Concordia Wealth Planning brands its app with Foster Commerce

Concordia Wealth Planning (CWP) is a boutique financial planning and investment management firm on a mission to redefine wealth planning. The heart of CWPs’ approach is to create better life outcomes for clients through holistic financial planning. As a fiduciary, CWP serves individuals across the wealth spectrum and at any stage of their financial life cycle.

To support its mission and broaden its reach, CWP sought a digital partner to help build a new digital product.

CWP leadership chose Foster Commerce as their development partner because of its well-rounded team. In addition to providing technical expertise, Foster Commerce facilitates brand strategy and design processes that can help determine fundamentals about an app’s or website’s digital presence.

After working with Foster Commerce on brand strategy and design, CWP leadership gained more than they expected. They not only received a new design, logo, and name for their product, but they also gained clarity about its fundamental purpose, audience, and strategic direction.

This clarity has saved CWP from wasting time and effort developing the wrong thing.

While many tools in the financial advising industry focus on a client’s balance sheet and measurable goals, financial advisors at Concordia Wealth Management (CWP) take a different approach.

Using a unique process he developed over twenty-five years of serving clients, CWP founder Andy Silver is able to surface a deep understanding of each client’s overarching priorities. Andy describes these overarching priorities as “core value statements at the thirty thousand foot level.”

As it happens, many of these values are rooted in clients’ early life experiences, or from mistakes they’ve made with money in the past that they’d like to avoid in the future.

Because Andy takes the time to understand and honor clients’ deeper motivations, he’s able to help them enjoy, conserve, and share their wealth in alignment with their deeper values.

Most significantly, Andy’s process often improves his married clients’ ability to have wholesome dialogues about their money.

Feeling he had something special that could benefit more people outside his immediate client base, Andy started to wonder how he could share his process more widely.

And that’s when the idea for a new product offering was born.

When Andy first talked about his product idea with Foster Commerce CEO, Stephen Callender, he envisioned a B2B SaaS offering. He wanted to bring value to other financial planners who could use his unique process with their clients.

However as Stephen worked through the initial SaaS concepts with Andy, he advised him to start with something simpler. Stephen suggested an app that could still bring a lot of value, but that would be easier to implement and get Andy to market faster.

Andy agreed, and Stephen offered to include Foster Commerce’s brand strategy and design process along with development services.

Andy trusted Stephen’s advice and his ability to take on the project for a variety of reasons. One of the biggest was from a business model perspective.

When asked about this Andy said,

Foster Commerce offers a multi-phase brand strategy and design process. The process starts with a discovery phase to understand how a client perceives their own business and its value, goals, and market.

Once this basic information has been gathered from the client, the Foster Commerce team works to identify the brand’s primary and secondary archetypes.

Understanding the brand archetypes clarifies the primary motivation underpinning the brand’s purpose. It can also significantly shorten the entire branding process.

Once brand archetypes are identified other information about the brand’s “personality” naturally unfolds. These are things like the brand voice, values, and the type of customer who will naturally be attracted to it.

Brand archetypes also inform the brand’s distinct look and feel, simplifying the process of creating a harmonious visual presence.

For CWP’s app, Foster Commerce developed a brand strategy and design, and also did a naming process and created a logo.

In addition to a new name for the app, designs, and a logo, the Foster Commerce branding process revealed a possible longer-term strategic direction for Andy’s digital product.

Instead of a B2B offering, the app could be a B2C product designed to save marriages from the perils of financial stress.

Positioning the app as a B2C product for couples first would still allow CWP to broaden its reach. In addition, CWP could gather important metrics about its use, impact, and ROI. It would allow Andy and his team to make any refinements and improvements.

Once confident in the app’s success in the B2C market, CWP would be able to tell future B2B customers a much more powerful story about its value as a white-label product.

Andy and his team immediately saw the value of this new, more focused direction and decided to adopt this approach.

With a strategic direction firmly in place, CWP leadership felt confident to make other long-term strategic decisions around the app’s development timeline, the necessary budget, and the overall marketing strategy.

The Foster Commerce brand strategy process also helped CWP understand how they could use data from the B2C offering to improve the app for future licensure to other financial advisory firms.

While in the past Andy had done a branding process for CWP he found the product-specific process extremely valuable. Andy had this to say about outcomes:

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