Personally, sites like that increase my confidence a bit for those sorts of businesses.

If a company spends a lot on a fancy, flashy site, the implication (for me) is that they're more about marketing and image than they are about whatever their business is. If their business is retail, that's OK. I get it. If their business is handling my money, though, it raises a tiny bit of doubt in my mind about their priorities.

Same for this site https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

Something about this statement on Berkshire's website is really amusing:

"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."

Nothing on that website needs a login, unlike Signature's site, so it doesn't matter if it looks like it was made in Microsoft Frontpage.

Even that has an ad at the end, lmao.

I honestly think that's a point of pride for many financial services.

If you don't want retail consumers, you don't wow retail consumers. You don't provide arbitrary confidence boosters to poor people who could never be in your network and leverage real wealth even if they tried for 100 years. You don't provide arbitrary confidence boosters that change every 2-3 years because anybody can learn the latest layout design pattern.

I think its far beyond having a World Wide Web strategy in 1995 and never revisiting it.

Its "Hm, never heard of you" good, its working.

Are just the landing pages that are intentionally kept simple or even the real site behind logins? A bad site typically also reflects low confidence in technological abilities, is that not the case here?

That isn't their intent at all here. You can view archive of the site and see that they were chasing trends, this was just their latest redesign that happened late 2014. Once you get past the cover page, they even had a very trendy full height drawing (that was removed in 2019).

Contrast this to Berkshire Hathaway, no additional scripts (gtag excluded) or frameworks, no plethora of css defined. Now that is defining a strategy and never revisiting it. Including still using adobe pagemill to publish pages.

I think some (all?) Berkshire Hathaway pages were just Word documents saved as html.

What specifically? Because they don't use the latest hip UI framework that breaks interoperability in order to appeal to the selfsame 20somethings that advocated for it?

The site works for me, and probably everyone else. My accessibility-enhancing addon is able to detect the interface elements. It's functional, which is almost a four-letter word these days.