The 4 big risks organisations face when localising financial websites and how to avoid them

Localising a financial website is not simply a linguistic project. For banks, asset managers, fintechs and investment firms, multilingual websites have to meet industry regulations, maintain investor trust, comply with accessibility law and rank in local search engines. A poorly localised website can create compliance risks, damage credibility, reduce online visibility and undermine client acquisition. This guide sets out the risks financial organisations face when adapting their digital content for new markets and how to avoid them.

1. Trust in brand

Literal translations that aren’t properly localised often sound unnatural and may not correctly express the brand voice. Incorrect or inconsistent terminology and style across the website can also look careless, and this negatively impacts consumer trust in an organisation. For example, audiences in certain European markets, such as Spain and Italy, may question a financial institution’s credibility if it displays “€10,000” instead of “10.000 €”.

Research backs this up, too. A survey by leading insights specialists, CSA Research, found that 76% of customers prefer to acquire products and services with information in their native language and that buyers inherently distrust financial websites and legal documents they cannot read fluently.

2. Compliance

Financial marketing is regulated content. Under the EU’s MiFID II and the FCA’s COBS 4.2 (UK), marketing communications and financial promotions must be fair, clear and not misleading in the specific market you publish in. This is where a literal translation can be a risk for compliance. Some products, such as “assurance vie” in France, have no exact equivalents in different markets, so poorly translated websites may be considered unclear.

MiFID II also expects risk warnings to appear in the same language as the rest of the communication, so a disclosure left in English (or poorly translated) goes against regulations. A literal translation of an approved disclaimer in the source market is not automatically approved in the target market.

3. SEO and visibility in AI search tools

Online search behaviour, phrasing and intent vary from market to market. Simply translating queries and keywords without redoing the research for the target audience risks your products and services being invisible in search engines.

For example, while a UK saver would search for “high yield savings account”, a German saver wouldn’t search for “Hochzinssparkonto” (the literal translation) as there is no close equivalent term. Instead, local users would look for “Tagesgeldkonto” or “Festgeldkonto”. A literal translation means you could be targeting keywords nobody searches for.

There’s also the technical side of translating for SEO. Publishing raw machine translation can fall foul of Google’s spam policies, which list automated translation without human review as scaled content abuse. This can lead to websites being deindexed. AI search engines, like ChatGPT and Perplexity, typically only cite clear and easy-to-read sources, too. 

4. Accessibility

For consumer-facing financial services in the EU, accessibility is a legal requirement which applies to every language version of your site. The European Accessibility Act (Directive (EU) 2019/882) came into effect in 2025 and requires consumer-facing financial services, including online banking and investor platforms, to be accessible for users with disabilities. It references WCAG 2.1 level AA, the international web accessibility standard.

Compliance in one language doesn’t make you compliant in another. A localised website needs its own alt text, captioned video, tagged PDFs and accessibility statement in the relevant language. Accessibility has to be maintained as your content changes, too — it’s an ongoing obligation rather than a one-time project.

When planning a localisation project for a financial website, these are just some of the steps to take to mitigate the risks.

• Work with specialist financial linguists. Professional financial translators, editors and copywriters are familiar with regulated terminology, different industry products and services, and how these are searched for in their respective markets. Financial linguists can also help you manage compliance risks by determining when a human, hybrid or machine translation would be best depending on the content type.
• Build translation memories and glossaries. Translation memories and glossaries store approved terms and phrasing for reuse. This keeps regulated language consistent from page to page and helps maintain the same brand voice across a website.
• Conduct in-country legal reviews. Before publication, a local reviewer in the target market should check regulated content — such as claims, disclaimers and accessibility statements — against regulations to ensure it complies with rules such as MiFID II and the European Accessibility Act.
• Research and optimise for local search. Researching how local audiences phrase their queries and then optimising pages around those search terms helps make financial products visible in preferred local search engines.
• Localise multimedia. For user experience and to comply with accessibility regulations, audio-visual material should be localised alongside written copy. Video, subtitles, captions and voiceover each need adapting for every language.
• Build accessibility into your project. Accessibility should be treated as a requirement from the start, rather than treated as an afterthought. Alt text, captions, tagged documents and an accessibility statement in each language are required to meet WCAG 2.1 AA standard as mandated by the European Accessibility Act.
• Ensure ongoing governance. As pages are added and updated over time, localisation teams should check the content still complies with regulations and maintains consistent terminology and tone. It’s a good idea to assign an owner to each language version and design a regular review cycle.

Peter & Clark has been creating, localising and governing digital content safely and credibly in the financial sector since 1998. We help banks, asset managers, fintechs, financial institutions and investment firms grow in new markets while minimising compliance and regulatory risks.

Our tailored solutions adapt to your specific needs and bring the end-to-end expertise any financial website localisation project requires, including:

• Specialist financial transcreation and localisation.
• Regulatory and accessibility compliance.
• SEO localisation.
• Multimedia adaptation.
• And more.