They trust the bot more than the broadcaster

What the regulator actually measured#

The ai investing numbers come from the Financial Conduct Authority's research, published 27 August: a quantitative survey of 666 UK adults aged 18 to 40 who own or are considering investments, run on 24 July 2026 via the Attest platform. Four in five less experienced investors have used AI for help with investing, around two thirds occasionally or regularly, and two thirds expect to lean on it more over the next year. The ai investing trail is not forming. It is formed, and the den is already down it.

Sit with the ranking a moment, because it is the reordering of a whole food chain. The broadcast channels that financial brands spend fortunes courting, and the influencers whole budgets chase, now trail a text box. For anyone doing fintech marketing, the question is no longer whether the answer engine matters, it is whether your brand is inside the answers young investors are already reading.

The protection gap nobody declared#

Here is the wide-open gate in the ai investing hedgerow. Almost half, 44 percent, mistakenly believe AI-generated financial information is regulated. More than one in three, 38 percent, think it is fine to make an investment decision based solely on AI outputs. And around a third, 32 percent, wrongly think they would get compensation from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme or the Financial Ombudsman if AI advice went wrong, per the FCA's own figures. No Financial Services Compensation Scheme cover exists for a chatbot's tip, however confident the prose that carried it.

The regulator's position is precise and worth quoting precisely: general purpose AI chatbots are not regulated, although tools specifically set up to provide financial advice would be likely to fall within the FCA's remit. Lucy Castledine, the FCA's director of consumer investments, framed the sensible middle: AI can help you research companies, understand jargon or explore options, but you need to understand how you're protected and continue to use your own judgement. Her pointer to the regulator's InvestSmart site is the practical next step for any young investor reading this.

Naivety is the practitioner's word for it, and the coverage across IFA Magazine, FStech, Crowdfund Insider and Money Marketing landed on the same fault line: trust has migrated faster than understanding. That gap is exactly the soil investment scams grow in, because a scam is borrowed authority plus urgency, and an unregulated channel trusted like a regulated one is borrowed authority at national scale.

How good is the ai investing advice they trust?#

The honest answer from the research literature on ai investing tools: partial. A peer-circulated evaluation, Can AI Help with Your Personal Finances?, tested ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Llama on mortgages, taxes, loans and investments, and found the models achieve an average accuracy rate of approximately 70 percent, with the paper noting they struggle with complex financial queries and vary significantly across topics. Seven right answers in ten is genuinely useful. It is also three wrong ones, delivered in the same confident register.

That register is the trap. A broadcaster hedges, a newspaper prints corrections, an influencer gets community-noted. A chatbot answers cleanly, instantly, and identically whether it is right or wrong, and 38 percent of these young investors say they would act on that alone. The ai investment advice they receive is not audited by anyone before it reaches the decision.

The regulator, meanwhile, is not standing still on the industry side. The FCA's artificial intelligence programme reports 75 percent of financial firms have already adopted some form of AI, and is running AI Live Testing so firms can trial systems in real conditions with regulatory oversight. Read the two facts together and the shape of the next two years appears: regulated firms building supervised AI, while consumers lean on unsupervised AI, and the marketing battle is fought across that seam.

What fintech brands should do with these numbers#

For a fintech or wealth brand prowling this territory, the research is not a warning, it is a map of the ai investing undergrowth. The audience has moved to the answer layer, the answer layer is only 70 percent right, and the trust gap is unpriced. The brands that win the next cohort of young investors will be the ones the AI cites, the ones whose pages fill the 30 percent gap with checkable specifics, and the ones whose compliance line is quotable in one sentence.

Practically, the ai investing shift means three workstreams. Make your educational content the source the machines retrieve: dense, specific, sourced, the discipline our SEO and GEO practice builds for regulated clients. Write compliance into the copy rather than under it, because the cohort trusting the bot needs the protection story told where they actually read. And keep paid social honest about its shrinking share of trust: 29 percent for influencers is a datapoint every media plan should now carry.

The fox does not envy the loudest bird in the field, it watches where the seed actually falls. The seed is falling into answer engines, the regulator has counted it landing, and the patient, provable brand is the one that gets to harvest. Our earlier work on the AI financial advice trust gap mapped this terrain in the spring; the FCA has now surveyed it in the summer, and the numbers agree.

Frequently asked questions#