2.39:1
Financial services
Regulation makes every firm sound the same. It says nothing about how you look.
Act one: the commercial case
Neon Frame Creative is a UK creative media studio that builds compliant brand, film and content for financial firms: strategy, imagery, film, design, web and social under one roof.
Trust is the product, and it is judged visually first.
Nobody can inspect an investment process the way they inspect a car. What a prospective client can inspect is the proxy: the website, the factsheet, the film, the person on camera. Financial services is the sector where presentation is most heavily discounted internally, on the basis that "our track record speaks for itself", and most heavily weighted by the client, who cannot read a track record but can absolutely read a website that was last touched in 2019.
Compliance flattens the words. It leaves the look wide open.
The FCA constrains what you can claim, so every firm’s copy converges on the same careful phrases. That makes the unregulated territory of design, photography, film and clarity the only ground left to compete on. The firm that explains a pension transfer in a two-minute film a client actually sends to their spouse has not made a promotion; it has made a distinction.
The next generation of clients is choosing now, on their phones.
Wealth is transferring to inheritors who never met the founding partner and feel no loyalty to the letterhead. They shortlist advisers, platforms and funds the way they shortlist everything: search, site, sixty seconds. Firms whose client books look secure are quietly ageing out of them, and the acquirers pricing those books can see it too.
A firm is trusted to the degree it can be clearly seen. Control the picture.
Act two: why Neon Frame
Six disciplines, read through how financial relationships actually start: search, scrutiny, referral, review meeting.
Positioning within the rules
What the firm is for and who it serves, expressed in language that survives compliance review without dying in it. Message architecture built alongside your compliance function, not thrown over the wall at it.
Films that make the complex sendable
Founder and adviser films that put a face on the fees, plain-language explainers for the questions every client asks, and client-story films with approvals, disclaimers and records handled as part of production rather than after it.
Imagery: people, process and data
Portraits and working stills that replace the handshake-over-a-graph stock, imagery of how the work actually happens, and data visualisation that makes performance and process legible without a footnote apologising for it.
Reports designed to be read
Identity systems that carry from pitch book to factsheet, annual and quarterly reports designed for the client rather than the archive, and the template suite that keeps every document on-brand after we leave.
Web that survives scrutiny
A fast, credible site that answers who you are, what you charge and how to start, with disclosures designed in rather than bolted on, and the sixty-second test passed before the visitor reaches the fee page.
Glow, Beam, Halo
Most firms start at Beam (positioning, a flagship film and the site to hold them) and move to Halo, where quarterly filming days and one design system keep every factsheet, post and pitch consistent.
See how the tiers workFinancial services: straight answers
Asked and answered
- How do you produce marketing that passes FCA compliance review?
- We bring your compliance function in at script and wireframe stage rather than at sign-off. Claims, disclosures and risk warnings are designed into the asset from the start, and we keep the approval records production generates. It is faster than writing it twice.
- How much does a financial services brand film cost in the UK?
- A single adviser or founder film is the smallest useful job. A launch package, meaning positioning, a flagship film, plain-language explainers and the site to hold them, is larger, and quarterly filming days on a retainer are priced against the number of people and documents involved. Compliance review time is scoped in, not billed as a surprise.
- Can you make a factsheet or annual report that clients actually read?
- That is the brief. Performance data still has to be exact, but exact and unreadable are not the same thing. We design the template suite once (typography, charts, disclosure furniture) so every quarter after that is production rather than redesign.
- Do you work with advisers, wealth managers and asset managers?
- All three, and the audiences differ. Advisers are competing for individual clients and referrals; wealth managers for the next generation of an existing book; asset managers for allocators reading a factsheet. The disciplines are the same, the emphasis is not.
Put your firm in frame
Tell us who your ideal client is, where the next generation of them is looking, and what compliance will and will not wear. We will come back with what we would make and what it costs.
Compliant always-on content
A content rhythm with compliance sign-off built into the workflow, insight and market content cut from quarterly filming days, and reporting that tracks enquiries and AUM conversations rather than vanity metrics.