CID, a software developer with a new platform for the asset management industry.

CID is a company of passionate software development titans that’s spent decades solving tough software challenges for some of the biggest enterprises in Europe. But when it spotted an opportunity to build a data insights platform for the asset and wealth management industry, it needed a new story, a new brand and a killer launch campaign to connect with a whole new audience.

CID’s main business is building bespoke software solutions for enterprises. But the company saw a gap in the financial services industry to improve how asset and wealth managers conduct investment research. They built Affinity, an investment insights platform that collates unstructured and qualitative data from across the web, news and other first-party data sources. Affinity needed its own brand and story that retained a connection to CID’s core business, but stood alone as a specific solution for a new (and mostly unknown) finance audience.

Traditional asset management research platforms — the Bloombergs and Factsets of this world — operate on structured, quantitative data only, which limits insights users can feed into their investment decisions. CID wanted to change this. It draws qualitative data from unstructured sources (think news articles), speeding up and enriching the research process, while making it easy to capture, sort, and integrate relevant findings into investment products.

We had to position Affinity carefully. Evangelizing qualitative data in and of itself wouldn’t cut it: asset managers have used this for years. But how CID’s platform enables them to use it —more effectively and without barriers — quickly became the key differentiator to frame the story. We went in hard on manual research and websites-trawling, and romanced a simple, richer way to work with (and combine) every available investment data source, on-demand.

We named the product Affinity, marking a fresh, more natural approach to investing. A new label — “thematic intelligence” — reflected its specific method for analyzing long-term trends, and underscored our naming for Affinity’s components:

CID’s existing site was all about bespoke enterprise solutions — still a vital part of the business, but irrelevant for investment managers. It was critical to tell Affinity’s story on the site without disrupting anything. So we bumped the new site way up the priority list (before we’d even made brand guidelines) and ran an accelerated messaging workshop to spin up new copy for key pages that felt closest to our end goal.

As web builds go, this was tough. We needed one site to serve two distinct audiences, each with specific messaging, products and user journeys. The result is a balanced, seamless experience, built to help users quickly self-direct towards relevant content that signposts they’re in the right place.

The Affinity work kickstarted a total brand overhaul. The client wanted a visual brand that clearly signalled “financial services” (lots of blues and blacks) while still standing out from the pack. The eventual sweet spot included a new color palette and photography style, as well as illustrations, icons and gradients.

Reaching finance audiences is tricky: they’re time poor, and bombarded with content. We chose an ABM approach, leaning on the client’s detailed persona and sales cycle knowledge (plus existing materials) to hit the ground running.

Our copy and content performance teams worked in lockstep, crafting a tailored story for each and every prospect. We’ve optimized it on a monthly basis since launching. The result — constant iteration across LinkedIn, Content Syndication and PPC ads — delivered exactly what was needed.