CASE STUDY   ↓

Standard Chartered

Global UX Redesign

London / Singapore

  • Strategic Design
  • Service Design
  • Visual identity
  • Product Design
  • Content Strategy
  • Front-End Architecture
  • Development

As the head of Standard Chartered's global digital experience team, I led the charge to reimagine how our bank shows up across digital channels. Over three years, I directed a program that redefined the bank's digital identity—spanning retail, business, and private banking interfaces, all the way to the touchscreens on our ATMs.

We brought in Hanzo, a leading boutique design firm from Barcelona/Madrid, as a design partner not just for their fintech credentials, but because I believed they could help us push past surface-level UX improvements and into a truly strategic redesign. Together, we created a cohesive design system robust enough to sit atop legacy infrastructure, but elegant enough to modernize the full digital journey.

This wasn't just a UI facelift. It was a deep, architectural shift—linking design thinking with business ambition across every layer of the bank's digital presence.

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Digital ecosystem

21 Products, 70+ markets and 46 languages

Back in 2015, Standard Chartered faced a familiar challenge: years of decentralized growth had left us with a fragmented ecosystem—scattered public websites, outdated legacy systems, and no unifying design language to guide our digital presence.

From my role leading the global digital experience team, I spearheaded a program to reverse that fragmentation. Partnering closely with our central office in Singapore and technology hubs in Hong Kong and Chennai, I engaged Hanzo as a design partner to help us co-engineer a digital foundation that would be future-proof, scalable, and globally coherent.

We began with deep research across business lines, geographies, and customer segments. From there, we developed a modular, scalable Design System that clearly differentiated pre- and post-login experiences, while honoring the distinct needs of our Personal, Private, and Business banking users.

Within a year, we had rolled out a cohesive digital experience and a unified product ecosystem—one that could adapt across markets and languages, and dramatically accelerate our ability to launch, localize, and scale digital offerings.

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New digital identity

Refreshed and systematized

For Standard Chartered customers, consistency is key—whether they're withdrawing cash at an ATM in Nairobi, checking their balance in Dubai, or applying for a credit card in Hong Kong. Delivering that seamless digital experience across regions and products wasn't just a UX challenge; it required us to rethink the bank's entire visual identity for a digital-first world.

Although our brand was globally recognized, it hadn't yet been optimized for screen-based experiences. Under my direction, we reimagined the visual system from the ground up, starting with a refresh of the wordmark and color palette, and culminating in the introduction of SC Sans: a custom, geometric typeface crafted for clarity and confidence in digital contexts.

We established comprehensive design guidelines, covering everything from responsive layouts to typography to reusable CSS styles, ensuring every team, in every market, could build on a shared foundation. To complete the system, we curated a full content identity toolkit: editorial principles, reusable templates, and an extensive asset library of imagery, video, illustrations, and a bespoke icon set capturing hundreds of banking metaphors.

The result? A smarter, more deliberate visual language, one that builds on our brand's heritage while giving it the flexibility and edge to thrive in today's digital landscape.

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Wealth Workbench

A bank in an ipad

In 2016, Standard Chartered invested over $1.5 billion in technology, with a clear ambition: to eliminate paper from every customer interaction. As part of this transformation, I worked closely with our teams and with Hanzo to envision and launch Wealth Workbench: a tablet-based, digital sales-and-service platform designed for our Relationship Managers to use with affluent clients.

Fully integrated with our backend infrastructure, Wealth Workbench supports paperless onboarding, product catalog access, and real-time portfolio management—anytime, anywhere.

We first rolled it out in South Korea, where we saw immediate impact: account opening times dropped below five minutes, while credit card issuance and personal loan disbursements were completed in under 20 minutes.

Following its success, we scaled Wealth Workbench across Asia, Europe, and Africa, making it a cornerstone of our modern wealth engagement model.

Technology

Sneek a peek under the hood

During our long-term partnership with Hanzo, we built a strong working relationship between their team and our internal technology departments. Hanzo supported us with technical consultancy, high-fidelity prototypes, and front-end development. In many cases, they acted as an embedded part of our delivery teams.

One of the most important achievements was separating the front-end layer from our legacy systems. This allowed us to centralize our digital experience around a shared Design System, which served a wide range of services, products, and acquisition forms.

This accelerated our development cycles, enabled faster global rollouts, and delivered a more consistent, high-quality experience for customers. It also contributed to revenue growth and greater operational efficiency.

Painstakingly documented

On-device prototypes

Four things

In partnership with Hanzo, we developed high-fidelity frontend prototypes that we used in real-time customer testing, while design and development progressed in parallel. This allowed us to gather meaningful user feedback and iterate quickly, without slowing down our aggressive go-to-market timelines.

To support scalability and consistency, our teams worked together to build a modular Design System from the ground up. Hanzo then used this system to construct the frontend layer for a range of digital assets—public websites, broker tools, calculators, and more—all fully functional and integrated with core banking systems.

One of our biggest regional challenges was the variation in business logic and core platforms across markets. To address this, we created a Digital Flow Generator: a tool that streamlined the creation and deployment of product acquisition forms. This significantly improved our speed to market for launching new financial products.

Hanzo and my global team also embedded teams on-site in Singapore and Chennai, working side by side with our engineers to integrate the new frontend with legacy infrastructure. That close collaboration was essential to the success of the entire program and played a critical role in sustaining our long-term partnership.

 

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