Financial services web design that survives an FCA audit, an SEO audit, and a high-net-worth referral
Wealth managers, mortgage brokers, IFAs, financial planners — financial services sites live in the intersection of regulatory compliance, brand credibility, and lead generation. Most agencies handle one of those three; the firms that win pick agencies who handle all three.
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Who I build for in financial services
Financial services has the highest-stakes web design brief in any commercial category. Get the regulatory disclosures wrong and you face an FCA enforcement notice. Get the SEO wrong and competitors with thinner expertise outrank you on the consumer queries that matter. Get the brand wrong and high-net-worth clients quietly route the next referral elsewhere. The firms that win build sites that survive all three audits.
The financial services clients I take on tend to fit one of these three shapes:
- Independent financial advisers (IFAs) and wealth managers competing on local trust and high-net-worth referrals
- Mortgage brokers needing high-volume consumer SEO plus integration with sourcing platforms (Twenty7tec, Trigold)
- Boutique investment firms, private banks, and family offices needing credibility-led design with measured digital presence
What Financial Services businesses get wrong about their websites
FCA financial promotion rules apply to every page, not just the disclaimer footer
UK financial services sites must comply with FCA's financial promotion rules across every page that mentions a regulated product or service. This means risk warnings on investment-product pages, accurate past-performance disclaimers on fund pages, regulated-status footnotes on mortgage and insurance pages, and a fair / clear / not-misleading test on every benefit claim. Most agency-built financial sites bury these in a footer disclaimer and call it compliant; the firms that get audit notices learn that page-by-page disclosure is the actual standard. The CMS structure has to support this — disclosure templates, version-controlled disclaimer text, audit logs of who changed what when.
Schema.org/FinancialProduct and FinancialService unlock real SEO
Most financial services sites have generic Organization schema or none at all. The win is shipping FinancialService schema on the firm-level page and FinancialProduct schema on every product page (mortgages, ISAs, pension wrappers, investment funds), with explicit areaServed, audience, and feesAndCommissions properties. Combined with proper LocalBusiness schema and Person schema for each adviser (with credentials, registration numbers, FCA reference numbers), the structured data tells Google exactly what regulated services this firm offers — and that knowledge graph signal compounds in both classic SEO and AI search citations.
Lead-gen forms must capture the right data without triggering KYC requirements prematurely
Financial services lead-gen has a regulatory gotcha most marketing teams miss. Capturing too much personal data on the initial enquiry form (DOB, NI number, current product holdings) can trigger Know-Your-Customer obligations before the firm has actually accepted the prospect as a client. The fix is a tiered enquiry approach — initial form captures name, email, brief context; the actual KYC happens in a controlled compliance environment after the adviser engages. Most marketing-led agencies design the form to maximise data capture; the compliance-aware build does the opposite.
What you actually get with the modern-stack approach
One senior team, no junior handoff
I am the senior on every engagement. Twelve thousand sites of practice across nine years at Seahawk Media. The kickoff conversation is with me; the build is delivered with senior engineers; the handover at the end is real code with documentation, not an agency-locked WordPress install.
Modern stack first — Next.js, Astro, Supabase, headless WordPress
Most agencies in the financial services space ship 30-plugin WordPress builds because that is what they know. I ship Next.js, Astro, and headless WordPress for the public site, with WordPress as the editorial back end only when the team is genuinely trained on wp-admin. The result: faster pages, smaller attack surface, lower hosting costs, longer-lasting site.
SEO transport that does not lose rankings
If you are migrating from an existing site, the SEO transport is the part that decides whether the migration is a clean handover or a six-month traffic recovery. Redirect maps from Search Console plus Ahrefs, Yoast or Rank Math metadata transport, schema preservation, hreflang continuity. The boring parts that 90% of agencies skip and 100% of post-launch reports complain about.
When you're ready
Book a 30-minute call. No slide deck, no qualification screen. You describe the financial services business, the brief, the timeline. I tell you whether I am the right person, and by the end of the call you have a stack pick, a price range, and a realistic delivery window.