According to Darren Morris, CEO of Lucky Hustle, traditional financial services brands are not short of advantages. They have scale, trust, data, distribution, licences and decades of institutional knowledge.
Most fintech challengers would happily trade their hoodies for even half of that infrastructure. And yet, when many established banks, insurers and investment businesses communicate, those advantages disappear beneath a thick layer of category sameness.
The language is cautious and the imagery is polished. The promise is usually some variation of a better future. I see that not as a creativity problem in the narrow sense. It is a relevance problem.
People do not experience money as a financial-services category. They experience it as the difference between saying yes and saying ‘not this month’. It is rent, school fees, ambition, status, anxiety, freedom and family. It is profoundly emotional, yet the industry often speaks about it as if everyone is sitting at home waiting to discuss wealth solutions.
New-age creativity starts by closing that gap. It is not youth slang pasted onto a product ad, a dance challenge approved by legal or a bank trying to behave like a fintech. It is creativity built around how people actually live, decide, participate and move through culture.
For traditional financial brands, that shift creates four opportunities. First, turn complexity into something people can use. Financial products are complicated because money is complicated. But complexity inside the business should not become confusion outside it. The creative task is not simply to make the explanation shorter. It is to make the value tangible. Show what changes in a person’s life, what becomes possible and why the product matters now. Clarity is the proof of sophistication.
Second, stop treating culture as media placement. Culture is not something a brand reaches by buying space near it. It is a living system of language, humour, rituals, tensions and communities. A financial brand becomes relevant when it understands those systems well enough to contribute something useful, entertaining or empowering. That requires local intelligence, not demographic shorthand. A twenty-three-year-old side-hustler in Soweto and a twenty-three-year-old graduate in Stellenbosch may look identical on a dashboard. Creatively, they may live in different worlds.
Third, use regulation as a creative constraint rather than a creative excuse. Financial services must communicate responsibly. That is not negotiable. But responsible does not have to mean forgettable. Some of the sharpest ideas emerge when the boundaries are clear. The job is to bring strategists, creatives, legal teams and product owners together earlier, so compliance does not arrive at the end to remove the pulse from the work. Creativity is not what happens after the rules. It is how a brand finds possibility within them.
It is a challenge we are particularly excited to take on following Lucky Hustle’s recent appointment by a leading financial services brand. The opportunity is not to make the brand behave off-brand. The goal is to bring fresh creative energy to a category where trust, clarity and responsibility matter, without accepting that any of them require the work to be boring.
Fourth, use technology to increase imagination, not industrialise sameness. AI can accelerate research, generate options, adapt executions and help teams learn faster. It can raise the floor for execution. It cannot manufacture a point of view. Human judgement, cultural intelligence and brave decisions still determine the ceiling. If every financial brand uses the same tools, trained on the same internet, efficiency will not be the differentiator. Taste will be.
This is where established brands can beat the challengers at their own game. They do not need to discard their heritage. They need to make it usable. Trust can become confidence to experiment. Data can produce better experiences, not merely better targeting. Distribution can turn a campaign into a service. Scale can help a powerful idea change behaviour, not just accumulate impressions.
The measure of modern creativity is not whether people call the work innovative. It is whether they notice, understand, remember and act. Did it make a difficult product easier to choose? Did it bring new customers into the category? Did it deepen usage, build loyalty or move the business forward?
Creativity is not a decorative layer applied to financial services once the serious work is complete. It is one of growth’s engines. Traditional financial brands already have the machinery. New-age creativity and thinking give them somewhere more interesting to go.
LUCKY HUSTLE
https://luckyhustle.co.za
