Happy Cog designs, builds, and markets for banks, insurers, advisory firms, and credit unions.
We're a full-service digital agency, which here means one team for the website, the app, and the media plan, working inside the same review cycles our clients live in. We built the iOS and Android apps that Capital One's small business customers use to take card payments in person, and we moved a credit union onto a new brand and a new domain without giving up its organic traffic. For an advisory firm, we place programmatic display against wealth-qualified households at roughly a dollar CPM, and we built the return path that ties a closed relationship back to the search that started it. Design, development, and digital marketing all sit under one roof here.
Marketing teams at banks, carriers, and advisory firms rarely run short on ideas. The harder part is getting an idea approved, launched, and measured, and that's the work we've spent more than two decades learning to do.
An advisory firm with 44 offices challenged us to take random, unorganized marketing campaigns and turn them into a cohesive strategy. Eight months in:
50%
lower cost per lead between the launch quarter and the next
46.4M
qualified impressions against verified wealth tiers, at roughly a dollar CPM
2.4×
branded search demand against its baseline four years earlier
03 / Clients
Some of the organizations we've worked with in financial services
04 / One team
You work with the same senior team across all three disciplines.
Our longest-running financial services relationship covers every one of them. We design and build the carrier's web properties in the United States and Canada, run its paid search and SEO programs, own its analytics, and sit in the room when it plans the year. Nobody hands the account between departments, because there are no departments to hand it to.
That matters more here than in most categories. A bank's rate table is a development problem, a compliance problem, and a conversion problem at the same time, and one team that understands all three usually costs less than three teams that each understand one.
05 / Compliance
We plan around compliance from the first week, not the last.
Our media team builds review cycles into the flight calendar, so legal review isn't the reason a launch slips.
For registered investment advisors, every placement we run goes through SEC Marketing Rule review. We write the media plan with that in mind, which means brand-led and education-led creative and no performance claims in the assets. Broker-dealer material answers to FINRA 2210, and our team knows which review track a piece needs before anyone builds it.
Insurance advertising answers to state departments of insurance, and for carriers that sell through agents the conversion isn't a purchase at all. It's a proposal request routed to a broker, which changes how we structure bidding, tracking, and the page the click lands on.
Meta classifies credit and financial products as a Special Ad Category, which removes most of the targeting precision agencies rely on. We've run inside that constraint at CPMs under four dollars by putting the work into creative and measurement rather than into audience levers we aren't permitted to pull. Google's financial products verification and advertiser identity requirements carry their own timeline, and we handle those filings for you.
Accessibility belongs in this section too. WCAG conformance now shows up in procurement documents across the category, and we've been treating it as everyone's job on the team since long before the current rules arrived.
06 / Paid media
Paid media built to produce pipeline your sales team recognizes.
Our accounts in this category share a shape: branded defense, high-intent non-branded terms, competitor terms where they clear review, retargeting, and an audience layer sitting on top of all of it. That audience layer is usually where a financial services campaign is won or lost, so we work with Windfall, Equifax IXI net-worth tiers, and custom segments built through LiveRamp to reach households that resemble the client's actual book rather than a lookalike of it.
A worked example
One diagnosis from a live account is worth sharing, because it's the mistake we see most often. An advisory firm was bidding on "financial advisor near me" and sending the traffic to its homepage. Cost per click was high, quality was poor, and the reflex is to call that a landing page problem. It's both. A homepage isn't an answer to that query, so Quality Score suffers, and near-me advisor terms also pull in people nowhere near the firm's client profile. We moved the destination to the locations page, added location insertion to the headlines with a clean fallback, expanded the negative keyword list, and layered an income audience over the top. All four had to happen.
We run Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, Meta, Reddit, TikTok, Yahoo DSP, and Simpli.fi, and we're candid about which ones don't earn a place in a given plan. Our team has been automating the parts of this work that machines do better since well before it was fashionable, and we've written about where we still keep a human in the loop.
07 / Brand campaigns
Brand campaigns that reach wealthy households where they already are.
Awareness spending is the first line cut in this category, usually because nobody can prove it worked, so we treat it as a measurement problem from the start. Programmatic display and video against verified wealth tiers has delivered 46.4 million qualified impressions at roughly a dollar CPM for one advisory client, bought for frequency rather than reach, on the reasoning that reaching a defined audience often enough is what moves it. On top of that we recommend a brand lift study, because a measured number is what lets a CMO defend the budget next year.
In-cabin airline
Identity-verified in-cabin airline networks put a brand in front of premium-cabin flyers.
Live-event CTV
Tentpole live-event CTV, the golf and tennis majors, the US Open, the Winter Olympics, can be bought programmatically with wealth data layered over it.
Private aviation DOOH
Digital out-of-home at private aviation terminals, where the audience is defined by the place itself.
Luxury place-based
Premium golf courses, marinas, and seasonal luxury markets, planned by season rather than by flight.
Editorial and audio
First-party units in the financial press. Some of this we've already run and some we're launching now, and we'll always tell you which is which.
Native
Native units that sit inside the financial press in the publication's own format, written to carry the disclosure language review asks for.
Geofencing
Geofenced mobile targeting around private clubs, competitor branches, and the neighborhoods a wealth tier actually lives in.
Audience-based search
Search campaigns with net-worth and income segments layered on top, so the budget follows households that resemble the book.
Branded search volume is the truest read available on brand strength, and it's the number an upper-funnel campaign exists to move. We track it monthly for our financial services clients. One advisory firm's branded volume reached an all-time high of roughly 5,500 monthly searches during our engagement, about 2.4 times its baseline four years earlier.
08 / Measurement
The sale closes months later, in a system that isn't your website.
Bidding optimizes toward revenue, not volume
01
Click
02
Lead capture, with the click ID attached
03
CRM
04
Closed deal
05
Back into the ad platforms
An advisory relationship closes weeks or months after the click, and a bound policy closes inside a policy administration system. Neither event fires a pixel, which is why so many financial services accounts end up optimizing toward form fills that sales quietly ignores.
We build the return path, and we've written up the method in detail. Click identifiers get captured at the point of lead capture and travel with the record through the CRM, and when a deal closes we import it back into the ad platforms so bidding optimizes toward revenue rather than volume. The shape of it changes with the client. One insurance carrier's qualified opportunities come out of Marketo on a schedule. A wealth management client receives a weekly conversion report at the individual lead level, matched to CRM record IDs and granular enough to hand straight to a sales leader.
Our analytics team owns the layer underneath: GA4 implementation, server-side tagging, consent management, and the first-party data foundation that has quietly become the audience strategy in this category. Measuring accurately without third-party cookies is its own discipline now, and we keep a current playbook on it.
Your next client may ask an assistant which firm to use before they ask you.
Search in financial services has always turned on third-party credibility as much as on your own pages, and generative answers have made that more so. When someone asks an assistant to name fee-only advisors in Denver, the answer gets assembled out of citations, and a firm can be entirely absent from it while ranking well in classic results. Our position is that SEO is no longer enough on its own, and we've mapped what it takes to show up in answer engines.
We measure that rather than guess at it. Our SEO team builds a representative set of prompts reflecting how prospects actually ask about a category, baselines where the brand is and isn't cited, and re-runs the set on a schedule so the trend is visible. We designed exactly this study for a fund family in the sustainable investing category, and another client asked us to put ongoing prompt tracking in place across their site.
One recommendation comes up on nearly every financial services audit we run, which is to move the resource library out of PDFs and into indexable HTML. Firms in this category tend to publish their best material as downloads, which assistants can't reliably parse and therefore won't cite. The work isn't glamorous, and it moves the number.
The rest of the practice covers what you'd expect and should still ask about: entity and knowledge-panel consistency across advisor, office, and product pages, local visibility at multi-office scale (verified business profiles across dozens of locations, in one client's case 44 of them), technical crawlability and Core Web Vitals, structured data, and a deliberate policy on which AI crawlers you allow. Referral patterns from assistants shift with every model release, and we track those shifts as they happen.
10 / Design
In financial services, trust is the product, so design carries more of the weight.
Our design work in this category starts with the people who'll use the thing, and it brings the client's own team into the process rather than presenting to them at the end. Someone comparing mortgage rates or vetting an advisor is making a decision with real consequences, and the design job is legibility, an honest hierarchy, and clarity about what they're agreeing to before they agree to it. Our design leadership has written a primer on building trust this way, and the same thinking runs through our wider UX practice.
When NEFCU rebranded as Jovia Financial Credit Union, we designed and rebuilt the site and adjusted the incoming brand palette to meet accessibility contrast standards before a line of it shipped, a correction that's cheap in design and expensive after launch. We also built tools rather than forms wherever we could, including interactive rate charts and an earnings estimator that let a member answer their own question without talking to anyone first. Fewer leads came off that page, and better ones.
Newmark has thousands of producers, so our design and development teams built the firm a brand hub, a digital asset management platform that gets on-brand material into a broker's hands quickly enough that they'll actually use it. A design system nobody can find is a design system that doesn't exist.
We build the CMS your marketing team can actually operate.
Craft, WordPress VIP, and headless architectures account for most of our work in this category, and the question we care about is what your team can change on a Tuesday afternoon without filing a ticket. That covers rate tables, disclosure blocks with version history, product and advisor directories, multi-market and multi-country properties (one carrier we support runs separate United States and Canadian sites off shared infrastructure), and editorial workflow with approval gates that mirror your real compliance chain instead of a generic two-step review. If you're still choosing a platform, we've written down the eight questions that actually decide it.
MainStreet's redesign onto WordPress VIP is a good example of the priority, since the migration mattered less to the client than what its marketing team could ship in the months afterward. Filene, the credit union movement's research institute, needed something different again: a Craft build that could carry a deep research library and stay findable inside it.
We're a WordPress VIP Premier Partner, a Craft Verified Partner, and a Stripe Premier Partner. That last one matters more here than it sounds, because payments, subscription billing, and in-person card readers come up constantly in financial services builds. The Capital One apps run on Stripe Connect and Tap-to-Pay, and we've built on Stripe Terminal and Stripe Billing for other clients.
The questions your security team will ask, answered before they ask them.
An RFP reached us this year from a digital bank looking for an agency with a proven record of optimizing secure, compliant, integrated enterprise WordPress environments. That's the shape of the requirement across this category, and it's why we treat security and performance as one conversation rather than two.
Our engineering team works on secure hosting architecture, penetration test remediation, dependency and patch discipline, uptime monitoring and incident response, single sign-on and role-based access control, and Core Web Vitals work in environments where you can't simply delete the tag manager and call it a win. Performance optimization inside a regulated stack is mostly a sequencing problem, since every third-party script on the page is there because somebody with authority put it there.
Plenty of what we're handed in this category is a system nobody wants to touch, and modernizing it without a rewrite is a specialty of ours.
13 / Personalization
Personalization here usually means getting someone to the right human.
Retail personalization merchandises products. Financial services personalization routes people to the nearest office, the right advisor, the appropriate broker, or the product that fits their situation.
We're working through an approach right now with an advisory firm that has 44 offices. Their paid search campaigns can pass a visitor's location into the URL as a numeric identifier through the tracking template. The locations page reads that parameter, matches it against a lookup table we supply, and renders the nearest office at the top with the rest below, falling back cleanly to the standard page when the parameter is empty or unmatched. One campaign, one URL, and 44 correct destinations, with click tracking intact and the visitor still free to choose a different office if we guessed wrong.
We also build authenticated experiences, member and client portals, and progressive profiling that collects less and respects consent.
Wealth management and registered investment advisors.
Multi-office advisory firms, family office positioning, high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth acquisition, and advisor-level routing. Our current work here spans paid search, programmatic, LinkedIn, local organic foundations, and lead-level reporting tied to CRM records.
Banking and credit unions.
Retail and small business banking, digital-first banks, and cooperative research. We built Capital One's iOS and Android apps for its small business customers, rebranded and rebuilt Jovia Financial Credit Union, and designed and built Filene.org for the credit union movement's research institute.
Insurance and insurtech.
High-net-worth personal lines, specialty and mutual carriers, direct-to-consumer insurtech, and broker-mediated funnels. Our work runs from a full-service relationship with a reciprocal exchange serving affluent households to multi-channel acquisition for a direct-to-consumer jewelry and watch insurer, which draws on the same playbook as our e-commerce practice.
Asset management and economic research.
Fund families, including values-based and sustainable mandates, where the AI citation problem is most acute because the buying question is a values question and the answer gets assembled from third-party sources. Adjacent to that, we rebuilt the Institute for New Economic Thinking from the CMS up.
Fintech and B2B financial services.
Platforms, consultancies, and financial media, where the pipeline is long, the buying committee is large, and the reporting has to reach revenue. MainStreet sits here, and much of the approach overlaps with how we work across B2B generally.
Commercial real estate and capital markets.
Brand systems, producer-facing tooling, and digital asset management at a scale where thousands of people need on-brand material without a designer in the loop. Newmark is the current example, and Coldwell Banker Previews International is the one we've been doing longest.
Adjacent categories we know well include law firms and mission-driven organizations, both of which share the compliance and long-consideration dynamics of financial services.
15 / Case studies
Selected work
Jovia Financial Credit Union
NEFCU's rebrand to Jovia meant a new name, a new website, and a new domain, and the domain change was the part that carried real risk to a primary source of new members. Our team designed and built the site on Craft CMS inside the incoming brand framework, corrected the brand colors to meet web accessibility standards, implemented Algolia-powered search, and built custom interactive features including rate charts and an earnings estimator. We planned and executed the redirect strategy off the old domain and used the project as the moment to establish the keyword and metadata foundation. Conversions rose in the first month against the previous site, and the following year showed further gains.
A reciprocal exchange serving affluent households has worked with us across design, development, analytics, SEO, and paid media for years, on properties in both the United States and Canada. Because the carrier sells through independent brokers, the conversion is a proposal request rather than a purchase, so we structured the paid search account around branded defense, high-value home coverage, and wealth-data audiences, and we import qualified opportunities back out of the client's marketing automation platform so bidding optimizes toward business the brokers actually wrote. Paid search conversions grew substantially year over year while the account consolidated onto the audience strategy that was working.
A multi-office registered investment advisor
An advisory firm with 44 offices challenged us to take random, unorganized marketing campaigns and turn them into a cohesive strategy. Over eight months our team built a coordinated program across paid search on Google and Microsoft, programmatic display against wealth-qualified audiences, LinkedIn targeting of professionals in wealth-transition moments, and verified local and organic foundations across every office. Cost per lead fell by roughly half between the launch quarter and the next, click-through rates climbed as we concentrated spend on the highest-intent queries, and branded search demand reached an all-time high during the engagement. The upper-funnel phase and a brand lift study are launching now.
We'd rather meet them in week one than in week six. For advisory clients we build the SEC Marketing Rule review cycle into the flight calendar and write creative that's designed to clear it the first time, which mostly means education-led messaging and no performance claims. For carriers and broker-dealers we do the same with state filings and FINRA 2210. The goal is that your reviewer sees material they can approve rather than material they have to fix.
Can you prove marketing impact when the sale closes months later and offline?+
Yes, and it's one of the reasons clients hire us. We capture the click identifier at lead capture, keep it attached to the record through your CRM, and import the closed outcome back into the ad platforms so bidding optimizes toward revenue instead of form fills. You get reporting at the individual lead level that a sales leader will recognize. There's a longer explanation of how it works here.
We're on WordPress VIP and can't move. Can you still help?+
That's a good place to be, and we're a WordPress VIP Premier Partner, so yes. A fair amount of our financial services engineering work is performance, security, and integration work inside enterprise WordPress environments that aren't going anywhere.
How do you handle the advertising restrictions on credit and financial products?+
We plan for them. Meta's Special Ad Category strips out much of the targeting precision, so we shift the work into creative testing and measurement and accept that the audience levers aren't available. Google's financial products verification takes time, and we handle the filings. Neither one is a reason a campaign underperforms, though both are reasons a campaign needs a longer runway than an unrestricted category.
What does an engagement look like if we only need one of the three disciplines?+
It looks like that one discipline, done well. Plenty of our financial services clients hired us for paid media alone or for a build alone. The advantage of the other two sitting nearby is that when a media problem turns out to be a landing page problem, or a build question turns out to be a search question, the answer doesn't require a second procurement cycle.
Who's actually on the account?+
Senior people, and the same ones over time. Our co-founder leads the digital marketing practice and is personally involved in the financial services accounts. There's no model here where partners pitch the work and juniors deliver it.
17 / Start a conversation
Tell us what you're trying to move this year.
Whether it's a replatform your security team will sign off on, a paid program that produces leads your advisors want to call, or visibility in the answers your prospects are already getting from an assistant, we'd like to hear about it. A first conversation is a conversation, not a pitch.
Tell us what you're solving for.
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