Fifty-six per cent of UK investors aged 18 to 40 say they trust AI tools — a larger share than trusts television and radio (47%), the press (46%) or social media influencers (29%). The figures come from research the Financial Conduct Authority published on 27 August 2026, drawn from 666 respondents who either own investments or would consider buying them within 12 months, surveyed on 24 July through the Attest platform. Among less experienced investors, per the regulator’s summary, 80% have already used AI for help with investing, and two-thirds expect to lean on it more over the coming year.
The trust figure is not the finding that matters. The three underneath it are. Forty-four per cent took AI-generated financial information to be regulated. Thirty-eight per cent considered it acceptable to make an investment decision on AI output alone. Thirty-two per cent assumed the Financial Services Compensation Scheme or the Financial Ombudsman Service would apply. The FCA’s position appears plainly in the release: general purpose AI tools are not regulated, while a tool deployed specifically to provide financial advice would be likely to fall within its remit. Lucy Castledine, the regulator’s director of consumer investments, is quoted saying such tools can help a reader research companies or understand jargon, but that the reader needs to understand how they are protected and keep exercising their own judgement.
For readers of this publication the consequence is narrow and unhappy. A model that produces the name of a broker has not made a recommendation for which anybody is accountable. Both the ombudsman and the compensation scheme attach to authorised firms and the business those firms do — not to a chatbot, which is where the 32% went wrong. The compensation scheme pays out when an authorised firm fails owing money; per the scheme’s own published cover it does not pay for poor investment performance, and nothing in it reaches what a chatbot suggested. The authorisation baseline has not moved because the technology producing the marketing has changed.
So the procedure stands where it stood. Whatever produced the name — an advertisement, an influencer video, a model answering a prompt — the reader opens the Financial Services Register, matches the firm reference number against the one the firm claims, confirms the permissions cover the product being sold, and makes contact through the details the Register records rather than the ones the source supplied. That last step is the one no chatbot performs on the reader’s behalf.
There is a small consolation in the same dataset: 73% of respondents accept that AI can return inaccurate information, and 86% say referenced sources should be checked. The distance between holding that view and acting on it is the whole of the problem. Check the Register.
The standing note: forex and CFD trading carries substantial risk of loss, and nothing generated by a model — or published by this desk — is advice.