UX strategy during a full-scale rebrand
Translating a new identity into a unified digital experience for financial services.
Banking / Financial Services | January 2023 -> March 2024
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Why this mattered
A leading financial services company was undergoing a full-scale rebrand — new name, new identity, new ambitions. But their digital presence told a different story: five separate websites, built in silos over time, each with different products, audiences, and visual styles.
For customers, the experience was confusing. Which site to visit? Which brand to trust? For the business, it was inefficient and unsustainable: duplicated content, inconsistent journeys, and little room for growth.
The challenge wasn’t simply to redesign a website. It was to create a unified digital experience that could carry the new brand forward, reduce fragmentation, and scale with the company’s future ambitions.
MY ROLE
UX & Service Designer, co-leading the discovery and strategy track together with a colleague. Responsible for turning user insights and brand direction into a scalable digital framework.
THE PROBLEM
The company was entering a full-scale rebrand but operated with five fragmented websites. Each served different products and audiences, creating a confusing experience for customers and an inefficient structure for the business.
THE OUTCOME
A strategic UX framework, customer journey insights, and a set of recommendations that guided the creation of a unified digital experience and the foundation for a new design system.
KEY LEARNING
Strategic UX means connecting the dots: aligning C-level vision, customer needs, and brand identity into a coherent digital direction.
Unpacking the ecosystem
We began by mapping the company’s digital landscape. At that point, five separate websites carried overlapping products, audiences, and inconsistent brand signals.
To understand how this fragmentation affected both the business and its customers, we conducted extensive interviews — with C-level executives to capture the long-term vision, with internal stakeholders across departments, and with end-users across private, business, and fleet segments.
This gave us two critical perspectives: the strategic ambitions driving the rebrand, and the real frustrations people faced when trying to interact with the company online.
Alongside this, we ran a benchmarking study against both financial peers and leading digital brands outside the industry. The question we kept coming back to was simple: what role should the web play in the company’s new brand experience?
Interview notes capturing customer needs and expectations.
Snippet of early draft of the future digital ecosystem.
When fragmentation becomes the experience
From our research, one insight became clear: fragmentation wasn’t just an internal problem — it was the customer’s reality.
-> Private customers struggled with brand confusion: different names, different websites, and no clear sense of what belonged together.
-> Business decision-makers found it hard to get a holistic overview of services, often piecing together information from multiple sites.
-> Drivers and end-users relied almost entirely on the app, rarely turning to the web at all.
Internally, teams were publishing in silos, duplicating content, and missing opportunities to use data in a unified way. The lack of a consistent digital identity meant the upcoming rebrand risked falling flat online.
The takeaway was simple: without a unified digital strategy, the new brand would never feel whole to its customers.
“Vad är vad? Det står [x brand] i inboxen. De heter [y brand]. Sen står det [z brand]”
Customer
“Vi har ett intranät där vi har en egen FAQ för att anställda ska slippa söka själva på [brand].se”
Fleet Manager
“Jag besöker aldrig webben. Jag får den information jag behöver på andra platser”
Reseller
Bridging brand and digital
Once the digital strategy was in place, a new challenge emerged: how to align it with the company’s upcoming rebrand. At this stage, the work on brand identity, name, and visual direction was still top secret — handled by an external agency under strict NDAs.
My colleague and I were two of very few externals invited into the process. We gained early access to the new identity and worked closely with both the brand agency and internal stakeholders to interpret how the brand could — and should — live digitally.
This was less about colors and logos, and more about translation: what does the new identity mean for navigation, content, and interaction? How can digital touchpoints express the brand’s promise while still serving real user needs?
BRAND
DIGITAL
Designing a unified vision
With both the digital strategy and the new brand identity in hand, we could begin shaping the future web experience.
Together with my colleague, we defined a set of guiding principles:
One web, many audiences —
a single platform flexible enough to serve private customers, business decision-makers, and partners.
Clarity over complexity —
reduce duplication, streamline navigation, and make it clear who the sender was.
Future-ready structure —
modular design blocks and scalable information architecture, making it easier to adapt as services evolved.
We created early wireframes and modular concepts that illustrated how the new identity could be expressed online. At the same time, we worked closely with the client’s internal design team as they began shaping a new design system in Figma.
The vision wasn’t just about creating a new website. It was about giving the rebrand a digital backbone: a consistent experience that customers could trust and that the business could build on for years to come.
Laying the foundation for growth
The rebrand didn’t launch with just a new logo — it launched with a digital strategy to match.
Our work provided the client with:
A strategic UX framework that aligned brand, business, and customer needs.
A modular design approach that informed wireframes and future content structures.
Customer journey insights and recommendations that directly shaped the new design system.
This foundation gave the client’s internal design and development teams a clear direction for implementation and ensured that the new brand would have a consistent, scalable digital home from day one.
WHAT I LEARNED
This project reinforced the value of UX leadership in strategic change. My role wasn’t to “design screens” — it was to connect dots:
Translating C-level vision into user-centered strategies.
Bridging the gap between brand identity and digital interaction.
Building alignment across multiple stakeholders and agencies.