Quick answer
A mortgage broker, insurance broker or financial adviser logo sits on regulated paperwork, next to a status disclosure, and is checked by clients who have been warned about clone firms. For £129 you get the horizontal, stacked and icon-only layouts, which keeps your recommendation letters, website footer, client portal and email signature on one consistent mark.
This page is for mortgage and protection brokers, general insurance brokers and independent or restricted financial advisers, whether directly authorised or trading as an appointed representative of a network. If your firm mainly does accounts and tax, our page on logo design for accountants fits better. Nothing here is regulatory advice: your compliance support or network signs off every promotion, and we design the logo that goes on it.
Directly authorised or an appointed representative?
How your firm is authorised shapes how much of the brand is yours to decide. The FCA’s page on the Financial Services Register describes appointed representatives as firms carrying out activities on behalf of another firm, their principal, and tells consumers to check with the principal what an appointed representative is permitted to do.
| Set-up | Whose rules shape the brand | What to plan for |
|---|---|---|
| Directly authorised firm | Your own compliance process | A logo that carries the firm on its own for years, beside a plain status line |
| Appointed representative of a network | The network’s brand and promotions rules, plus your own name | A logo that sits comfortably beside the principal’s name in every footer |
| Adviser within a larger practice | The practice’s brand guidelines | A personal lockup or sub-brand only if the practice allows it |
If you are in a network, ask for its brand and promotions guidance before you brief a designer. A network may want to approve a trading name and logo before they appear on anything client-facing, and it is far cheaper to design within those rules than to redraw afterwards.
What it means for your logo: as an appointed representative, keep the network’s name and colours out of your own mark and leave room beneath the horizontal logo for the principal’s name and approved status wording, so a client sees at once which firm advises them and which firm is responsible for that advice.
The FCA logo is not yours to use
It is tempting to put a regulator-style badge in the footer to look official. The FCA’s page on logos and photos says you must not use the FCA logo without authorisation in any of your documentation, promotional material or websites, that the logo is a registered trade mark, and that for regulated firms unauthorised use is also a breach of its rules, including any use in connection with the firm’s mandatory regulatory status disclosure.
The same page gives the status wording for firms regulated only by the FCA: “Authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority”. A directly authorised firm regulated only by the FCA uses that line; an appointed representative uses the status wording its principal approves. Either way, set it as plain text in your footer and on letters, with your firm reference number where your compliance support asks for it.
What it means for your logo: no shield, crest or regulator-style colours in the mark and no slot built into it for the FCA logo, because a mark that borrows official authority is what a careful client may be most wary of.
Clone firms, and why your details must match
The Financial Services Register also lists firms providing regulated products without authorisation, the details unauthorised firms give out, and whether they are falsely claiming to be a genuine authorised firm. Clone firms may copy real names, addresses and branding. What it means for your logo: make the mark hard to copy convincingly and easy to match against the register, with three habits:
- A distinctive mark. Generic houses, keys and shields are easy for a fraudster to imitate convincingly. A wordmark with one distinctive letter or a specific symbol is not.
- One name everywhere. Your trading name on the logo, the website, the email domain and the register should match letter for letter.
- Contact details that agree. Put the same phone number and web address on every document, so a client who checks the register finds what you sent them.
Clear, fair and not misleading, from the logo down
The FCA’s page on financial promotions states that every financial promotion, whatever the medium, has to be clear, fair and not misleading, and gives a website, a Facebook post and a tweet as examples of the forms one can take. The logo appears on nearly every one of those.
What it means for your logo: slogans such as “best rates”, “guaranteed approval” or “the cheapest cover” stay out of the mark entirely, because a tagline locked into a logo is repeated on every promotion you publish and has to pass that test every time.
Any strapline you do use works best as text your compliance support can approve and amend. Our guide to writing a business overview clients trust covers what to say instead.
Recommendation letters, the fact-find and the client portal
Much of what a client reads from you is generated by software: the fact-find, sourcing results, illustrations, suitability or recommendation letters, fee agreements and portal messages. Many of these systems let you upload a logo once, usually at a small size in a header. What it means for your logo: give these systems the horizontal version in a single dark colour, because that is what survives on a printed letter, a scanned signature page and a phone screen.
The client portal or app shows the icon as a square tile next to dozens of others on a client’s phone. Make sure it still says who you are at that size, rather than becoming one more blue house among the lenders’ and comparison sites’ icons.
Email is where the logo and the disclosures meet most often. A good signature puts the horizontal logo at a modest size, then your name, role and direct number, then the status line and registered company details as live text rather than an image, so they stay readable when images are blocked and searchable when a client looks back through old messages. If you hold advice meetings on video, remember that when your camera is off the icon is what the client sees in the corner of the screen for an hour, so it needs to look settled and professional rather than cropped. Our guide to letterhead design covers the printed equivalent for firms that still post recommendation packs.
Mortgages, protection, general insurance or wealth?
- Mortgage brokers serve first-time buyers, movers, landlords and later-life borrowers. The brand should feel approachable and competent, not like a bank.
- Protection and general insurance brokers sell cover people hope never to use. Steady, plain branding that reads as dependable works better than anything playful; commercial lines brokers often need a more corporate look for business clients.
- Financial planners and wealth advisers deal in long relationships and large sums, so restraint is the premium signal: confident type, a narrow palette and plenty of space.
Our page on bookkeeper and tax adviser logos covers the neighbouring trade, where clients make similar judgements about care and trust.
Beyond houses, keys, shields and arrows
Roof outlines and keys are every mortgage broker’s first idea; shields belong to insurers and regulators; rising arrows and graphs suggest investment returns that a promotion should never imply. A stronger route for a small firm is usually the founder’s surname or a short invented name in well-made type, with one distinctive detail. Colour matters too: a deep green or an ink-dark blue, close to the pen on a signed recommendation letter, feels considered without imitating the high-street banks’ reds and brighter blues.
Test the shortlist where it will really live: at the top of a recommendation letter printed in black, as a square tile on a phone home screen and in a review profile beside your star rating. A mark that still looks settled in all three is the one to keep.
£129 for the whole advice-office kit
An adviser’s £129 buys all three layouts of our Logo Design: recommendation letters, the website and every email signature take the horizontal logo; the office door plate, presentation covers and review profiles take the stacked one; the icon becomes the portal tile, favicon and social avatar. The set includes a single-colour master for letters and scanned forms, a 3D mockup, and the formats your back-office system, printer and web developer each require. Concepts carry no limit, nor do revisions within your brief, and the copyright transfers to your firm on delivery. Firms adding advisers who need written colour, type and document rules can step up to brand identity design at £299. Other prices are on our pricing page.
Changing the brand without confusing the register
If a new logo comes with a new trading name, ask your principal or compliance support how the name gets recorded before it goes on anything, and only then switch the website footer, letter templates, email signatures and review profiles, all in the same week so a client checking you finds one name everywhere. Keep the status line wording exactly as approved. First concepts reach you within 48 hours of your completed brief, and customers rate us 4.8/5 Excellent. Once your principal or compliance support has confirmed the trading name, order your broker or adviser logo.
