This morning, a Finextra article grabbed my attention, and not in the nice “ah, that is an interesting development” kind of way. More in the “here we go again, where did I put my coffee” kind of way.
The article referenced new research showing that almost nine in ten social media posts by financial influencers are considered low quality. The underlying study, conducted by Queen Mary University of London and supported by the Aberdeen Group Charitable Trust, examined nearly 2,500 finfluencers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and surveyed 4,200 adults in the UK. According to the reporting, almost 90% of posts contained more negative than positive quality features, including weak disclosure of expertise, limited credibility, poor discussion of downsides and alternatives, and lack of proper source links. Almost 40% of surveyed UK adults said they use social media for financial guidance, compared with only 9% who use professional advice.
That last number should make anyone working in financial services sit up a little straighter. Or pour something stronger into the coffee.
For me, this is no longer a niche issue about a few excitable people on TikTok shouting into a ring light about passive income and “the one asset the banks don’t want you to know about”. This is becoming part of how people learn about money. And that should worry us.
Not because all financial influencers are bad.
They are not.
Some create genuinely useful content. Some explain budgeting, saving, investing and debt in ways that banks and schools have often failed to do. Some are more accessible, more human and frankly more understandable than the average financial institution’s customer communication, which still too often reads like it was written by a committee of lawyers trapped in a basement.
But many are not doing that.
Many are selling confidence without competence, certainty without accountability, and sometimes, sadly, financial hope to people who are already vulnerable.
The democratisation of financial advice, and the mess that came with it
The generous interpretation is that social media has democratised financial knowledge.
For years, financial services did a poor job of explaining itself. Banks made money complicated, then acted surprised when customers did not understand the rules. Investment firms often wrapped fairly basic ideas in language designed to sound clever. Regulators published important warnings in formats nobody outside the industry would voluntarily read. Schools taught too little practical money management. Parents did their best, but many were themselves navigating financial systems that had become more complex, more digital and more fragmented.
So people went elsewhere. They went to YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and increasingly to people who looked like them, spoke like them, and made finance feel less intimidating.
That part is not the problem. In fact, I think it is part of the opportunity.
The problem is that the same platforms that can explain compound interest can also turn a leveraged crypto bet into a lifestyle aesthetic. The same algorithm that helps someone understand budgeting can push them into foreign exchange trading, meme coins, copy trading, contracts for difference, side-hustle schemes and other financial adventures that often end with the customer discovering that the only thing being compounded was their regret.
The issue is not simply that bad advice exists. Bad advice has always existed. Before TikTok, there was the bloke at the pub who knew a guy who knew a guy who had a guaranteed investment opportunity involving property, gold, or occasionally dishwashers.
The difference now is scale, speed and intimacy.
The pub bore had reach of seven. The algorithm has reach of seven million.
The easy-money machine
The reason this content works is not difficult to understand.
People are tired and confused.
They are worried about housing costs, inflation, job uncertainty, pensions, children, ageing parents and a future that feels increasingly difficult to plan for. They are told they need to invest, save, protect themselves, optimise, diversify, and prepare for retirement while also somehow enjoying the present and not spending €8 on coffee.
Into that anxiety walks the finfluencer with a clean microphone, a rented car, some suspiciously perfect lighting and a very simple message.
You are not poor because the system is complicated.
You are poor because nobody showed you this one trick.
And there it is. The emotional hook.
Easy money.
Fast money.
Freedom.
Escape.
The ability to beat the system without really understanding the system.
This is where the crypto casino makes everything worse.
I have said this many times on Fintech Daydreaming, and I am not going to pretend otherwise now. Large parts of the crypto world still feel less like the future of finance and more like an online casino wearing a fintech hoodie.
That does not mean every crypto project is nonsense. It does not mean all stablecoin use is criminal. It does not mean distributed ledger technology has no role in the future of finance. I have no interest in making a lazy argument just because it gets applause from people who already agree with me.
But it does mean we have to be honest. The speculative energy around crypto has trained millions of people to think about finance as a game. The interface looks like trading. The language sounds like investing. The community feels like belonging. But underneath it, too much of it is still gambling, momentum, hype and the hope that someone else will arrive later and pay more.
That is not financial literacy.
That is financial entertainment.
And in entertainment, the platform wins when you keep watching.
Not all influencers are villains, but incentives matter
It would be unfair to say all finfluencers are uneducated, dishonest or dangerous. Some are excellent. Some are better communicators than banks (and me). Some are doing the job that schools, financial institutions and public authorities should have taken more seriously years ago.
But incentives matter.
If your income depends on attention, then your content has to compete for attention.
If your content has to compete for attention, nuance becomes a problem.
If nuance becomes a problem, risk disclosure becomes boring.
And if risk disclosure becomes boring, the algorithm quietly escorts it out of the room.
This is not because every creator is evil. It is because the business model rewards certainty, novelty and urgency.
“Here are three boring but sensible steps to improve your financial resilience over the next ten years” is probably good advice.
It is not going viral.
“Buy this before the banks panic” might.
And that is the issue.
The Queen Mary research reportedly found that the quality features of posts were often poor, including weak disclosure of expertise, limited discussion of downsides and alternatives, and lack of source links. It also found that crypto and get-rich-quick material featured strongly among the misleading guidance people said they had seen.
That sounds about right. Because the best financial advice is often slow, contextual and slightly dull. The worst financial advice is fast, confident and very clickable.
The regulator is playing whack-a-mole with a jet engine
The UK Financial Conduct Authority has been increasingly vocal on this. Reporting around the latest study notes that the FCA has launched criminal proceedings against two finfluencers, issued dozens of warnings and made 120 account takedown requests to platforms hosting illegal finfluencer content. It was also part of a coordinated international action involving 17 regulators.
That sounds impressive, and to be fair, it is not nothing. But it also shows the scale of the problem.
Regulators are built for rules, evidence, process and enforcement. Social media is built for speed, replication, remixing and reach. By the time one misleading account is identified, reviewed, escalated and taken down, the same content can have been clipped, reposted, stitched, screenshotted, translated, rebranded and pushed into another platform with a slightly different username and a fresh set of emojis.
This is not a fair fight.
The platforms are not passive noticeboards. They are recommendation machines. They decide what spreads, what gets amplified, and whether a teenager sees a budgeting explainer, a gambling advert, a crypto pump, or a fake investment opportunity fronted by a celebrity deepfake before breakfast.
So no, responsibility cannot sit with regulators alone. It also sits with platforms, banks, schools, and all of us in the financial industry who have perhaps been too comfortable assuming customers should somehow understand systems we have spent decades making harder to understand.
Financial literacy is now infrastructure
This is where I think the debate needs to move.
Financial literacy is still often treated as a nice social responsibility topic. Something for school programmes, community initiatives, youth workshops and glossy annual reports with pictures of smiling students. All of that has value.
But I feel it is no longer enough.
Financial literacy is becoming part of the resilience of the financial system itself. If people do not understand money, they become vulnerable to scams. If they do not understand risk, they become vulnerable to speculation disguised as empowerment. If they do not understand banking mechanics, they become vulnerable to nonsense like the “check fraud glitch” that went viral on TikTok in 2024, where people were encouraged to deposit fraudulent cheques, withdraw cash, celebrate online, and then discover that “free money” was in fact fraud with paperwork attached.
That was one of the moments that really stuck with me. Not because fraud is new. Fraud is as old as money, and probably slightly older than bank customer service queues.
What worried me was how many people appeared not to understand that they were committing a crime. They thought they had found a hack, a glitch, a loophole, a way to beat the bank. That tells us something deeply uncomfortable about the gap between digital behaviour and financial understanding.
In a world of instant payments, embedded finance, buy-now-pay-later, trading apps, crypto wallets, AI-generated scams, synthetic identities and social media advice, financial literacy can no longer mean “understand compound interest and don’t spend more than you earn”.
It must also mean understanding what money actually is, what a bank account is, what credit is, what fraud is, what regulated advice is, what risk looks like, what conflicts of interest look like, what happens when a platform makes financial content feel like entertainment, and why “not financial advice” in a video description does not magically turn a promotion into education.
The crypto casino and the illusion of sophistication
Let’s come back to crypto for a moment, as I always will.
Because any article about finfluencers that does not mention crypto is like writing about kitchen floods and ignoring the dishwasher currently emptying itself onto the floor. I managed to get a reference to my new book also in this post.
Crypto has become one of the most powerful engines of financial misinformation because it combines several dangerous ingredients: a technology most people do not fully understand, a culture that often distrusts institutions, a market that can create spectacular short-term gains, a language of empowerment, a global distribution network, and a strong incentive for early holders to recruit later buyers.
That is quite the cocktail.
Again, I am not saying there is no future in digital assets, tokenisation, stablecoins or programmable money. There may be. Some of the underlying ideas are interesting. Some may become important. Some may even become boring enough to be useful, which is usually when financial technology has finally grown up.
But we need to stop pretending all of this is harmless innovation. When financial products are promoted like memes, consumed like entertainment, and defended like religion, we should probably pause before calling it progress.
Especially when the people taking the risk are often not the people making the money from the attention.
The AI problem is arriving next
As if the current situation was not messy enough, we should assume artificial intelligence will make it worse before it makes it better.
AI will allow scammers and low-quality promoters to produce more content, faster, in more languages, with more convincing scripts, fake testimonials, synthetic voices and deepfake personalities. It will make it easier to personalise scams, impersonate trusted people, and create fake evidence, fake returns, fake screenshots and fake urgency.
The next viral financial scam will not necessarily look like a shaky TikTok filmed in someone’s bedroom. It may look like a professional interview, with a familiar face, a convincing voice, a dashboard showing fake returns, a synthetic community of fake people saying it worked for them, and a payment link that works perfectly.
This is where financial literacy and digital literacy merge. Customers need to understand not only money, but also the information environment in which financial choices are now made.
The old advice was “don’t believe everything you read”.
The new advice is “don’t believe everything you see, hear, screenshot, forward, like, stitch, repost, or receive from someone who appears to be your cousin but suddenly wants to discuss algorithmic yield farming”.
Admittedly, that is less catchy.
What should the industry do?
The answer cannot simply be “people should be smarter”.
That is lazy.
People are busy, stressed, overwhelmed and exposed to a firehose of information designed to manipulate attention. We need better individual education, yes, but we also need better systems.
Platforms should be required to apply stronger standards to financial content. If they can target adverts with terrifying precision, they can also identify patterns of unauthorised promotion, scam language and repeated harmful behaviour. The argument that this is technically impossible becomes less convincing every year.
Regulators need faster tools and stronger coordination across borders. Financial misinformation does not respect national boundaries. A scam does not pause politely at the edge of the jurisdiction while lawyers discuss mutual assistance.
Banks need to make financial education part of customer experience, not a side project. Every high-risk journey should include understandable, contextual education at the point of decision. Not after the customer has lost the money. Not hidden in a blog. Not in a PDF. In the flow.
Schools need to teach practical finance as a survival skill. Not as an optional extra. Not as a one-off workshop. As part of preparing people to live in a digital economy where money has become invisible, programmable, embedded and dangerously easy to move.
And the financial industry needs to communicate better. Because when serious institutions are boring, vague or patronising, unserious people fill the gap.
The cost of ignorance in a digital world
The old financial literacy gap was expensive.
The new one is dangerous.
Because the modern consumer is being asked to make more financial decisions, across more providers, in more channels, with more risk, more noise and less time to think. That is the perfect feeding ground for influencers who sell simplicity, confidence and the dream of easy money.
Some will help.
Some will harm.
Some will not know the difference.
And that is precisely why this matters.
Financial literacy is not a soft topic. It is not just about budgeting apps and school visits. It is part of consumer protection, fraud prevention, digital resilience, and the trust infrastructure of modern finance.
So yes, I will keep talking about this on Fintech Daydreaming. And yes, I will keep being sceptical of the crypto casino. And yes, I will keep arguing that the financial industry needs to communicate more clearly, platforms need to take more responsibility, and consumers need better tools to separate education from entertainment.
Because the next viral financial trend will come. It always does.
And by the time everyone realises the “glitch” was not a glitch, the money is usually gone.
Did you know that I have written a book?
The book Rip Out the Core will be published at the end of July 2026, but it is already available for preorder on Amazon.
When Financial Advice Becomes Content, the Customer Becomes the Product
