Designing for Scale: Building Unified Experiences Across Complex Banking Ecosystems
Discover how UX leaders design unified, scalable experiences across complex banking ecosystems powered by legacy and modern technologies.
When Scale Becomes the Design Challenge
When I first entered the financial sector as a UX designer, I thought I was walking into a world of numbers, risk models, and compliance frameworks. What I found was something far more intricate a living organism of systems, processes, departments, and legacy tools all coexisting in constant tension. Designing for a single app or product felt like a breeze compared to designing for a banking ecosystem a sprawling, interconnected network of services that touch millions of people, businesses, and institutions every day.
The challenge wasn’t only to make an interface intuitive or visually clean. It was to design for scale scale of users, scale of data, scale of regulations, scale of expectations. More importantly, it was to design for unity, in a landscape where fragmentation was the default.
This article reflects what I’ve learned over years of working in and consulting for large financial organizations including development banks, investment institutions, and regulatory bodies where building unified experiences meant navigating legacy systems, political silos, and shifting technological foundations.
Designing for scale in banking isn’t just about managing complexity; it’s about finding coherence in chaos.
1. The Hidden Architecture of Banking Ecosystems
To understand what “scaling UX” really means in the banking world, you first need to see how complex the underlying ecosystem is.
Behind every banking product a loan application portal, an investment dashboard, or a KYC onboarding flow sits a web of interconnected systems:
Core banking built on decades-old COBOL infrastructure,
Middleware translating data between incompatible systems,
CRM tools, risk and compliance databases,
External APIs connecting to payment networks and regulators.
Each of these systems was built at a different time, for a different purpose, and often by different vendors. The result? An ecosystem of islands, each with its own data model and user logic.
In recent years, many institutions have started wrapping their legacy COBOL systems with modern APIs, allowing new front-end layers built in React or Angular to deliver faster, unified, and more flexible user experiences without disrupting the reliable core.
This shift is transforming the designer’s role. We’re no longer crafting static interfaces we’re designing connections between old and new worlds. Scaling UX in banking means understanding these layers, respecting their constraints, and finding the bridges that hold them together.
References:
IBM Redbook: Modernizing IBM Z and Mainframe Applications with APIs – explains the evolution from COBOL mainframes to API-based systems.
McKinsey Digital Report (2022): The Next Generation Core Banking Transformation – analysis of modularization in banking architecture.
Examples:
ING Bank transitioned its COBOL-based core by wrapping APIs, allowing React-based apps to deliver real-time data experiences.
BNP Paribas implemented a hybrid architecture connecting COBOL mainframes to microservices, reducing release cycles from quarterly to biweekly.
2. The Fragmentation Problem
In most large banks, digital experiences evolve organically. Different business units launch digital products independently the corporate division builds one portal, the retail team another, the investment division yet another. Each serves a valid purpose, but none of them talk to each other.
The outcome is fragmentation, both technically and experientially:
The same client might need five different logins for different services.
Navigation patterns vary from one platform to another.
Terminology differs “Accounts,” “Portfolios,” “Positions” might mean slightly different things in each system.
Brand and tone inconsistencies create cognitive friction, subtly eroding trust.
When users interact with these fragmented systems, they perceive the organization as fragmented.
In one project for an international financial institution, I remember a corporate client who said, “I feel like I’m dealing with five different banks.” That was the moment our team realized fragmentation wasn’t a UX problem; it was a trust problem.
References:
Forrester Research: The State of Digital Banking Platforms, 2023 – discusses siloed legacy systems and their customer experience impact.
Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g): Cross-Channel User Experience Design – insights on consistency across complex systems.
Examples:
HSBC unified its corporate and retail interfaces through a central design system, reducing inconsistencies across 17 platforms.
Deutsche Bank consolidated four separate portals into one unified customer hub, cutting user login friction by 60%.
3. Designing for Scale Is Designing for Governance
In smaller organizations, UX decisions can be made by small, agile teams. But in large-scale banking environments, every design decision touches multiple departments: compliance, IT, product management, legal, risk, data protection, and more.
So scaling design isn’t just about frameworks and pattern libraries; it’s about governance how decisions are made, maintained, and evolved across time.
To make design scalable, you need three forms of alignment:
Strategic Alignment - A clear shared vision for the customer experience across business units.
Operational Alignment - Processes that ensure consistency in delivery (for example, shared design systems and standards).
Cultural Alignment - A shared understanding of what “good experience” means and why it matters.
Without these three layers, design systems and frameworks become shelfware beautiful in theory, rarely applied in practice.
In one major banking transformation project, we introduced a UX governance board. It wasn’t about policing teams, but about creating a forum where design, technology, and business leaders could decide collectively:
What patterns were reusable,
What principles guided decisions,
How accessibility, inclusiveness, and compliance were enforced across platforms.
This board became the backbone of our scaling effort. It allowed us to unify design decisions without suffocating teams’ autonomy.
References:
Gartner: Digital Design Governance for Financial Enterprises – on how governance structures ensure consistent experience delivery.
DesignOps Handbook (InVision) – practical guide to scaling UX through standards and governance frameworks.
Examples:
Santander Group established a UX governance board linking design, compliance, and tech, resulting in faster approvals and fewer accessibility violations.
Lloyds Banking Group introduced a centralized DesignOps team overseeing cross-platform patterns and accessibility enforcement.
4. The Role of Design Systems: More Than a Toolkit
When people talk about scaling UX, the conversation often turns quickly to design systems. And indeed, they’re crucial especially in the financial sector where consistency and reliability are tied directly to credibility.
But a design system is not just a component library. It’s a living infrastructure that connects brand, accessibility, compliance, and technology.
In our banking projects, we learned that a design system succeeds when it:
Embeds regulatory and accessibility requirements directly into components (for instance, enforcing minimum contrast ratios and input validation rules),
Provides contextual examples of financial interactions (e.g., how to display multi-currency data, or how to structure loan repayment tables),
Aligns front-end and back-end developers through a shared code repository,
Defines content and language patterns for financial communication (e.g., how to talk about “risk” without inducing fear).
But most importantly, it has to be owned collectively.
When design systems become the property of a single team say, the UX department they risk isolation and obsolescence. When they become co-owned by designers, developers, and business owners, they become scalable culture.
References:
UXPin: Design Systems in Enterprise Environments – how design systems serve as communication and governance tools.
Figma’s Enterprise Case Study: How Barclays Scaled Design Consistency Across Global Teams.
Examples:
Barclays built a multi-platform design system integrated with compliance rules, enabling over 400 designers and developers to work from one source.
Goldman Sachs developed its Sky Design System to unify UI components across trading dashboards and client portals.
5. The Challenge of Legacy and Regulation
In the tech world, you often hear, “Move fast and break things.”
In banking, it’s more like, “Move carefully and don’t break anything that’s tied to a regulation.”
Financial systems are inherently conservative and rightly so. Mistakes have real-world consequences. A design change that modifies the way financial data is presented can inadvertently affect compliance obligations or even introduce legal exposure.
When we redesigned a transaction reporting interface for a European investment institution, we discovered that even the order of data fields was legally significant. Changing it required approval from compliance and legal departments in three countries.
This tension between innovation and regulation is the daily reality of designing at scale in finance.
To navigate it, I learned that UX leaders must:
Develop deep domain literacy understanding not just design, but the financial logic behind interfaces.
Build cross-functional empathy respecting the cautious pace of compliance teams, while advocating for user needs.
Use prototyping as a communication tool, not just for design validation but for alignment with legal and data stakeholders.
Designing for scale isn’t about bypassing regulation it’s about designing within it gracefully.
References:
Deloitte Insights: Designing Within Regulation: UX in Financial Compliance – explores balancing innovation and regulatory constraints.
Accenture: Modern Banking under PSD2 and GDPR – explains how open banking and data privacy reshape UX boundaries.
Examples:
European Investment Bank (EIB) implemented UX review checkpoints within compliance workflows to ensure all visual changes met EU regulatory standards.
Revolut built UX patterns that automatically guide users through GDPR and PSD2 consent flows without breaking usability.
6. From Data Silos to Experience Flows
Banks are data-rich but experience-poor.
Data sits in silos: customer data in CRM, transaction data in the core banking system, risk data in specialized tools.
Designing unified experiences means rethinking how data becomes information, and how information becomes meaning.
For example, in one project we unified the experience of a corporate client managing loans, guarantees, and investments across multiple systems. We didn’t merge the databases that would have taken years. Instead, we designed a meta-layer of experience: a single dashboard that pulled contextual data from different systems and presented it as one coherent narrative.
That dashboard didn’t just integrate systems; it integrated understanding.
The principle we followed was simple: Don’t make users understand your system architecture; make your system understand their mental model.
That’s the real scalability when experience scales horizontally across systems, not just vertically within one.
References:
MIT Sloan Management Review: Data as Design Material – the UX role in transforming data into meaningful user experiences.
Harvard Business Review: Breaking Down Data Silos in Financial Institutions.
Examples:
UBS Group created a cross-system dashboard using APIs to integrate investment, risk, and client data into a single unified client view.
BBVA’s data visualization layer turned fragmented risk data into a dynamic decision-support interface for financial advisors.
7. Designing for Internal Users: The Forgotten Customers
In large banks, many UX efforts focus on customer-facing platforms: retail banking apps, websites, or trading dashboards. But some of the most impactful design work happens behind the scenes in the tools used by analysts, compliance officers, or operations teams.
These internal users are the ones who ensure the bank’s day-to-day functioning. Yet their experiences are often fragmented, outdated, or neglected.
In one transformation initiative, we shadowed middle-office teams who had to reconcile data from three systems using Excel macros and manual cross-checking. The result: frustration, error-prone workflows, and thousands of lost hours each year.
By redesigning their internal tools aligning terminology, automating data fetches, simplifying report generation we didn’t just improve usability. We improved organizational confidence.
Scaling UX means designing for everyone affected by the ecosystem, not only the end customers.
References:
Nielsen Norman Group: Designing for Enterprise and Internal Tools – emphasizes that employee UX directly impacts customer satisfaction.
Google Design: Improving Enterprise UX Through Empathy and Efficiency.
Examples:
JP Morgan Chase redesigned internal compliance dashboards to reduce task time by 40%, improving analyst satisfaction scores.
Credit Suisse modernized its operations UI, eliminating redundant steps for middle-office teams and saving thousands of work hours annually.
8. The Human Side of Scale
Scaling design is as much about culture as it is about systems.
Every designer working in banking eventually learns that persuasion is part of the job. You must navigate hierarchy, legacy mindsets, and institutional inertia. Some of the most important UX work happens in meetings, not in Figma.
I’ve sat in rooms with risk officers who didn’t see why UX mattered, with engineers skeptical about design systems, and with executives balancing transformation against budget pressures. What worked wasn’t evangelism; it was translation.
I learned to speak the language of value not “usability,” but reduced support tickets; not “empathy,” but customer retention; not “consistency,” but regulatory clarity.
This is what leadership in scaled design environments demands: the ability to align empathy with economics.
References:
IDEO U: Organizational Design for Scalable Creativity – human-centered leadership frameworks in large organizations.
McKinsey Design: How to Embed Design into Company Culture.
Examples:
Standard Chartered Bank created a design leadership program to help senior managers understand UX as a business driver, not a cost.
Nordea Bank introduced UX evangelist roles to bridge designers and executives, enabling design language adoption across teams.
9. Measuring What Matters
In large ecosystems, impact is hard to measure. The improvements are often distributed a 2-second faster task completion here, a 10% fewer data errors there.
But when scaled, these micro-improvements become powerful.
To measure effectively, I found it useful to define three levels of UX maturity metrics:
Experience-Level Metrics - Task completion, error rates, satisfaction, trust.
System-Level Metrics - Design reuse, compliance adherence, accessibility compliance rates.
Organizational Metrics - Cross-department collaboration, design literacy, and decision-making velocity.
Tracking these metrics over time turns UX from a cost center into a strategic lever for transformation.
References:
Google HEART Framework – standardized UX metrics for measuring usability and engagement at scale.
NN/g: KPIs for Enterprise UX – best practices for quantifying impact in complex systems.
Examples:
HSBC Digital used HEART metrics to measure cross-platform consistency, resulting in 22% faster task completion.
ING DesignOps created a metrics dashboard that linked design quality to reduced support calls and improved conversion.
10. Lessons from the Field
If I had to distill years of designing within banking ecosystems into a few enduring lessons, they would be these:
Start with understanding, not solutions. Before you design, map the ecosystem. Identify dependencies and pain points.
Design systems are governance tools. They’re about alignment, not aesthetics.
Treat internal users as first-class citizens. They’re your most loyal, if often invisible, customers.
Prototype to persuade. Prototypes bridge the gap between vision and reality in highly regulated environments.
Design for relationships, not just transactions. Every interface should strengthen the trust chain between the user and the institution.
Build a narrative of consistency. When users see unity across tools, they see reliability in the institution itself.
References:
Jared Spool: Design Leadership in Complex Systems – on the transition from designing products to designing organizations.
Don Norman’s The Design of Future Things – perspective on evolving design roles in high-stakes, complex environments.
Examples:
Goldman Sachs UX Academy trains designers on financial domain literacy to balance creativity with precision.
Euronext embedded UX researchers within compliance and IT to ensure human-centered perspectives in all product decisions.
11. The Future of Scalable Design in Banking
As banks continue their digital transformation journeys, the idea of “ecosystem experience” is becoming central.
With the rise of open banking, AI-driven insights, and composable platforms, the challenge is no longer just to unify systems internally, but to create seamless interoperability across partners and regulators as well.
The future of scalable design lies in design ecosystems, not design teams ecosystems where design is part of every conversation, from product conception to compliance sign-off.
Tomorrow’s banks won’t just compete on rates or technology; they’ll compete on coherence on how clearly, reliably, and empathetically they help people navigate financial complexity.