The state of financial services media 2026

1. The audience

How financial audiences consume media now

Financial services has never had one audience. A mortgage broker, a wealth manager, a retail investor and a pension saver read different titles, at different moments, for different reasons. What they share is a high bar for trust, because the decisions they make with the information are expensive to get wrong.

Consumers and investors: using AI, trusting brands

AI has crossed into the mainstream for personal finance. More than half of UK adults (55%) now use platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for financial questions at least sometimes, rising to 81% of Gen Z and 80% of millennials, while 72% of baby boomers have never used AI for a financial question^[1]. Among AI users who have asked for investment guidance, the average amount invested on the back of an AI answer was £2,350^[1].

But usage is not the same as trust. The same research found consumers trust bank websites (92%) far more than ChatGPT (53%) for financial information^[1]. For news, the gap is starker: only 4% of UK adults use AI chatbots for news each week, the lowest of any of the 48 markets the Reuters Institute surveyed, and just 6% of Britons say they trust AI answers^[5][6].

The pattern matters. People are asking AI the question, but they still want the answer to come from a source they recognise and trust.

Advisers and intermediaries: a professional, trade-led readership

The UK has around 31,000 financial advisers, and regulated advice reaches only around 9% of UK adults^[7]. The market is dominated by small businesses: 87% of advice firms have five advisers or fewer^[8]. That means most of the people recommending pensions, investments and mortgages are running their own practices, reading on the go and relying on a small number of trusted titles to keep up with regulation, products and markets.

Research among advisers in North America points the same way. When speed matters, advisers turn first to financial news websites and apps more than a third of the time, and only 26% use social media as a source of financial news. Younger advisers use a much wider mix of formats, including podcasts (43%) and newsletters (40%)^[9].

In our experience as publishers of mortgage and investment titles, this is where professional reputations are built: in the trade press that brokers and advisers read every week, and the specialist journalists who decide which lenders, providers and experts are worth their readers’ time.

3. What AI reads

AI answers are built on earned media

So where do AI assistants get their answers? Muck Rack’s latest analysis of more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found that earned media accounts for 84% of citations, while paid and advertorial content accounts for just 0.3%^[2]. Journalism alone makes up 27% of cited sources, spread across more than 20,000 outlets, and those proportions have held steady across three editions of the study since July 2025^[2].

The type of question matters too. Queries about industry trends drive journalism citations at more than double the rate of “how-to” questions^[2]. In financial services, that is exactly the kind of question prospects ask: which lenders are growing, where the market is heading, who the credible experts are.

Research into wealth management queries shows the same dynamic. For broad prompts such as “best wealth management firm”, AI systems leaned heavily on comparison sites and major financial media, with The Wall Street Journal cited in 24% of responses, CNBC in 20.7% and Forbes in 19.3%^[10]. That study looked at the US market, but the lesson travels: the publications that shaped reputations for decades are the same ones AI treats as authoritative.

Why we wrote this

Built on two decades of financial publishing

City Road Communications was founded by Marco Callegari and Ramesh Sharma, who have worked together in financial services publishing since 2005. At Charterhouse Communications, an AIM-listed financial publisher, they worked on titles including What Investment, Mortgage Introducer, What Mortgage, Personal Finance and Company REFS, before founding The Publishing Group, now MVI, in 2008. MVI publishes UKTN and PropertyWire today.

That means we understand financial media from the inside: how editors decide what to cover, how lenders, advisers and investors read, and what makes a story worth their attention. It is why we believe earned coverage in the right titles is now one of the most valuable assets a financial services brand can build. Meet our people or read more about our financial services PR.