The belief gap at the heart of the City's big moment
The Leeds Reforms have handed financial services a rare opening. Most firms are about to waste it.
In July 2025 the Chancellor stood up at Mansion House and announced the most wide-ranging package of financial services reform in more than a decade. The Leeds Reforms, and the Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy behind them, set an unambiguous ambition: to make the UK the number one destination for financial services by 2035. The trade bodies applauded. The law firms produced their client briefings. A year on, the Financial Services and Markets Bill is moving through Parliament, carrying ring-fencing, Senior Managers and Ombudsman reform with it. By any conventional measure, the sector has won.
Won where, though? In Whitehall, certainly. In the country, not remotely.
The gap nobody has priced in
Step outside the Square Mile and the public conversation about finance has barely moved since 2008. Put "cutting red tape for the City" in front of a focus group and you will not hear a growth story. You will hear the prologue to the next crisis. This is not supposition: in YouGov polling this spring, 42 per cent of Britons said they do not trust financial institutions, a finding Edelman's global sector research echoes. Meanwhile 86 per cent of international investors tell EY the UK's appeal will hold or improve. The world's money is convinced. The country's voters are not. Financial deregulation is one of the very few policy areas where the public's default assumption is bad faith, and seventeen years of regulation have done little to shift it. The sector has spent those years talking to its regulators. It has not spent them talking to the country.
That distance between what policymakers believe and what the public believes is what we call a belief gap, and belief gaps are not a cosmetic problem. They are a political risk sitting on every balance sheet in the sector. Reform built without public consent is built on sand. The Chancellor has promised to regulate for growth and not just for risk, but no Chancellor's promise survives contact with a scandal. One mis-selling episode, one collapsed fund with retail money inside it, one bank failure, and the deregulatory agenda goes into reverse, because no political capital has been banked to defend it. Ministers defend policies the public supports. They abandon the rest.
Asking the country for its savings
And the stakes are about to rise, because the Government is not merely loosening the rules. It is inviting the public in. Savers with cash idling in low-interest accounts will be nudged towards investment products. Long Term Asset Funds are being opened to Stocks and Shares ISAs, drawing retail money into private assets for the first time. An industry advertising campaign will make the case for investing. A sector that has spent two decades communicating through compliance departments is about to ask ordinary households for their savings. You cannot do that and remain institutionally silent about who you are and what you are for.
The firms most exposed are the ones with the least public credit to draw on. Investment managers, asset managers and private equity houses barely feature in the public imagination, and where they do, the picture is unflattering. Private equity in particular has allowed itself to be defined by its critics: the asset stripper, the debt loader, the buyer of care homes and high street names. None of these caricatures survives contact with the evidence. All of them survive contact with the industry’s communications, because the industry mostly does not communicate.
The messenger, not the message
The instinctive response is a corporate campaign, and it is the wrong one. The public discounts what the City says about itself, for the sound reason that the City is talking its own book. Trust research is consistent: audiences do not believe institutions, they believe messengers who resemble them or carry independent authority. Belief moves when credible third parties carry the evidence, not when a bank buys a wrap on the Tube.
None of this means covert advocacy. The rules on financial promotions and hidden advertising are tightening sharply, and rightly so: regulators now hold firms responsible for content they cause to be made, wherever it appears. But genuine independence needs no disguise. Voices engaged openly, armed with evidence that withstands scrutiny, persuade precisely because they have nothing to hide.
So shaping the narrative, the opportunity the competitiveness agenda genuinely offers, means something more disciplined than visibility. It means measuring the belief gap precisely: what do the audiences that matter actually think about your firm, your asset class, your role in their retirement? It means identifying the messengers those audiences already trust, and equipping them with evidence worth repeating. And it means doing this consistently over years, not in the fortnight after a hostile headline. Consent is a stock, not a flow. It is accumulated in peacetime and spent in a crisis, and most of the sector is starting from empty.
The window is open. A Government has, for the first time, put financial services at the centre of its growth strategy and asked the industry to help make the public case. Firms can treat that as a lobbying exercise and a compliance project, and hope the political weather holds until 2035. Or they can recognise it for what it is: a rare invitation to close the gap between what the country's most successful industry does and what the country believes about it. The firms that take the second path will own the narrative. The rest will spend the next decade responding to it.
If you're thinking about how your organisation can close the belief gap with the audiences that matter most, we'd be happy to discuss how to measure it and shape the narrative.
Get in touch at info@wearespqr.com
