Of the 15 industries included in the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer study, the financial services industry sectors, which includes financial services and banks, ranked 13 and 14 respectively — ahead of only the media.
Where the financial services industry came ahead on trust, though, is in innovation. For example, while the food and beverage industry is more trusted as a whole than financial services, electronic and mobile payments are more trusted, by far, than genetically modified foods.
"In 2014, innovations in financial services included the robo-advisor, mainstream interest around cyber currency, upswing of digital banking convergence and the broader entrance of peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding," the global communications marketing firm says in a statement.
Looking more specifically at particular innovations, electronic and mobile payments was the most trusted innovation at a global level (69%), in comparison to innovations related to the health, technology and energy sectors.
Interestingly, the trust in innovations related to the financial services industry contradicts the low levels of overall trust in the financial services.
According to the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer, it is the only example where an industry is more trusted to implement a specific innovation than it is as an industry as a whole.
For example, the technology industry carries far greater trust than the financial services industry (78% to 54% respectively). However when looking at the implementation of specific innovations, the financial services industry is slightly more trusted to implement electronic payments (62%) than the technology industry is trusted to develop and implement cloud computing (55%), according to the study.
Moreover, the food and beverage industry has a 67% overall trust level – but when it comes to the people's confidence in the industry to implement genetically modified foods, trust plummets to 35%.
