The Challenge

One of the largest financial institutions in the U.S. engaged us to conduct a targeted survey on how social media platforms are being used across financial services. The objective was to identify non-patent literature showing where social media and banking-related functions were converging, with a focus on emerging trends and future possibilities.

The research question was broad and cross-functional, spanning payments, deposits, lending, investments, customer analytics, fraud management, authentication, and more.

The real challenge was separating general discussions about social media from evidence showing social platforms being used to deliver, enable, or enhance financial services.

The Solution

Conventional keyword searches produced a high volume of noise. This required developing search strategies that captured the intersection of two traditionally separate domains while filtering out thousands of irrelevant references. The search strategy focused on identifying publications where social platforms played a functional role in delivering or improving financial products and services, rather than serving solely as marketing or communication channels.

We organized our findings by financial service area and social media platform, then highlighted representative references across categories such as payments, fund transfers, account information, investment activity, customer analytics, rewards, crowdfunding, online branches, credit scoring, and authentication.

Our approach included:

Our impact

The report identified emerging themes such as analytics-driven personalization, virtual Facebook branch concepts, LinkedIn’s potential role in commercial and investment banking, mobile-first banking design, and customer incentivization through rewards-based products.