FCS Capital Markets: 19 pages of regulated finance copy, written from scratch and cleared by legal

BeforeAfter

The challenge

FCS Capital Markets had two businesses and one website that treated them as the same thing. The traditional brokerage side covered cash equities, derivatives, fixed income and market intelligence. The newer side arranged securitisations: actively managed certificates and real-asset structures issued through collateralised special purpose vehicles. The old WordPress site opened on a City of London skyline photo and the line "Where Finance Meets Opportunity", with a flat navigation that gave a prospective institutional investor no way to tell the two apart.

In regulated finance that is not a presentation problem, it is an exposure. FCS acts as the arranger of these structures and is never the issuer. The issuer is the SPV, which is independently regulated. Any copy implying that FCS's own FCA permissions extended over the certificates would misdescribe the product and the firm's role in it. The same risk applied in reverse: the securitisation business needed enough technical depth to be credible with credit originators and fund managers, without reading as a regulated offer.

Doing nothing had a specific cost. The firm's competitors in securitisation, GenTwo, FlexFunds and Altarius, all ran dedicated, educational sites explaining the structures in detail. FCS was arranging the same instruments while sending prospects to a page that did not mention them. The brokerage side had the same problem in miniature: four distinct desks presented as one undifferentiated service.

They needed a team that could write the content itself from interviews with the firm's own partners, not just build a site around copy somebody else supplied, and that could put every page through legal review without the project stalling.

Strategy

The information architecture was the first deliverable, not the design. We split the site into two top-level territories: Capital Markets for the brokerage desks, Securitisation for the AMC and real-asset business, each with its own landing page, its own service pages and its own tone. Miguel A. Gonzalez, Global Managing Director, drove that naming decision and pushed for "Capital Markets" over a generic "Services" label, because the term carries meaning to the institutional audience that "services" does not.

Beneath those two territories we built four brokerage service pages (Cash Equities, Derivatives, Fixed Income, Market Intelligence), three securitisation pages (AMCs, Real Assets, AMC Creator) and six industry pages addressing the distinct buyer types: asset and wealth management, private banking, institutional investors and hedge funds, real-asset and alternative investment firms, credit originators and lenders, and corporate and industrial issuers. The firm supplied its own competitive set for each side of the business, and we used those references to calibrate depth and register page by page.

Delivery ran in two sprints, tracked against a content framework sheet listing every planned page, with a weekly Monday call.

Design

The direction was agreed in the second week: dark theme, corporate blue accents, motion and video, London visuals. The visual language carried the institutional register the audience expects, and the homepage opened on an animated globe graphic rather than stock photography of a skyline.

The tone needed one significant correction. The first drafts read as too commercial for the audience, and in September the direction was reset toward a tech-forward register closer to the structured-products platforms the firm competes with, while holding the sophistication of an investment bank. Every subsequent page was written to that calibration, and the earlier pages were re-toned to match. Heading capitalisation was adjusted to the compliance lead's house convention across the site.

Development

The site was built on Webflow's CMS plan. Background video runs through Vidzflow, and the homepage globe is animated with a GSAP timeline inside a Webflow code embed, driven by reusable CMS components rather than one-off page sections.

Two builds were specific to the regulatory context. A site-wide "Website Terms of Use" modal gates every page, requiring the visitor to confirm they are a professional client or eligible counterparty before continuing, matching the pattern the firm's securitisation competitors use. And the AMC Creator page was built as a step-by-step questionnaire so a prospective issuer could work through the structure of a certificate rather than read about it.

Organization structured data was implemented on the live build.

Compliance

This workstream ran in parallel with the whole project and shaped the copy more than any design decision. All wording placing the certificates under FCS's FCA oversight, or under FCA and FINMA oversight, was removed from the AMC and Real Assets pages so the firm's permissions could not be read as covering the independently regulated SPV. The crypto and digital asset industry page was cut entirely once it was established that the firm holds no crypto licences and can only securitise crypto funds. British spelling was enforced throughout, with "Securitisation" standardised across every page and navigation label. The firm's own website terms replaced our draft, and the Global Director of Legal and Compliance proofread the pages directly on the site.

Launch

The project was transferred into an FCS-owned Webflow workspace in October 2025, so the firm owns its hosting and its site rather than renting it from an agency. We prepared the DNS records for the firm's IT provider, who made the cutover, and the site went live on 12 January 2026. Post-launch QA ran through January, with fixes tracked in Teamwork.