People in Singapore use AI for money decisions. What should financial firms make answerable?

What the Singapore survey found

A sizeable minority of adults in Singapore already ask AI about money, and some act on what it says. In MDRT's survey of 2,000 adults, run online by Opinium on 6–9 April 2026, 89% used at least one digital platform for their finances, and 35% of those users used AI tools for financial purposes, from gathering information to taking action.¹ MDRT is an association of financial professionals, so it has a stake in the advice question; the fieldwork was done by an independent pollster.

The detail matters more than the headline. In the same survey, 29% used general chat tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini for money matters, against 14% who used a chatbot run by their bank or financial institution; the release does not say whether these two shares are of all adults or of digital-platform users.¹ Among people who had acted on AI-generated advice or used it as a starting point, 47% had used it when choosing or switching a product such as a loan, credit card or insurance plan.¹

Our view: the second number is the one a bank or insurer should plan around. The engine that answers a question about switching your card is not yours, and it builds its answer from whatever pages it can find.

Singapore, April 2026

AI is already in the money conversation

35%of digital-platform users use AI tools for financial purposesMDRT and Opinium, Apr 2026 ¹

29% vs 14%use general AI chat tools vs a financial firm's own chatbotMDRT and Opinium, Apr 2026 ¹

47%of those acting on AI advice used it to choose or switch a productMDRT and Opinium, Apr 2026 ¹

Do people trust the answer, or just start with it?

Mostly they start with it. In MDRT's April 2026 fieldwork, 19% of people who use AI for financial purposes had made a decision based primarily on AI-generated advice.¹ In the same survey, 42% of those working with an adviser still preferred to meet in person for complex topics.¹ AI shapes the shortlist; a person often closes the decision.

That pattern matches what we described for people in Germany asking AI for financial advice and for advisory clients in the US and Canada. Trust in AI for money is limited, use is not. A firm that is missing from the AI answer often never reaches the meeting where trust gets built.

So the job is narrower than "rank in AI". Someone in Singapore asks which travel card has no foreign transaction fee, or whether an insurer covers pre-existing conditions. The job is to make sure the facts the engine repeats about you are current and correct.

Why finance answers are less locked up than other sectors

Finance is a crowded answer, which helps a mid-sized firm. In Semrush's 2026 AI Visibility Index, built on 126 million US prompts from January to April 2026, the top three brands held 41.4% of AI visibility in finance, against 82.9% in news and media.² Semrush sells SEO and AI visibility software. The data is US-only, so read it as a pattern rather than a Singapore figure.

The same index found ChatGPT cited about 15 sources per response, against about 3 for Gemini (US, January–April 2026).² An engine that reads fifteen pages before answering has room for a smaller bank's rate table. One that reads three will lean on the biggest names and on comparison sites.

Our view: in finance the realistic goal for most firms is a reliable place in the answer for their own products and niches, not the top slot for "best bank". Pick the questions where your product is the right answer and make those pages easy to quote.

What should a financial firm make answerable?

Start with the facts a buyer checks before choosing, and put each one where an engine can read it without guessing. The table below is the list we would work through for a bank, insurer or advisory firm.

Our checklist. Illustrative: adapt the rows to your product range.

Two rules make the table work. First, keep the facts in HTML, not only in a PDF brochure or an image of a rate card. Second, date them. Pricing, offers and eligibility change often, and an engine has no way to know a figure is stale unless the page says when it took effect.

Licensing deserves its own check. The Monetary Authority of Singapore runs a public Financial Institutions Directory listing licensed firms and activities.⁴ Use the same legal name, licence type and activities on your site as the directory does, so an engine that finds both sees one entity, not two.

How often do Google's AI Overviews appear on money questions?

Often enough to plan for, though less than on health questions. Ahrefs found AI Overviews on 22.9% of financial "your money or your life" queries, against 44.1% for medical ones.³ The study covered 146 million desktop results from September 2025, with geography not stated, so the data is now close to a year old. Question-style queries triggered an Overview 57.9% of the time in the same study.³

Ahrefs sells SEO software, and its data predates Google's expansion of AI Mode to more countries. What carries over is the shape: the more a query reads like a question, the more likely an AI summary sits above the links. Money questions from people in Singapore are usually phrased exactly that way.

What not to publish

Do not chase AI answers with pages that read like personal advice. A page that tells a reader which policy suits them, without the context a licensed adviser would give, creates compliance risk and gains little. Engines quote facts more readily than recommendations anyway.

Avoid three other habits. Do not leave old promotion pages live after they end, because engines keep citing them. Do not hide eligibility in footnotes. And do not publish a "best of" list that ranks your own products first without saying who wrote it; engines and readers both discount it.

Our view: correction work pays faster than new content in finance. When an engine quotes a wrong fee about you, fix the source page first, then the third-party listings that repeat it. Our summary of the major AI accuracy studies explains why errors persist.

How to check where you stand

Write twenty questions a customer in Singapore would ask before choosing a product in your category, and run them. Record which firms appear, which facts are quoted and which pages are cited. Repeat on separate days, because answers vary from run to run.

At Sigzen AI, our AI answer monitor does this across six engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Google AI. It uses official APIs where they are offered and a licensed AI-answer data provider otherwise, and our audits run each prompt on three separate days. The free score is a smaller version of the same check; the audit adds the fact-by-fact comparison against your product pages.