by 14% and revenue rise by 38%, despite spending only 13% more.
The research pointed to a sector that recognises the issue but is struggling to respond quickly enough. It found that 92% of finance marketers cannot comfortably scale creative production, while just 8% are able to launch new creative concepts on a weekly basis or faster, the cadence the report says algorithms increasingly favour, with half of respondents refreshing their creative only quarterly or less often.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) said they tend to run a small number of core ideas with minor variations rather than genuinely distinct concepts.
Regulatory sign-off adds a further layer of difficulty. According to the findings, 88% of respondents view their sector as more restricted than others, and 54% said it takes three weeks or more to get a new concept live once compliance approval is included, a timeline at odds with a channel that rewards weekly refreshes. Even so, when asked what most limits creative reaching the market, marketers pointed to production capacity first, cited by 48%, ahead of compliance sign-off at 34%.
The findings are published in a report titled The creative gap holding finance back. Nest Commerce will host an event examining the report’s conclusions on 2nd September at Meta UK’s offices.
Discussing the compliance challenge, the CMO of a leading wealth management platform said, “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.”
Nest Commerce CEO Will Ashton said: “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 5 to 10 ads, we’re talking 5 to 50 to 500. That’s a seismic change, and manual processes can’t keep up.
“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.”
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