AI has a place in financial marketing. It can collate documents, knock out a first draft, suggest a few headlines, or churn out content in the blink of a cursor. For internal presentations and suchlike it can be a godsend.
But financial marketing is not about speed or filler. It’s about persuasion, trust and accuracy. Not to mention the requirements of the FCA and all the other regulators.
Here are eight situations where a copywriter, rather than an AI tool, is the safer, more effective choice.
Shepherds Friendly – Consumer Duty rewrite
1. Anything that counts as a financial promotion
Financial marketing of any kind has to be fair, clear and not misleading. This isn’t a stylistic guideline but a legal standard, and falling foul of it can mean a rejected campaign, a formal warning or even a fine.
You can upload the rules and regulations to your chosen AI, craft ever more detailed prompts and keep refining the answers (so much for time savings). But even if you do all that, an AI tool has no real awareness of what will pass the test. It doesn’t know what’s caused problems for other firms recently, or where a particular regulator’s attention has shifted. (As that familiar line goes, ‘Past performance is no guide…’) A financial services copywriter can catch a risky line before it ever lands on your compliance team’s desk.
In the UK, one of the main concerns for financial organisations in recent years has been Consumer Duty – the need for all communications to be straightforward and clear. While you can ask AI to simplify your documents, it takes an experienced financial copywriter to get it right while maintaining your unique tone of voice, and ensuring nothing is left to chance. The example shown above is just one of many pieces I’ve written to comply with Consumer Duty.
2. Risk warnings and disclosures
Where a risk warning appears, how prominent it is and how it’s phrased can matter almost as much as whether it’s there at all. Most problems with financial promotions don’t come from a missing warning. They come from one that’s buried at the bottom of the page, softened into meaninglessness, or presented in a way that quietly undermines its own purpose.
Someone with real experience writing for regulated financial products knows how to blend a risk warning into the copy so it does its job properly and still reads like it belongs there. AI usually goes one of two ways here: it either tacks the warning on at the end as an afterthought, or waters it down so much that it’s barely noticeable. But you can be sure that the regulator will pick it up, even if your legal department doesn’t.
Gulf International Bank – annual report, CSR review section
3. Any communications that rely on accurate facts or figures
AI tools are known for inventing statistics, using outdated figures or confident representations that simply aren’t true, and not just in words. Six fingers on someone’s hand in an AI image is weird, even funny; six figures when there should be five in financial data is not funny at all – it could be catastrophic.
A copywriter can see at a glance if something is off. They’ll check where a figure has come from and flag anything they can’t verify, rather than papering over the gap. That habit of checking rather than guessing or hoping is crucial in financial marketing.
Nowhere, of course, is getting facts and figures right more important than in an annual report, which is why no company would ever be fully authored by a machine. The example above is from one of the annual reports I wrote for Gulf International Bank, and checking up on figures and flagging anything potentially problematic was all part of the job.
4. Winning the trust of a sceptical audience
People reading financial marketing are often being asked to hand over their savings, a portion of their income, or even their entire financial future. Every sentence can either earn their confidence or cost you some of it.
That confidence rarely comes from a well-turned sentence on its own. It comes through in tone, in precision, and in the sense that whoever wrote this actually understood the product and the person reading about it. AI copy, however fluent, tends to sound like it came from nowhere in particular. In a sector where so many products are similar, credibility is essential.
Eagle Star – transparent mailer
5. Explaining complicated products
That credibility is even more important when a potential customer is starting from a position of little knowledge (and sometimes a great deal of suspicion). Products such as pensions, structured investments and insurance are complicated by their very nature, and simplifying them for a general reader without misrepresenting them (while subtly pushing the benefits of your particular offerings) takes real skill. Strip out too much and you’re risking mistrust or worse. Leave too much in and the reader switches off.
An experienced financial copywriter has done this enough times to know roughly where that line sits for a given product and audience. AI tends to miss it in one of two directions: oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy, or reproducing dense, jargon-heavy language that doesn’t help anyone.
The example above that I created was sent (in a similarly see-through envelope) to financial advisers – but the benefit of transparency and clarity was firmly aimed at the ordinary saver.
Royal London – web copy & brochures
6. Sensitive financial situations
A great deal of financial marketing touches on genuinely difficult moments: debt, redundancy, retirement, illness, bereavement, inheritance. Getting the tone right matters enormously, and it’s easy to get it wrong. Bright, upbeat marketing language, applied without thought, can come across as tone-deaf or even exploitative.
This kind of writing needs a person who can sit with the difficulty of the subject rather than defaulting to standard marketing speak because it happens to be the pattern that gets used most often. That kind of judgement doesn’t come from a prompt.
An obvious example of this is talking about the need for planning retirement. I wrote a whole campaign around this for Janus Henderson – you can read the Big 5-Oh case study here
Another instance is where you have to communicate unexpected changes. Following a merger and reorganisation, Royal London undertook a major rebrand a few years back, and in the process brand and product names were changed and services merged. All this had to be communicated to customers in such a way that it came out as a positive, rather than a potential negative. The example shown above was part of a quirky campaign I helped create to make the changes more appealing.
7. Anywhere you’ll need to justify the wording later
When compliance or legal ask why something was phrased a certain way, you need a proper answer. A copywriter can walk you through their reasoning: why a claim is framed the way it is, why the risk warning sits where it does, why they worded a particular comparison the way they did.
That accountability is one of the more underrated reasons to use a human writer in a regulated sector. It isn’t only about the words, but about being able to show how you got there if anyone asks.
A good copywriter will also be up to speed on reg-tech and wider fintech, and have a good understanding of what underlies them – the key word being understanding, something a machine can only mimic.
Virgin Money – award-winning mailer
8. Standing out in a sector that already sounds the same
Financial services marketing has always leaned on familiar phrases and safe structures. AI tools are trained on that existing language, and are increasingly used to write new content across the whole industry, so there’s a real risk that everyone’s marketing converges ever further.
A financial copywriter who takes the time to properly understand your proposition and your audience can find an angle that’s actually yours. As AI-generated sameness becomes more common, that kind of differentiation becomes more valuable, not less.
There are many ways in which creative, human-led copywriting can help a financial service or product to stand out. The Virgin Money mailpack shown above that I wrote was for a credit card which you could tailor to your needs in all kinds of ways – create your own blueprint for, in other words.
The bottom line
AI has its uses in financial marketing: early drafts, quick ideas, getting past a blank page.
What it can’t do is take responsibility for a misleading claim or apply proper regulatory judgement. It can’t build your brand – or the kind of trust that persuades someone to hand over their finances to your business.
For accuracy, accountability, insight, creativity and empathy, it takes the human touch of a professional financial copywriter.
If you need financial marketing content that’s accurate, compliant and genuinely persuasive, take a look at my financial copywriting page and then talk to me about your next project.
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