Should financial institutions extend in-app security signals across email, calls and messaging to help clients distinguish genuine alerts from scams?
Ask a financial institution where its customers feel the safest, and the answer is almost always “inside the app”.
Years of investment have gone into making mobile banking feel like a vault, protected by biometric log-ins and real-time fraud monitoring. And the efforts have arguably paid off because of the trust that customers have in the app.
However, what customers are far less sure about is: everything that happens when they step outside the app. The touchpoints beyond the app, whether it is an email confirming a new payee, or a call from an unfamiliar number to verify a transaction, are where financial institutions and their customers often meet, and they are exactly where trust breaks down.
Alejandro Murcia, Global Financial Services, Sinch
Our own research points to around 53% of polled consumers globally having ignored a legitimate message from a brand because it looked suspicious. It is hard to blame them when digital spoofing has become so convincing that a fraudulent message and a genuine one can look basically identical.
In digital-first hubs such as Singapore, impersonation scams running through platforms like WhatsApp have become common enough that suspicion is now the rational default, and when customers cannot tell the difference, they protect themselves by ignoring everything. Legitimate communication ends up as the collateral damage.
The app-only trust trap
The irony is that, in working so hard to make the app secure, financial institutions have arguably made every other channel feel unsafe by comparison. The app has become the one place customers were told to trust, so anything arriving from outside it now carries a question mark, and a bank can run a flawless in-app experience yet still lose the customer the minute a message lands in an inbox or a call comes through.
For institutions that depend on external channels for important moments such as fraud alerts or payment confirmations, this presents a serious operational gap. The most urgent messages tend to be the ones sent when something has already gone wrong, and those are the ones a wary customer displaying heightened caution is most likely to dismiss.
Yet, closing the gap does not mean pulling everything back inside the app. It means carrying the app’s sense of safety out into all the other channels the customer already uses.
Restoring trust with secure platforms
Voice is a vulnerable touchpoint because it is where scammers do their sharpest work. A customer who receives a call from an unknown number has no way of knowing who is really on the line, and fraudsters exploit that uncertainty every day.
Rethinking how to initiate high-stakes voice interactions changes this dynamic. By shifting sensitive account communications into authenticated digital environments such as the banking app itself, financial institutions can eliminate guesswork for their customers.
When a customer can see that a call is coming from their financial service provider, and it has been initiated inside an environment they already trust, like their banking app, this bridges the gap between digital convenience and human reassurance without requiring customers to take a gamble on an unverified phone number.
Restoring confidence across channels
Beyond voice, financial institutions across Asia Pacific have a growing set of framework standards for making trust visible across every communication touchpoint.
Modern protocol upgrades allow organisations to deliver authenticated messages complete with verified sender profiles, making legitimacy clear at a glance before a customer ever opens an alert. Industry players can also implement email authentication standards that ensure verified brand logos are displayed directly in the inbox, while verified business profiles on instant messaging platforms offer clear visual indicators of authenticity. An example is Meta’s blue tick that denotes a verified business account, found on their messaging platform, WhatsApp. Sinch’s research highlights the impact of these visible trust indicators, finding that 59% of consumers globally prefer authenticated messaging standards over traditional SMS for receiving one-time passcodes.
None of these standards is a fix on its own, and their real value comes from being used consistently across channels. When a customer sees the same signals of authenticity wherever their financial service provider reaches out to them, the whole communication ecosystem begins to feel as safe as the app itself, and trust stops being something that just lives in one place.
A strategic shift, not a technical one
The temptation is to treat this as a messaging problem for the marketing or IT teams to solve, but the implications are far broader. As scams grow more sophisticated, the financial institutions that treat verified communication as part of their core infrastructure will be the ones able to preserve long-term customer relationships. For financial institutions across the region, the strategic priority is clear. Extending the trust built within secure apps to every single customer touchpoint does more than reduce fraud. It ensures that when an organisation genuinely needs to reach its customers, they still feel safe enough to answer.
