Why Financial Brands in the APJI Region are Losing the Moments That Matter Most

Did you know neobanks commanded significantly higher customer satisfaction scores than their traditional counterparts in the West last year?* Things are no different in Asia as digital-first neobanks are resetting customer expectations across this vast continent. In a fast-growing economy like India, UPI (an instant real-time payment system) completed 10 years earlier this year, emerging as the world’s largest real-time payments platform. QR-led payments dominate retail commerce from Bangkok to Jakarta while Australia has built one of the world's most advanced open banking frameworks.

The APJI region is by far the most digitally accelerated banking market on the planet. Yet if you look at how most APJI banks and insurers are showing up on social media, you'd think the decade-long digital transformation ran out of steam before it reached the social team's brief. But customers across the region now expect the same intuitive, responsive social experience they get from their favorite consumer brands. What most of them get instead is compliant corporate content pushed on a schedule, with little acknowledgment that the person reading it might be navigating a claims process, anxious about a market downturn, or comparing products in real time.

The 2026 Sprinklr Social Index Report — built on 1 million data points from 1,160 brands across five industries — benchmarks exactly where financial brands stand globally. The data isn't flattering for the sector, and the APJI picture is worth examining closely.

*How Traditional Institutions Can Beat Neobanks at Customer Acquisition

The global FSI picture and how it mirrors APJI

The global findings for financial services are consistent and uncomfortable. FSI brands carry a median Social Index score** of 2.1. And negative sentiment surrounds 45% of brands. The gap between an average performer and the top 10 global FSI brands is 1.8 Social Index points, and it’s clear from the data that the gap isn't due to marketing budgets or brand size. It can be attributed to how the brand shows up on social media.

The pattern is consistent: most FSI brands are broadcasting compliant content and calling it a social strategy. They post around campaigns, go quiet in between, and miss the moments — market volatility, life events, financial stress — where customers most want to hear from them. These patterns apply to APJI as well. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer for APAC notes that customer trust in financial institutions runs higher across this region than in most Western markets. That trust is an asset but a perishable one. In a region where a competitor's digital product is one app notification away, brand trust can migrate faster than most institutions realize. The cost of getting social wrong in APJI BFSI isn't gradual decline; it's abrupt departure.

**Social Index is the average of your Brand and Audience Experience Indices. Brand Index measures your brand’s social media visibility — follower strength, publishing frequency, and brand responsiveness across channels. Audience Experience Index measures how people feel about, react to, and engage with your brand on social media. It captures audience‑led conversations, engagement on those conversations and brand posts, sentiment, and depth of interaction.

The APJI twist: Where global patterns diverge

Three regional dynamics make the global FSI findings more complex in APJI and, in some cases, point toward different solutions.

The platform reality

The Social Index Report analyzed performance across X, Instagram, and Facebook; platforms that banking customers in the APJI region rarely use. WhatsApp is the primary communication layer in India and much of Southeast Asia. LINE dominates in Japan and Thailand. KakaoTalk is the default in Korea. Banking conversations happen in private group chats, encrypted threads, and broadcast lists that conventional social metrics barely register. Any BFSI brand in this region benchmarking its social performance against a feed-first model wouldn’t get an accurate picture of its performance.

The regulatory floor

APJI BFSI operates under consistently strict regulatory regimes, e.g., RBI in India, MAS in Singapore, APRA in Australia, FSA in Japan. Every piece of social content is shaped by compliance constraints that don't apply to retail or CPG brands. That explains some of the broadcast tendencies. What it doesn't explain is why the top-performing global FSI brands, operating under equally strict frameworks, still produce content that feels distinctly human. The difference comes down to editorial ambition, not the regulatory environment.

The trust inheritance

In markets like India and Indonesia, customers carry a higher inherited trust in established financial institutions. That trust is an advantage and a warning at the same time. The findings in the report show that brands with strong inherited trust can lose social ground faster than they realize when the actual experience doesn't match the brand promise.

The 3 moments of opportunities APJI BFSI keeps missing

Below are opportunities that BFSI brands need to latch onto to ensure they stay relevant on social media.

Moment 1: Narrative content between launches

Globally, FSI brands that move from less than 5 to 30+ posts a week enjoy 16x higher engagement. The insight isn't about volume — consistent presence is the driver, showing up often enough that the algorithm and the audience both treat the brand as reliable. Most APJI banks treat social as a campaign channel, publishing in bursts around product launches and falling silent in between. The algorithm reads inconsistency as an unreliability signal, and the audience stops expecting anything from the brand.

HDFC Bank's Instagram handle hdfcbankcsr is worth a look to check what the alternative looks like. It tells human stories about real financial lives rather than product features, earning an engagement quality that campaign content can't replicate. Most brands still treat this kind of storytelling as aspirational. The data suggests it should be operational.

Moment 2: The public feed as community

Brands that genuinely invite dialogue gain 22x more message volume and a 31-point sentiment lift. Most APJI BFSI feeds read instead as de facto help desks — overrun with queries about failed UPI transactions, claim status updates, and KYC requirements. These are real customer needs but resolving them publicly converts the brand's highest-visibility surface into a complaint thread. The feed becomes somewhere people go when something goes wrong, not when they want to engage.

DBS Singapore's social presence offers a working model: financial wellness content on the public feed, service resolution routed to DMs. The feed stays a destination worth following. The brand doesn't become synonymous with friction.

Moment 3: Resolution quality over response speed

The most-loved FSI brands in the study are, on average, 2x slower to respond than their peers: 9 hours versus 4.5. Speed is a secondary metric for these brands. What they optimize for is the quality and completeness of what happens when they do respond — acknowledging instantly through AI, resolving thoughtfully through humans. In APJI, where many teams are measured on response time SLAs that incentivize the wrong metric, this reorientation matters considerably.

4 shifts APJI BFSI leaders need to make soon

These four operating model adjustments aren't complicated but they do require ownership conversations that go beyond the social team's brief.

• Reframe social at the C-suite level: CX, communications, compliance, and marketing all have a stake in how the brand shows up. They need shared KPIs that reflect that. Siloed ownership of social produces incoherent customer experience and misaligned priorities. 
  
• Build a platform strategy that reflects APJI customer behavior: WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk, and Instagram aren't secondary channels in this region. For many customers, they're the primary line of communication with the brand. A strategy built around feed publishing alone leaves the most important conversations unaddressed. 
  
• Invest in AI-led acknowledgment and human-led resolution: This is the model the top performers use globally, and it holds particular importance in markets with regulator-driven complaint resolution windows. Speed of acknowledgment and quality of resolution are separate requirements and, thus, they need separate investment. 
  
• Treat compliance as a creative parameter: The top performers operate under equally strict regulatory regimes. What separates their content is editorial investment and organizational willingness to find the human story within the constraint, rather than treating the constraint as an insurmountable hurdle.

The bigger picture

APJI is home to the most digitally engaged banking customers in the world — customers who've moved their financial lives onto platforms that are faster, more personal, and less forgiving than anything that preceded them. The brands that stay relevant in this environment are the ones treating every social moment as an opportunity to show they're paying attention: to what customers are going through, to the conversations happening well beyond their own feeds, and to how their social presence compares with that of the category leaders.

Where does your brand stand today, and what would it take to move up? Get answers to all your pressing questions by downloading the Sprinklr Social Index Report.