Two theories of trust: how financial services design splits between business and consumer

We’ve discovered that financial services design styles often split along a formulaic line most people don’t notice. The ways trust for each business gets built is either directly between institutions or directly from a professional to their client. We try and blur the divisions, lessons learned with work for our clients NorthWall Capital, ICON Corporate Finance and Henwood Court.

This summer I’ve been thinking about our financial services design work and how it conveys trust. My team and I have realised that an evolution in our mindset has been brought about by working in parallel for two very different audiences: institutional and consumer.

When we design for a private equity firm or a wealth planning practice built for individual families, these pieces of work are necessarily different in style, applying two very different theories of how trust is formed. The former assumes their branding is ‘reputational’ and built between institutions, evaluating one another as peers. The latter assumes trust is built on the ‘country bank manager’ approach, with a single person, making a series of significant decisions that are inevitably deeply personal.

What’s interested me is the way in which we built not only our visual research for these projects but even the way the pages were structured, with a contrasting tone and flow that needed to back up the messaging. As we’ve worked across both types of firm, each approach has informed the other in fascinating ways I wanted to give a little thought to.

Business-centered design

Look across the institutional side of our own client work and there is a satisfying consistency of tone. The result is often a blend of ‘big vision’ paired with restraint. An example of this in practice might be a really distinctive use of graphics, type and colour combined with a cautious-compliance tone to the language. The signals we’re designing in are that the firm does not need to work hard to convince you, partly because marketing isn’t legally possible, but also the firm almost certainly wants to project a sense that conviction is central to their business.

1. NorthWall Capital

Our work for NorthWall Capital, a European credit investment firm, is a case in point. We took their existing identity and devised a highly individual design approach built on smooth custom animation and a considered use of type and colour. That same graphic language was carried across press releases, social posts and newsletters, so everything about the firm’s communications feels like it springs from the same well.

When NorthWall held its inaugural Investor Day at the Mandarin Oriental, we applied our visual system across every aspect of the experience, including signage, staging, folders and brochures.

The firm already had their own sense of confidence and intelligence, but their brand now matches that consistently everywhere investors meet the firm, not least on LinkedIn where business news is blended with personal achievement such as promotions or new hires, with those faces placed front and centre.

2. ICON Corporate Finance

ICON Corporate Finance shows a similar instinct, applied from a different visual angle. As M&A and capital raising advisers with hundreds of completed deals and over twenty years in business, ICON’s brief was to refresh their business for the next decade. The new brand was designed to give founders weighing the genuinely life-changing decision to sell their business a certainty that ICON’s experience and track record could carry them through it.

Our work applied a completely new identity and set of motion graphics. Yet amidst this design system lies structure and meaning. The idea at every stage was to provide clarity as well as colour to the pages and in particular placing both internal commentary and client testimonials on every single deal, providing dialogue such as writing within their Insights section, amid evidence of their competence.

So how do these pieces of work blur the lines I was speaking about earlier? To me, what’s interesting about both these visually different pieces of work is that at every turn, both place the calibre of each firm and their team at the centre of everything they do, trusting that an institutional audience is evaluating expertise and consistency with our design providing the structure behind that.

Consumer-centered design

3. Henwood Court

Our recent work for Henwood Court, a Chartered financial planning firm working with individual clients and families, sits on the other side of the business line entirely. The firm is a family business both in terms of leadership and spirit. The new website needed to place the consumer in the driving seat from the start while providing a sense of self-assurance that when it comes to family money, business sales or retirement, Henwood are the right people to help.

The visual brand was created to provide a context for the crisp, thoughtful words that were written especially for the new site, sometimes working directly with a design concept we’d created that allows a reader to take their time and build that all-important confidence.

We created a series of textures to bind the pages together which took their cue from hand-made craft. The subtle backdrops inspired by weaving or the texture of wood flooring, worked as both a graphic device and a careful metaphor for continuity. Henwood’s advice, much like their client’s money, is built by one generation and carried carefully into the next. Custom photography and smooth animation carry that warmth through the pages. Where the site needs to go the extra mile, Henwood Court’s proof lives in the voice of its current clients, speaking to its new ones with a wide-ranging series of video case studies which back up the team’s own words about what the firm does and why, in a relatable register.

What’s interesting is that ultimately the core difference between both approaches is in the evidence structure. Business-centered work asks you to trust a system. Consumer-centered work asks you to trust the person telling you about it. We’re looking to blur lines with dialogue, pitched in the right tone for each financial services client we work with.

Finding the right language between structure and texture

The interesting lesson from this work that the team and I will be carrying forward is that each of these two approaches to communication has solved a weakness the other might carry.

Business-centered design often forgets that even the most institutional decision is still made by a person, at a desk, on a particular afternoon, forming a private judgement about whether the firm they’ve been tasked to look into can be trusted with deals worth potentially millions of dollars. The design needs to eliminate any sense of risk while providing a human connection. NorthWall’s decision to carry a singular, considered visual language that previously only existed online to an in-person investor event is just one example of that instinct at work.

Consumer-centered design carries the opposite risk. Warmth without visible evidence of rigour or consistency can start to feel insubstantial once a decision grows larger or more complex. Working with Henwood Court, our answer to that risk was not to apply tone-deaf institutional restraint, which would have undercut the very warmth the brand requires. The evidence of their expertise is carried by the relatable, practical ‘nuts and bolts’ stories of their existing client base, backed by their brand at the corner of each of the videos.

Let me wrap up by making one thing clear: neither camp needs to become the other. What we’re interested in doing is creating the strongest work that borrows selectively across this divide. Our best work should have at its heart institutional confidence that always remembers the person or team making decisions, or personal warmth that still carries enough evidence backed with visual heft to be trusted with something serious. That cross-pollination of ideas within financial services design is closer to our belief in always considering the customer, an ‘outside-in-thinking’ strategy, than either approach. It starts from how the specific audience experiences trust, then builds a visual language to match.

Discover more of our work in financial services design

Henwood Court

NorthWall Capital

ICON Corporate Finance

Our work across the financial services sector