£614bn. That’s how much cash is sitting idle in UK savings accounts – not earning, not growing. It is a huge missed opportunity: money that could be building futures, fuelling businesses or supporting retirement goals is instead laying dormant.
This reality is why UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been speaking in recent months about her ambition to build a nation of investors. It’s a much needed shift. But it won’t be achieved through policy change alone.
Turning savers into investors hinges on building trust, instilling confidence and removing friction. It requires a fundamental cultural shift as well as better technology that makes investing more accessible. And it needs systems that empower individuals to not only take their first step but to continue progressing toward their financial goals throughout their lives.
And there’s one group particularly well placed to do this at scale: banks.
Banks have a unique opportunity – if they choose to seize it
As the financial touchpoint people trust and use every day, banks are uniquely positioned to help shift behaviour in the quest to create a nation of investors. Not by reinventing the wheel, but by embedding investing into the financial lives their customers already lead.
In the last 15 years, the launch and proliferation of banking apps has made spending and saving more visible, more habitual and more empowering. The same opportunity now exists to transform approaches to investing: to normalise it, demystify it and make it feel like a natural next step rather than a specialist move for the wealthy or well-informed.
The stakes for getting this right are high. A reported 12.5 million UK residents are currently under-saving for retirement. Millions of people feel that investing isn’t “for them”. And a quarter of Brits say they simply don’t know where to start.
From passive savers to confident investors
Fintech innovation means unlocking routes to investing has never been more user-friendly, personalised or affordable. Alongside this, the FCA is working to make it easier for a broader range of people to access guidance and support.
But the stubborn gap between access and action remains.
Banks are particularly well positioned to fix this. They already support millions of diverse individuals and have a broad picture of their customers’ finances – how they earn, spend, borrow and save. That gives them a powerful edge in helping individuals build investing into their everyday financial habits. From rounding up spare change into diversified portfolios to setting up simple recurring investments, banks can meet a broad range of needs for a broad range of people.
What banks can learn from Netflix
Banks can compound this advantage and help savers take those vital first steps by also borrowing lessons from outside the industry.
By explicitly designing for trust, companies such as Airbnb and Uber drove an explosion in new ways to travel. The language app Duolingo leverages smart prompts to turn complex learning into confidence-building micro-moments. And Netflix? It doesn’t just recommend content based on your preferences – it shows you what others like you are watching too. That subtle blend of personalisation and peer insight makes decision-making easier.
By embracing this type of tech infrastructure and combining it with their unique access to data, banks can guide people toward smarter investment decisions; offering nudges, suggestions and tailored journeys that feel intuitive instead of intimidating.
Fintech has already proven that simple, elegant design can help remove complexity and build confidence. And embedded infrastructure can power transformation without heavy lifting. This means it is easier than ever to offer a customer-first, tech-enabled approach to investing that meets the next generation’s expectations of what good user experience looks and feels like.
A one-size-fits-none approach won’t work
Another area we must get right in order to unlock the potential of investing for millions is personalisation. Retail investors don’t all want the same thing. Some want to be in full control, others want to outsource the decisions around their wealth-building (whether to a human or technology). Some put ethics and sustainability at the heart of their choices. Different age groups will have different tolerance for risk.
To cater to modern expectations around personalisation, banks must offer flexibility, not friction. That means embracing modular, digital-first investment infrastructure that gives people access to everything from fractional shares to low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETF). It also means designing intuitive experiences that adapt to different levels of engagement, interest and understanding.
A combination of curation and personalisation will help give individuals the inspiration, confidence and agency they’ve become accustomed to in their personal lives – whether that’s scrolling on Netflix or Spotify or being served recommendations on Amazon.
This isn’t about banks becoming wealth managers. It’s about offering simple, user-friendly, low-friction pathways into investing – ones that reflect how people already manage their money and how they prefer to engage.
Banking the opportunity
Building Britain into a nation of investors requires big shifts in behaviour which cannot be underestimated. However, the opportunities to better understand and support individuals to own their financial futures is worth the investment. And there’s never been a better time to turn talk into action.
The current technological, political and cultural landscape provides fertile ground for change. This is a golden opportunity for banks to step up, expand their place at the heart of their customers’ financial lives and lead the way in helping everyone build a brighter, more confident financial future. They hold the keys that could unlock a new generation of wealth building.
Symmie Swil is the UK general manager at Upvest, an investment-management platform.
£614bn. That’s how much cash is sitting idle in UK savings accounts – not earning, not growing. It is a huge missed opportunity: money that could be building futures, fuelling businesses or supporting retirement goals is instead laying dormant.
This reality is why UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been speaking in recent months about her ambition to build a nation of investors. It’s a much needed shift. But it won’t be achieved through policy change alone.
Turning savers into investors hinges on building trust, instilling confidence and removing friction. It requires a fundamental cultural shift as well as better technology that makes investing more accessible. And it needs systems that empower individuals to not only take their first step but to continue progressing toward their financial goals throughout their lives.
