Standard Bank
Sector
Enterprise Financial Services
Scope
- UX Design
- UI Design
- Design Strategy
Overview
Standard Bank CIB operates across trade finance, global markets, transactional banking, and advisory. A CFO, a treasury analyst, and a sovereign wealth fund manager all land on the same site and need something different from it. The old site gave all of them the same thing.
The Problem
Designing for complex financial services audiences means solving a problem most digital projects never face: your users are not a group. They are several distinct groups, each with different levels of sophistication, different vocabulary, and a low tolerance for content that was not written for them. Effective enterprise UX design in financial services starts with that tension. The question is not what the organisation wants to say. It is how different audiences make decisions, and what they need at each stage to keep moving.
The existing site did not try to resolve that tension. It was organised around how Standard Bank thinks about itself internally, not around how any of its clients navigate a decision. By the time we came in, it had drifted far enough from the brand that the gap was visible.
The Work
We started with research: direct conversations with CIB clients, a heuristic review of the existing site, and a benchmark audit of how comparable institutions handle the same challenge globally. The goal was not to validate assumptions. It was to understand, concretely, where the site was losing people and why.
What came back from research shaped everything that followed. The architecture was rebuilt around how different audiences enter and move through the site, not around internal org structure. The visual system was designed to carry a brand that had grown considerably since the previous site was built. And because Standard Bank operates across multiple markets and teams, the design needed to be systematic enough to hold without us in the room.
The Outcome
The engagement closed with stakeholder sign-off across CIB's product and brand teams. For an organisation where design decisions cross multiple jurisdictions and seniority levels, alignment at that scale is not a given. The system went to development with enough specificity that the decisions made in design stayed intact through build.
There is no single metric to point to here. What we delivered was a foundation: one that reflects where the brand actually is, speaks to the audiences that matter most, and gives internal teams something coherent to build on.
