Making Financial Services More Personal

Everyone needs help at some point or another with managing their finances. No matter what field you work in, these needs are likely to arise for everyone. For many years, FÉRIQUE was the place to go for people in the engineering field who needed financial services guidance.

Founded in 1974, FÉRIQUE offers fund management and investment services to clients throughout North America with a focus on providing their services to engineering professionals. They wanted to update their platform to attract young engineers. To accomplish this, they wanted a more attractive design and enhanced customer experience.

As a result of these changes, FÉRIQUE found itself in need of an updated site and a new client portal to reach their new audience. They turned to Valtech to help them meet those needs.

When a company has a predefined audience, they don’t have to work as hard on creating a universally applicable interface. However, when you’re looking to expand and grow your audience, these types of issues have to be considered.

For FÉRIQUE, this meant embarking on a full site update. The initial site was outdated and making use of webtools that were popular in the 90s. To meet its clients’ current expectations and to remain competitive on the market over the longer term by attracting younger clients, FÉRIQUE needed to update its transactional site.

In building out their new site, Valtech focused on improving user experience in three different areas: the client portal, new account creation and the advisor’s portal.

When designing a new site, there are a lot of different places you can begin. Perhaps there’s a particular function you need the site to perform, so you start designing from the standpoint of getting that specific functionality. For FÉRIQUE, we decided to put the customer journey at the forefront of our creation efforts.

When working with a client in the financial services sector, that often means trying to take a topic that can be complicated and simplifying it. The new client portal had to become a key channel to engage with clients and enable them to better manage their account. And before new clients even got there, they had to go through the new account creation process.

This is where the simplification of complex information and processes began. Nothing scares off new customers in financial services faster than including a lot of words and phrases that don’t make sense given their limited experience. Instead, we created a new custom web form that customers could fill out using plain words and clear examples to help them on their way.

For someone looking to save for retirement, it’s easier to gather information about how much money they have to put into an account and how they’d most like to see that money grow over time. And when the potential client enters this information, they get advice in real time from the experts at FÉRIQUE about what they should do next.

This blending of clear and uniform information from the potential client and the appropriate advice from experts was important for this project because offering their expertise is a large part of what FÉRIQUE does. While updating the site, we didn’t want to lose what the client was already best at.

People looking for help with their finances can turn to FÉRIQUE. When you do so, you’ll be given the option to open an account directly, or you’ll be able to submit information about your goals, a specific project or investment interests, and a qualified employee will reach out to you with the best advice.

In the first two months after the new site and client portal went live, FÉRIQUE reported an eight percent increase in new clients. Our confidence in projects from the financial services sector comes from our ability to partner with clients who have the expertise we don’t and taking their instructions and information and creating what they need. Our ability to rely on our client’s knowledge is what sets projects like FÉRIQUE apart.