There was a time when the path to consumer awareness in financial services ran through television commercials featuring reassuring spokespeople and branch offices with good parking. That time, it appears, has passed.

A study released by NP Digital, the advertising agency, found that Apple and Google — companies that would not typically describe themselves as fintech brands — are dominating the visibility rankings when consumers ask artificial intelligence platforms for financial recommendations. Apple ranked first with a score of 65.6 out of 100; Google was not far behind.

The reason, according to the agency's analysts, is not that these companies have superior banking products. It is that they have products at all in multiple categories, which gives them more opportunities to be mentioned when AI systems generate answers. Apple Pay, for instance, surfaces in discussions of digital payments, which helps Apple's overall standing even when the underlying question has nothing to do with selling iPhones.

(One imagines the fintech startups that raised billions of dollars to "disrupt banking" are taking notes.)

The study, which NP Digital called the "FinTech AI Visibility Index," examined 68,334 AI-generated answers across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude Sonnet 4. The methodology tracked how often brands appeared, how early they appeared and how many categories they appeared in.

SoFi, which ranked second, was the highest-scoring company that actually considers itself a fintech brand, with a score of 64.6. PayPal had the most raw mentions — 14,294 — but ranked third because its competitors tended to be cited first, a reminder that in AI-generated answers, as in class presentations, showing up is not the same as being called on first.

Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later company, appeared in 92 percent of answers in its category, suggesting a strategy of dominating a single conversation rather than joining many.

Only 2 percent of the answers analyzed carried negative sentiment, which may say something about the current state of AI-generated financial advice, or about the difficulty of being critical in a format designed to be helpful.

Original story published in MediaPost: "Apple Finds Advantages Across Fintech In Search Results"