/// SECTOR / FINANCIAL SERVICES

FINANCIAL SERVICES WEB DEVELOPMENT. IT HAS TO PASS REVIEW.

Websites and client portals for advisory firms, lenders, fintech, and insurance — built so the compliance review at the end confirms what was designed at the start, instead of sending the whole thing back.

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[ ALL SERVICES ]

/// KNOWN FAILURE MODE

THE LAUNCH THAT COMPLIANCE KILLED

A firm hires an agency. The agency designs something handsome, writes confident copy about returns, adds a testimonial carousel and a live chat widget, and ships it to staging. Then compliance reads it. The performance language has to go. The testimonials cannot run in that form. Nothing on the site is being archived, so every page is an unretained communication. Six weeks of work goes back in the box.

That is not a compliance problem. It is a sequencing problem. The rules governing what a regulated firm may publish, and what it must retain, are knowable on day one — they are the most stable input in the entire project. An agency that treats them as a final approval gate rather than a design constraint has chosen to find out the expensive way.

We ask who reviews this and against what, before anything is designed. Then we build the review into the workflow: content that cannot ship without sign-off, disclosures bound to the claims they qualify, and an archive of what was published and when. The review at the end becomes a formality, which is what it is supposed to be.

/// CAPABILITY MANIFESTWHAT WE BUILD IN THIS SECTOR

BUILT FOR THE AUDIT TRAIL

FIRM & ADVISORY SITES

Marketing sites for RIAs, broker-dealers, and advisory practices where every claim is traceable to something defensible and disclosures travel with the content they qualify rather than living on a page nobody reads.

CLIENT PORTALS

Authenticated areas with real session handling, role-based access, and document delivery — built when a portal earns its keep, and argued against when your custodian already provides one that works.

LEAD & INTAKE FLOWS

Prospect intake that captures what the firm needs to qualify someone without collecting account numbers or identifiers it has no business holding. What is collected is a deliberate decision, not a form template.

CALCULATORS & TOOLS

Rate, payment, and planning tools that are accurate, that show their assumptions, and that carry the language your reviewer requires. An unqualified projection is a liability wearing an interaction design.

CORE & CRM INTEGRATION

Connections into the core banking platform, CRM, or custodian feed you already run, so the website stops being a parallel system somebody rekeys into Salesforce every Monday morning.

CONTENT GOVERNANCE

Editorial workflow with review states, so marketing can publish and compliance can approve without either one becoming a bottleneck or a rubber stamp. Every version is retained.

/// CONSTRAINT SET

THE RULES THAT SHAPE THE ARCHITECTURE

REG / RETENTION

EVERYTHING PUBLISHED IS ARCHIVED

Page versions, published dates, and approvals are captured so you can produce what the site said on a given day. Firms subject to books-and-records rules need this and are routinely surprised that their CMS does not do it.

REG / DISCLOSURE

DISCLOSURES BOUND TO CLAIMS

Required language is attached to the component that triggers it, not appended to a footer. If a claim moves to another page, the disclosure moves with it — the failure mode is a page that gets syndicated without its qualifiers.

SEC / PCI

CARD AND ACCOUNT DATA NEVER LANDS HERE

Payment and account flows are tokenised through the processor so raw card or account numbers never touch our infrastructure. The cheapest way to secure sensitive data is not to be holding it.

SEC / POSTURE

A SECURITY POSTURE YOU CAN SHOW SOMEONE

Hardened headers, dependency scanning, least-privilege access, and encryption in transit and at rest — documented, so when a bank partner or enterprise client sends a diligence questionnaire the answers already exist.

REG / PRIVACY

TRACKING THAT SURVIVES A PRIVACY REVIEW

Analytics and advertising configured so account identifiers and application detail cannot leak into third-party payloads, with consent handling appropriate to the jurisdictions you actually operate in.

A11Y / ACCESS

WCAG 2.1 AA AS A BUILD REQUIREMENT

Accessibility is both an obligation and a plain commercial fact in financial services, where the customer base skews older and interfaces that assume perfect vision and a steady hand quietly exclude paying clients.

We build to these requirements and document what we did. We are engineers, not your compliance counsel — your reviewer signs off, and we give them something legible to sign off on.

/// FIELD REPORTS

CLIENT TRANSMISSIONS

VERIFIED OPERATOR FEEDBACK // CLEARANCE LEVEL: PUBLIC

"Nicklaus was absolutely fantastic to work with. He completely transformed our website for The CPG Co-Op, and the end result is better than I could have imagined. What really sets Nicklaus apart is that he’s not just a great designer—he has a deep understanding of the technical side of websites and the backend functionality that makes everything work. He was able to take a fairly complex project, handle the technical details seamlessly, and still make the entire process incredibly easy for me as someone who is, frankly, a total luddite when it comes to this stuff. He also built the site in a way that makes it incredibly easy for me to manage and make changes myself, which means we aren’t constantly paying someone every time we need to update something. That was a huge win for us. He was responsive, collaborative, incredibly fast, and genuinely cared about getting it right. I would highly recommend Nicklaus to anyone looking for someone who can bring the creative vision and the technical expertise to actually execute it. He made the whole process easy—and delivered a website we absolutely love."

EMILY KEALEY

FOUNDER // THE CPG CO-OP

ON THE CPG CO-OP

/// FIELD QUESTIONS

STRAIGHT ANSWERS

CAN YOU WORK WITHIN OUR COMPLIANCE REVIEW PROCESS?

Yes, and we would rather design around it from the start than discover it at the end. Tell us who reviews, what standard they review against, and how long they take, and we build that into the schedule and the publishing workflow. The firms that have the worst launches are the ones that treat review as a final gate.

DO YOU HANDLE BOOKS-AND-RECORDS RETENTION?

We build the site so published content is versioned and retrievable with dates and approvals attached, and we integrate with a dedicated archiving vendor when your obligations call for one. What we do not do is tell you which rules apply to your firm — that is your compliance officer’s call, and we build to whatever they specify.

IS A CLIENT PORTAL WORTH BUILDING?

Often not. If your custodian or core provider already offers one your clients will actually use, a second portal splits the experience and doubles the security surface for no gain. We will tell you when that is the case. Where a portal does earn its place, it is usually because you are delivering something no existing system covers.

CAN YOU INTEGRATE WITH OUR CRM OR CORE PLATFORM?

Usually. Salesforce, Redtail, Wealthbox, HubSpot and the major core providers all expose something workable. We confirm exactly what is available during scoping rather than promising the integration and discovering the limitation in week six. If a vendor offers nothing usable, you hear that before you commit.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE SECURITY DILIGENCE FROM OUR PARTNERS?

By having the answers ready. Bank partners and enterprise clients send questionnaires covering encryption, access control, dependency management, incident response, and data residency. We document those decisions as we make them, so responding is a retrieval exercise rather than a fire drill.

WHAT DOES A FINANCIAL SERVICES BUILD COST?

A marketing site for an advisory firm sits in the same range as any well-built custom site. Anything authenticated, integrated with a core system, or subject to formal archiving costs more, because the review cycle and the integration set the pace. You get a fixed number in writing after scoping — see /pricing for how we arrive at it.

/// ADJACENT SECTORSSAME ENGINEERING, DIFFERENT CONSTRAINTS

SECTOR / MED-01

Working in a sector not listed? Tell us what you build — the constraints are the interesting part.

/// NEXT STEP

SEND US YOUR REVIEW CHECKLIST.

Give us the current site and the standard your compliance team applies to it. We will tell you what would not survive review today — within 24 hours, no engagement required.