How mutuals can win a younger audience

There’s a version of the under-30 money story that’s become received wisdom: a feckless generation spending on flat whites and festival tickets while homeownership drifts out of reach.

It’s a comforting story if you’re older, and it’s mostly wrong because the data points the other way.

Younger people are anxious, under real financial pressure, and are more deliberate about money than the generation lecturing them. That gap between the caricature and the reality is where the opportunity sits for building societies and other mutuals, because the things this audience says it wants from a financial brand are, more or less, a description of what a mutual already is.

The catch is that they don’t know that. So the question for a marketing director in the sector isn’t “how do we become relevant to young people?” It’s “how do we get credit for relevance we already have?”

Their lack of confidence isn’t their fault

Start with confidence, because it shapes everything else. YouGov’s data show 60% of Gen Z say financial matters confuse them, compared with 37% of all adults. HSBC and Young Enterprise found that nearly a quarter of Gen Z don’t feel they’re making the most of their money. Reading that as carelessness overlooks what the same research identifies as the cause, that around half the population cites the absence of financial education in schools as the single biggest barrier to young people building good money habits.

So you have a cohort that knows it’s underinformed, knows why, and is actively looking for somewhere to learn. In the absence of a trusted source, they go to the one that’s always on, social media. Roughly one in four Gen Zs have taken financial advice from a social media influencer in the past year, and on some measures, the share saying online trends shape their money decisions is far higher.

That’s a risk for them, and the regulator knows it. The FCA has been pursuing finfluencers and the firms that work with them, leaving room for a regulated, trusted, member-owned voice to provide plain-English education. There’s a gap in the market, with a compliance moat around it.

The pressure is real and specific

Three things bear down on this group in a way they didn’t on their parents.

1. The cost of getting started,
2. The insecurity of how they earn,
3. And the noise of how they spend.

House prices against entry-level wages have turned a deposit into a long, abstract project rather than a few years of saving. Work is less linear, with more people holding multiple jobs, freelancing, or earning in ways that don’t fit a lender’s automated underwriting. Nottingham Building Society’s own research found that nearly nine million working people had put career plans on hold for fear of how it would affect their chances of getting a mortgage. And the spending environment is relentless in a way no previous generation faced, with social platforms engineered to make buying frictionless and constant.

What’s striking is how they respond to all this. Mintel’s 2025 work, cited by the BSA, found that 94% of 16- to 34-year-olds have set financial targets, compared with 61% of those over-55. Around 40% feel motivated to save, and a similar share automate transfers into savings each month. They favour cash savings over riskier bets. This is a cautious, goal-setting group doing the sensible things from a difficult starting position. They want to progress, but they can’t always see the route.

Digital for the day-to-day, advice for the decisions that matter

Here’s where it gets useful for anyone planning a strategy, because the channel picture isn’t either/or.

For everyday banking, the phone has won outright. Over 40% of Gen Z use mobile banking daily, and the app is the primary relationship by a distance. They don’t do single-provider loyalty either, spreading accounts across providers for different jobs and switching at roughly double the rate of older cohorts. If your day-to-day digital experience is poor, you lose before the conversation starts.

But the bigger the decision, the more they want a human.

RFI Global’s data shows branch usage among UK Gen Z sitting at 77%, and a Barclays executive has claimed Gen Z are the heaviest monthly branch users of any age group in the UK. Mortgages, pensions and the genuinely consequential choices are where the in-person, talk-to-someone model earns its place. Newcastle Building Society has been opening branches, not closing them, framing it explicitly as a commitment to face-to-face service in its communities. Read cynically that looks like nostalgia, but it’s closer to reading where this audience actually wants a person.

The shape of the opportunity, then, is hybrid. Get the app good enough that you’re not embarrassing yourself day-to-day, and own the advice relationship for the decisions that count.

The values are already yours

Now, the part that should make a mutual marketer sit up. When you ask younger people what they want from brands, the answer has shifted from cleverness to character. YouGov finds Gen Z more likely than older generations to rate brand ethics highly, with honesty, trustworthiness and consistency at the top and wit and slogans well down the list. By 2026, authenticity is projected to overtake wealth and fame as the primary personal value. They switch providers based on whether a brand’s beliefs, community role, and conduct align with their own.

Read that list back. Honesty, trust, community, and putting members before outside shareholders.

A mutual doesn’t have to invent that as a marketing position, because it’s already the legal structure. Newcastle Strategic Solutions made the point in the BSA’s own blog: this younger audience holds the same values that sit at the heart of building societies, community, trust and doing the right thing.

The problem is awareness, not fit. More than half of Gen Z think all banks are basically the same. The differentiation a mutual could own, the genuine structural difference between member-owned and shareholder-owned, is sitting unclaimed because nobody under 30 has had it explained to them in language they’d use.

What the challengers got right, and where they’re exposed

It’s worth being honest about why Monzo won this audience, because the obvious lesson is the wrong one. Around two-thirds of Monzo’s customers are under 30.

But the growth didn’t come from the memes. Roughly two-thirds of its sign-ups came through word of mouth and referrals, which is the member-gets-member mechanic a mutual should recognise instantly.

The social content works because the product underneath it does something useful, with the budgeting tools and spending breakdowns generating the shareable moments rather than the other way round. Get the product and the experience right, and the brand has something true to talk about.

Monzo’s exposure is the mutual’s opening. There’s a live question about whether it keeps these customers as they age into mortgages and pensions, or whether it stays the fun-first account people graduate away from. That serious, long-term, deposit-and-mortgage relationship is the one a building society is built to hold. The challenger owns the first account. The mutual could own the rest of the life.

Brand and digital, done without losing the room

A few in the sector are already moving, with varying degrees of nerve.

CLEVR Money, the rebrand of Blackpool, Fylde & Wyre Credit Union, is a tidy example of a member-owned lender adopting a clean, tech-first brand and proper digital services while keeping its ethical, affordable-lending purpose front and centre. Coventry Building Society launched a new app aimed at a new generation of members while keeping its branch network, which is the hybrid model in practice. Nottingham Building Society’s “A Different Kind of Society” rebrand modernised the look and tone around a real proposition that supports people whose lives and work don’t fit into a rigid lending box. The logo change drew the predictable column inches, but a press cycle about a squiggle isn’t the same as members walking away, and the underlying positioning is sound.

Outside the mutual world, two more are instructive on the brand point. JN Bank UK relaunched as thisbank with a human-first, digital-first identity, “new name, new look, still 150 years of experience,” which is the tone a heritage player can credibly adopt without pretending to be a startup. Gibraltar International Bank rebranded explicitly around “digital transformation with a human touch,” backing the new identity with the systems work to make it real rather than just a new colour palette. Neither is a building society, but both show a traditional institution refreshing its brand while keeping the human, trusted register that this audience responds to.

Some recent FS rebrands

The common thread across the ones that work is that the brand change is backed by something real. A better app, a clearer proposition, a genuine reason to look again. A rebrand that’s only a logo gets found out, but a rebrand that signals a real shift in experience gets rewarded.

Where this leaves you

The under-30 audience is anxious, underinformed by no fault of its own, hungry for trustworthy guidance, and holding values that map almost exactly onto what a mutual is. They’ll run their daily money through an app and want a human for the decisions that matter. Building societies and credit unions are structurally well-placed for all of it, and largely invisible to the people they would benefit.

The work splits cleanly; where mutuals tend to lose is in the day-to-day, the digital experience, and a brand that reads as something a 25-year-old would choose rather than inherit. Where they can win is trusted advice and the education this audience is actively searching for and not finding from a reliable source. Fix the first so you’re not ruled out on sight, and the second becomes the reason to choose you.

This is the brand and digital work Creode does for financial services organisations trying to make exactly that shift. Keeping the trust and community that older members value while building the experience and voice that a younger audience will actually pick up. The affinity is already there; the job is to make it legible.