Why Fintech Brands That Skip Expert Interviews Are Failing Google’s Highest Standard

When fintech content teams don’t rank on Google, they automatically look for technical gaps or weak backlinks to find a solution.

Yet the real reason is both simpler and much harder to fix. Their content contains no named human expertise, something that Google prioritises over anything else when it comes to financial services content. 

The reason? Financial content is one of Google’s stated Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics, which it now says must carry provable expertise from named sources. Fail to include it, and you can expect to see your fintech brand remain invisible.

The standard generalist fintech content keeps failing

So, what exactly is the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) classification? Google themselves use it to describe content about topics that can “significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.” 

The search engine holds these topics to a much higher standard than usual, which means they scrutinise who wrote it and what they actually know about the topic. To do this accurately, they use a framework that they call E-E-A-T, or  Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, to use its full title. Anyone who understands these words will know that they are traits we normally associate with people – specialists, to be exact.  This is who financial content writers must turn to. 

Failure to meet this standard may prove costly. According to the guidelines, generalist articles made up of several existing articles and offering no first-hand experience will be ignored by search algorithms, no matter how well optimised they are. 

Expert interviews are how you clear the bar. They are the most effective way to include named experts and verifiable claims in the content. If the writer can get the expert to include an image, then even better – these also help to build trust with the reader.

Compliance is a collaborator

There’s another factor that fintechs tend to get wrong when attempting SEO for financial services: compliance.

Most people tend to treat it as a box to tick when editing the final draft, but this is often too late. Content often gets stuck in review, and editors, in their haste to meet financial guidelines, tend to water it down. 

The key is to use it as a guardrail from the very start, rather than as a final filter. This is where expert interviews are a natural fit: they provide sourced, on-record claims that specify exactly what compliance will approve instead of some vague claim. A compliance officer reviewing a quote from a named CFO is a very different conversation from one reviewing a generic claim about investment returns.

Use them well, and content teams will find they have another advantage – they don’t need to write as much; just simply let the experts do the talking, which they can then craft into trustworthy, original, and compliant content.

Why expert interviews beat simply publishing more

It’s tempting to reach for the panic button when rankings dip and start to publish more. Yet generative AI has made publishing average content at industrial scale the norm and thus worthless. 

AI cannot generate insights that only exist because someone asked an expert some difficult questions via a phone or video call.

This is the thinking behind Journalistic SEO, a methodology created by Justin Calderón, founder of leading fintech SEO agency Mint Position, after years of helping brands appear on the first page of Google. He realised that new AI algorithms are also searching for the same expert content that Google values when it cites sources. 

By taking these new insights and mapping them to what buyers are looking for, he was soon able to get fintech clients cited by AI engines as well as traditional search. 

These interviews help deliver the trust fintech buyers crave. When a financial content reader senses genuine authority behind the words they see, their guard drops, and they are much more likely to make a favourable buying decision. 

The GEO dimension: the same trust signals, a second SERP

A single expert interview now performs a double function. It clears Google’s YMYL bar and makes your content the kind of authoritative source that Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) engines lift straight into their answers. Earning that visibility is the core of any GEO strategy, and expert interviews are what feed both engines at once.

Fintech brands that skip expert interviews are taking a big risk: they’re failing the one standard that now governs Google and AI search simultaneously and risk falling behind rivals because of it.

Get this right, and they’ll rank higher on Google and own the AI answers their competitors don’t even know exist yet.