Human Touch: What the big 4 financial consultancies are missing in their design
Human touch: Why is it imperative in finance design?
Finance design – Why is designing for finance so important? What if you could find the best consultant for your company and chat with him? What if you could create your unique home page for e.g. KPMG according to your own interests? What if you could easily find content in a huge library of insight, articles, videos, people…?
Basing ourselves on the current examples of the most famous consulting companies, the Big 4, we sat down and decided to disrupt the financial consulting business by redesigning their websites and changing the experience for the user(s). Since, we are targeting Decision Makers and people who are interested in working with the companies we have designed a compelling case for these Big 4 to provide a more human touch to their websites. What is the best way to build a design for finance?
The Big 4 financial consulting names
There are many consulting companies in the world, but the “Big 4” are the ones that are present in almost every country in the world, and the ones that are known for having the best consultants. These are PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte, the four largest international accounting and professional services firms. These firms audit the majority of all public-traded companies as well as other thousands and thousands of firms of different sizes and industries.
These companies offer a wide range of services to a wide range of industries. But that’s not all, in order to show that they are the better experts, these companies have a lot of content in the form of articles, insights… they want to show in the front pages of their websites.
What’s currently out there in finance design?
We had a look at their websites and all 4 of them had a similar structure, some nicely designed, but the journey of the users was pretty much the same.
Nowadays, if you type pwc.com, ey.com, deloitte.com or kpmg.com, you will land on a homepage with a company’s big insight upfront and a bunch of different articles, services, key people, etc. Useful information that is well classified, well structured and well presented, but not personalized to the user. I.e. it is the same stuff shown to every user, regardless if he’s interested in just automobile industry, he’s always going to land in the same homepage as anybody else.
Problems we experienced in finance design
So, we went through all 4 websites and the problems we faced were two:
- Saw too much information that may not be of every user’s interest.
- Took a while to connect with the right person and the website didn’t really push us towards it.
- I’m treated equally whether I’m an executive of an important company or I’m a “nobody”.
- The search is not good. For a website that has so much content in different forms, searching content is really basic.
- Not driving me to get onboarded.
We dared to disrupt the domain of finance design
Hence, we have dared ourselves and challenged us to disrupt this field too, and we’ve redesigned a financial consulting website with 4 touché points: credibility, personalization, engagement and search engine. To see our result, watch the clip.
Designing Financial Consulting Website from Netbramha Studios on Vimeo .
“This way, our design will offer the experience that the user of nowadays deserves: a customized website where she/he can flow through, engage with, find any specific content and discover more in the best way, onboard easily and connect directly with a consultant”
Credibility
All Big 4 websites want to show their credibility, expertise, professionality and the main way is by showing content, a lot of content, about every industry. We’re not going to change that but, as a user, I am already an expert in the automobile industry and I don’t need anyone to define me what the industry is about. I also don’t need to see content about other industries and markets I’m not interested in.
Our changes here: not many. We are going to keep that necessary credibility but make it more discrete. The users are companies, experts in their industry and we don’t want to underestimate them. Also, within all the credibility consulting companies can show, we are just going to show whatever the user is interested in: Automobile industry, Taxation… making this way, credibility more discrete.
Personalization in financial consulting
We want to create a financial consulting website where the user is king. Not one where it shows the same info to every user: a global look of the company, showing off how great they are, how much they know about the trending topics in the economy, about the future, about each and every industry, but one that gets only the relevant information to each user, one that the user can personalize and engage with.
Therefore, our landing page will be just a selection for the user to choose whatever topics he’s interested in, and after that, the home page will be totally personalized to him, showing only articles, insights, videos, key people that the user will find useful.
Engagement
This is another main thing we’ve changed. We wanted to increase the number of user on-boardings throughout the website. So we’ve decided to make an easy onboarding that’s appropriate to the PwC’s, Deloitte’s, KPMG’s and EY’s of the future.
How? Creating some engagement for the user, which to date, was none.
We have thought about what a user’s motivations would be to get on-boarded, and we came up with this: You’re an automotive company that wants to know more about the self-driving cars or any trending topic in your industry, because you want to check if you could work with these guys. You would like to speak directly to one of the guys, hence we created a live chat with consultants. A chat where you can speak to any consultant you wish, or we can find you one that’s suitable to your profile. If he’s not online, don’t worry, you can leave him an email.
Same experience of a live customer service chat, but for consulting companies, where a professional consultant is available for a client. However, for any simple help, there’ll be a chatbot.
These gives the user an engagement with an expert in his field that nowadays is not available. To be able to do this, there is an on-boarding, where the user has to fill in information about himself and the company, to get the appropriate experience.
No doubt about that being very useful to the user, while quite tricky to adjust to the company. We are adding a task to an already busy expert’s day-to-day, but surely these will be necessary adjustments in the market. Only question is who of the 4 will disrupt in this way first?
Search Engine for financial consulting websites and finance design
You would also like to check out what they have to show about the topics you’re concerned about. Hence, we have redesigned a financial consulting website with a strong focus in the search engine, creating one that allows the user see all results clearer and more structured.
The way ahead
These are the four main points that we have considered when doing the redesign. Four points that change completely the function of a financial consulting website and improves its use for the user. Four points that disrupt the financial consulting websites by creating a new journey experience.
The redesign would be indeed a very big step for the consultant firms, as it brings in a whole new approach to the clients and changes entirely how the financial consulting companies work. Turning into a user-centered approach is a trend that is happening in every domain, so why wouldn’t it also happen for financial consulting websites?
But the real question is: Who do you think will be the first one among the Big 4 in anticipating that trend and implementing this approach? Share your thoughts in the comment section!
