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When tech needs to feel human

What’s the point of an algorithm that’s smart if no one trusts it?

AI is reshap­ing what finan­cial exper­tise looks like. Algo­rithms now analyse, opti­mise and advise faster than any human ever could. But as tech­nol­o­gy gets smarter, trust gets hard­er. The more mechan­i­cal the expe­ri­ence, the more investors crave warmth, reas­sur­ance and human con­text. The win­ners in this sec­tor like so many oth­ers won’t be those who auto­mate the most, but those who human­ise the best.

Case Study

Advies and the algo­rithm with a human name

How do you scale a busi­ness found­ed on rela­tion­ships and human trust, when the mar­ket is being reshaped by fast, fric­tion­less algo­rithms? Advies, an inde­pen­dent wealth advi­so­ry firm in Lon­don, had grown through refer­rals and per­son­al rela­tion­ships. But to scale, some­thing had to shift. At the same time, the mar­ket was being re-ener­gised by a wave of mod­ern robo-advis­ers mak­ing invest­ing sim­ple, fast and con­ve­nient. Advies had some­thing far more pow­er­ful, a pro­pri­etary invest­ment tool that con­sis­tent­ly out­per­formed the mar­ket, but it looked and felt like gener­ic tech. Investors did­n’t get it’s pow­er or believe it. It felt com­plex and not compelling.

Turn­ing a tool into a brand
In an age when algo­rithms can do the work, brands have to do the feel­ing. Advies’s tool didn’t need more data; it need­ed a soul. We gave it one with a name, a tone, a sto­ry that expressed the human intel­li­gence behind the code.

We called it Vie, mean­ing life. Because investors don’t care about algo­rithms, they care about out­comes, about what per­for­mance means in human terms. It was about a bet­ter life, ear­ly retire­ment, that boat they’d always want­ed. The name also lit­er­al­ly lives inside Advies, giv­ing the prod­uct a sense of belong­ing while ener­gis­ing the par­ent brand.

Per­for­mance with personality

We gave Vie its own con­fi­dent, human tone. We replaced jar­gon with four sim­ple ben­e­fits investors actu­al­ly cared about. The result was a brand that felt alive, cred­i­ble and emo­tion­al­ly res­o­nant, con­nect­ing tech­nol­o­gy, cul­ture and sto­ry to dri­ve growth at scale.

Brand­ing the invis­i­ble 
Every busi­ness now has some form of algo­rithm, plat­form or sys­tem doing the heavy lift­ing behind the scenes. But the real oppor­tu­ni­ty is in what you wrap around it. Because when log­ic becomes the com­mod­i­ty, feel­ing becomes the dif­fer­en­tia­tor. The busi­ness­es that thrive next won’t just code smarter, they’ll also con­nect deep­er. Brand­ing an algo­rithm isn’t about adding pol­ish. It’s about giv­ing tech­nol­o­gy a human sto­ry peo­ple can trust, believe in and buy into. 

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