A psychology-led brand and messaging story that gave a global asset servicer a distinctive sales story.
Ocorian is a premier global asset servicer, managing the operational, administrative and regulatory needs of asset managers, financial institutions, corporations, family offices and high-net-worth individuals — administering over $275bn in assets for 9,000+ clients across 25+ jurisdictions.
Ocorian's sales collateral had become indistinguishable from its competitors - dense, feature-led, and heavy with cognitive load. The primary objective was clear: strip the story back to first principles, build a psychologically robust sales narrative that could genuinely differentiate, and reduce friction for every buyer who opened the deck.
By combining behavioural science with a deep understanding of how Ocorian's buyers actually make (or avoid) decisions, we created a narrative distinctive and flexible enough to travel across audiences and markets.
Financial Services
UK
Simplify a complex product experience to improve onboarding, activation, and early-life retention.
The project began by understanding why prospective clients weren't switching, even when dissatisfied. The research revealed that CFOs and asset managers can carry months, even years, of dissatisfaction with a fund administrator before acting.
This was paired with a review of the existing sales collateral and a competitor benchmarking exercise, which confirmed the core problem: Ocorian's assets looked and read like everyone else's, reinforcing rather than challenging the buyer's belief that "all providers are the same."
We then applied decision science directly relevant to this buyer group. We identified and named behavioural patterns - including status quo bias, sunk cost, loss aversion, negative social proof, switching costs, time cost, hyperbolic discounting, and bounded decision-making. Together, these gave us a framework for exactly what was keeping buyers stuck, which we distilled into repeatable models such as the "CFO Doom Loop" and the "Inertia Circle."
Equipped with these insights, we built a new narrative framework from first principles rather than building on top of the old one.
This framework anchored a single ownable brand narrative, "Our Clarity is Your Asset," giving Ocorian's sales teams one consistent story to open with across every market and audience.
From here, we developed the full proposition architecture: reframing inaction itself as the real risk ("Inaction carries greater risk than switching"), and building a self-diagnostic device, the switching checklist - that lets a prospect recognise their own inertia rather than being told about it.
The Engagement System brought the new story and strategy to life across Ocorian's sales collateral. We built a new visual and graphic language specifically to break from competitor convention - deliberately stripped back to reduce cognitive load rather than add another design layer.
Each core insight became a distinct visual device: the Doom Loop and Inertia Circle diagrams, the trust model, and the switching/partner checklists, all designed to make abstract behavioural patterns immediately recognisable to the buyer reading them.
These assets were rolled out first for the core proposition, then re-engineered for the Intermediaries audience, and finally adapted into messaging and collateral for Ocorian's UAE event strategy - giving Ocorian a single, scalable narrative framework it could deploy consistently across audiences, service lines and jurisdictions.
At the heart of this project was the application of behavioural and decision science to a sales problem that competitors were solving with design alone. By grounding the narrative in named behavioural patterns — status quo bias, sunk cost, loss aversion, cognitive effort, and the compounding effect of "acceptable" service - Ocorian's new sales story doesn't just describe what it does differently; it names the exact psychological reason buyers hesitate and hands them a way out of it.
The result is a messaging architecture robust enough to reuse, not reinvent, every time Ocorian enters a new market or audience.
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