coindesk.com
Happy Thursday, advisors!
In today’s newsletter, Jennifer Rosenthal of the DeFi Education Fund shares new survey data pointing to an opportunity for advisors as clients look beyond traditional finance.
Then, in “Ask an Expert,” DJ Windle of Windle Wealth explains why younger investors are more open to alternative financial systems.
Happy reading.
- Sarah Morton
Fading trust in banks is an opening for financial advisors
Most Americans rely on large financial institutions to keep their money safe, but fewer than half of Americans actually have high levels of trust in these legacy institutions. In a few days, Americans will vote in the midterm elections, which will help decide how the next generation of financial products gets built and regulated.
In a new national, longitudinal study, we at the DeFi Education Foundation surveyed Americans to hear their perspective on the state of the current financial institutions and their openness to frontier technologies. We used Ipsos on KnowledgePanel, the same gold-standard methodology used for the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Household Economics and Decision Making. The data shows how wide the gap has grown between the financial system and the people it serves.
Some relevant findings for financial advisors:
- Trust is a problem. Only about 1 in 5 Americans (19%) say the current financial system in the United States is secure. Nearly 2 in 3 (63%) say it needs to be upgraded to combat new threats like cybercrime and AI. Only 1 in 10 Americans (10%) completely trust large national banks. Credit unions, the most trusted institution in the survey, fell 5 percentage points in a year, to 48% reporting complete or a lot of trust. Only about 3 in 10 Americans (31%) strongly agree that the financial system works well for people like them, and only about 1 in 7 Americans (14%) believe banks and other financial institutions charge reasonable fees for their services. This diminishing trust means that American investors are going to be more and more open to exploring alternatives.
- Americans want to feel like they have greater control over their money and assets. Two in three Americans (66%) want access to their money at all times, and 8 in 10 Americans (80%) feel that changes are needed to give people more control over their personal data. Three in four (74%) now say financial privacy is important to them. For advisors, this is an argument for radical transparency. Advisors have an opportunity to help clients better understand how and why their assets are allocated, and to create options that enable clients to have greater control over, and insight into, how their portfolios actually work.
- Americans are interested in experimenting with financial alternatives. More than 1 in 5 Americans (22%) have now owned or used crypto, up from 18% in 2025. Fewer than 1 in 10 (9%) say they are extremely or very familiar with it, but the top reason people tried it was curiosity. Two in five Americans (40%) say they would be at least somewhat likely to try decentralized finance (DeFi) if it were available to them. Among those likely to try DeFi, more than 8 in 10 would use it to save money (85%, up from 77% in 2025), send money to family or friends in the U.S. (82%, up from 73%) or earn interest (82%). Americans are also expressing interest in learning more about things like perpetual futures, tokenized assets and stablecoins, so advisors should be familiarizing themselves with these financial innovations.
- Younger Americans are more likely to be less happy with the financial system. Only 42% of Gen Z are extremely or very satisfied with the current financial system, compared with 63% of boomers. And when asked about openness to financial innovations, Gen Z Americans are more than four times as likely as boomers to be interested in learning about DeFi (13% versus 3%). This generation is the future client base for many financial advisors, and it is are more likely to be open to financial alternatives.
