Banks Ignored Consumers' Feelings About Money
It Cost Them Trust
In 2018, Emotional Banking argued that retail banks were misdiagnosing loyalty, behaviour and risk.
It was never a CX issue.
It was a human one.
Emotional Banking 2.0: Tales from the #FinTech Crypt and the Organisational Trenches examines what followed.
AI entered decision systems.
Trust weakened.
Cultural fragility surfaced.
Unresolved decisions compounded inside financial institutions.
This is not a sequel. It is a record.
Emotional Banking Reframed Customer Centricity
Emotional Banking positioned behavioural economics as operational infrastructure, not marketing language.
It proposed a systems view.
Consumers do not make financial decisions rationally.
Organisations under pressure do not behave rationally either.
Culture shapes product design.
Fear shapes policy.
Trust grows slowly and disappears quickly.
Over the past decade FinTech expanded. AI was inserted into underwriting, fraud detection and decision engines. Regulatory pressure increased.
Yet most banks still treat emotion as background noise instead of structural data.
Emotional Banking 2.0 addresses:
Organisational culture in financial services
Human-centred design inside fintech
Unresolved institutional decisions compounding under scale
Psychological safety as a risk variable
Trust design in AI-augmented systems
Behavioural economics is not theory.
It is operational reality.
Explore the original Emotional Banking essays
The argument was not wrong.
It arrived before the market was ready.
From banking to all organisations
Emotional Banking
Fixing Culture, Leveraging FinTech, and Transforming Retail Banks into Brands
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
The book that started it all. Blomstrom tells the story of arriving at the realisation that people's feelings about their money were not investigated — and her quest to explore why banks haven't done so. It details methods of cultural change developed after working with 100+ incumbent banks, FinTech startups, and technology providers.
Emotional Banking 2.0
Tales from the #FinTech Crypt and the Organisational Trenches
This is not a sequel. It is a record. AI entered decision systems. Trust weakened. Cultural fragility surfaced. Unresolved decisions compounded inside financial institutions.
Tales from the FinTech Crypt
The field evidence is already public.
Tales from the FinTech Crypt documents:
Leadership errors that compound under scale
Cultural blind spots that distort product decisions
Trust failures that could have been prevented
Behavioural misreads inside growth narratives
Available on podcast and YouTube.
These are not promotional conversations. They are structured examinations of how institutions behave when pressure rises.
Episodes
Bank executives managing AI-era trust exposure.
FinTech founders moving beyond product market fit.
Behavioural economists working inside financial systems.
Culture leaders responsible for decision quality.
Regulators and policy observers tracking institutional risk.
If your work sits at the intersection of money, power and behaviour, this book is relevant.
Receive Field Notes from the FinTech Trenches
Periodic dispatches covering:
Trust signals in financial services
Organisational miscalculation patterns
Psychological safety under regulatory strain
AI-driven behavioural risk
No promotional clutter.
No artificial urgency.
Clear analysis.
Emotional Banking was a warning.
Emotional Banking 2.0 documents what became visible once scale, AI and institutional pressure intensified.
Trust in financial services will not return through dashboards or slogans. It will return through behavioural literacy, structural integrity and cultural accountability.
This work is for leaders prepared to examine the human layer before it becomes measurable loss.