There is a question that financial services firms almost universally fail to ask, and its absence costs them enormously in customer loyalty, product adoption, and long-term trust. That question, deceptively simple and profoundly consequential, is this: what does the customer actually feel? Chris Skinner, the influential commentator behind The Finanser, has placed this interrogation at the centre of a wider critique of how the financial industry — and insurance in particular — has long mistaken product utility for emotional resonance.
Insurance is the starkest illustration of this failure. Skinner articulates the paradox with precision: a customer purchases a policy they sincerely hope they will never need to invoke. They pay premiums over months and years — sometimes decades — before the value of that transaction becomes tangible in any meaningful way. And in the case of life assurance, the ultimate beneficiary of the payout is not the person who signed the contract, made the payments, and built their financial plan around it. The policyholder, by definition, will not be alive to experience the product's fulfilment. This is not a quirk of insurance. It is its central proposition. And yet the industry has poured enormous resources into marketing these products as though standard commercial persuasion tactics — benefit-led advertising, competitive pricing, digital convenience — can bridge an emotional chasm that is structurally built into the product itself.
The disconnect is not merely a branding problem. It is a design problem, a distribution problem, and ultimately a cultural problem within financial institutions. When an organisation's internal metrics are built around policies sold, premiums collected, and claims ratios managed, the felt experience of the customer becomes a secondary variable — something addressed in customer satisfaction surveys rather than embedded into strategic decision-making. The industry has, in effect, optimised for everything except the one thing that determines whether a customer feels genuinely served.
This emotional blind spot is not unique to insurance, though the sector offers the clearest example because the gap between transaction and value is so protracted and so final. Consider how retail banking customers feel about overdraft fees levied at moments of acute financial stress. Consider how small business owners feel navigating opaque lending criteria when their livelihoods depend on rapid access to capital. Consider how wealth management clients feel when portfolio statements arrive dense with jargon that obscures rather than illuminates their financial position. In each of these cases, the institution may be functioning entirely within its legal and operational frameworks, yet the customer's felt experience is one of alienation, confusion, or even hostility.
The financial services industry has undergone a sweeping technological transformation over the past decade. Revolut, Wise, and an entire generation of neobanks and JPMorgan-scale incumbents have invested billions in mobile interfaces, artificial intelligence-driven personalisation, and real-time data capabilities. Yet the question Skinner raises suggests that technology alone cannot resolve an emotional deficit. A frictionless app experience does not automatically translate into a customer who feels understood, valued, or protected. The danger for digitally advanced firms is that they mistake ease-of-use for emotional connection — that they confuse the absence of friction with the presence of trust.
Regulators have begun to sense this gap, even if their frameworks remain imperfectly calibrated to address it. The Financial Conduct Authority's Consumer Duty rules, which came into force in the United Kingdom, represent perhaps the most deliberate regulatory attempt to shift the conversation from process compliance to customer outcomes. The FCA explicitly requires firms to consider whether products and services genuinely meet customer needs and deliver appropriate value — a standard that implicitly demands institutions ask not just what customers receive, but how they feel about receiving it. The European Banking Authority (EBA) has pursued similar themes through conduct supervision frameworks that emphasise fair treatment and outcome-based assessment.
Yet regulation can only go so far. The deeper shift Skinner's question demands is cultural. It requires financial firms to recruit for empathy alongside analytical rigour, to test products against emotional as well as functional criteria, and to treat qualitative customer insight as strategically equivalent to quantitative performance data. It means redesigning the moment of a life insurance sale not as a transaction to be completed efficiently, but as a conversation about mortality, responsibility, and love — the actual human motivations that underpin the purchase.
What This Means for the Industry
The firms that will define financial services in the next decade are those that recognise emotional intelligence as a core competency rather than a marketing afterthought. Insurance companies, in particular, face a generational reckoning: they must find ways to make felt value legible long before a claim is ever made — through communication, through community, through the texture of every customer interaction. The question is no longer simply whether a product works. The question, as Skinner poses it, is whether the person holding that product ever truly feels that it does. For an industry whose fundamental promise is security, peace of mind, and protection, failing to answer that question is not merely a commercial risk. It is a fundamental betrayal of purpose.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.