Scalable platform redesign: empowering digital banking for BMO's US customers

My Role: Lead Product Designer
Project Duration: July 2024 - May 2025

The challenge: a digital experience stuck in the past

Our legacy banking platform was hindering customers as well as business growth. Customers wrestled with an outdated UI. A clunky 50/50 layout buried crucial information, and confusing navigation eroded trust. For the business, it meant missed opportunities, specifically the absence of cross-sell capabilities within the logged-in experience. We needed a fundamental transformation.

Solution at a glance

We delivered a comprehensive redesign that fundamentally elevated the digital banking experience.

Intuitive & adaptive layout

  • Replaced the 50/50 split with a dynamic 70/30 layout, maximizing content priority and scannability.

  • Result: A unified, consistent visual language across the platform.

Modernized content presentation

  • Implemented a scalable card-based system for organizing information.

  • Result: Improved discoverability, clear categorization, and significantly enhanced accessibility by surfacing content previously hidden in inaccessible collapsible elements.

Streamlined navigation

  • Replaced confusing back arrows with clear mobile header navigation.

  • Introduced an intuitive accordion-style account selector (dropdown) for seamless account switching, validated by user familiarity.

Strategic cross-sell integration

  • Designed contextual cross-sell cards within the authenticated experience (a new channel for the business).

  • User research confirmed these were non-intrusive, enabling business growth without compromising user experience

Design System Integration

  • Integrated new patterns and components into the central Design System

  • Result: Established crucial consistency standards and a scalable foundation for future development, despite initial organizational friction with global design system alignment

Impact and results

Our strategic redesign efforts yielded significant positive outcomes for both users and the business.

Client Satisfaction

  • ↑ +12 point increase in NPS (Net Promoter Score)

  • ↑ CSAT score climbed from 3.4/5 to 4.0/5

  • Qualitative feedback: users consistently praised

    • clearer navigation

    • easier account switching

    • and a cleaner, more modern UI that felt more like a bank website

Business Growth

  • New revenue channel enabled: successfully introduced the first cross-sell capabilities within the authenticated experience.

  • ↑ Increased Traffic: Saw a significant increase in traffic to cross-sell landing pages

Accessibility

  • Enhanced equitable access: addressed critical accessibility barriers (e.g., problematic focus order, screen reader issues with old collapsible elements) by implementing directly accessible card systems and robust component patterns

Learnings and future outlook

This project was a masterclass in navigating enterprise complexities, teaching me invaluable lessons in strategic design leadership.

Key Learnings

  • Empathetic stakeholder management: learned the power of active listening and visually exploring all ideas (even those not adopted) to build trust and foster strong partnerships

  • Strategic scalability: recognized early on the need for a templating strategy, reducing future workload and ensuring consistent application across diverse product types

  • Advocacy with rationale: successfully advocated for the US experience's distinct Design System needs against global mandates, using market insights and user data to stand my ground effectively

  • Adaptive design: embraced the non-linear nature of large projects, making strategic pivots (like the card system) based on user feedback and resource realities

Future Outlook

  • My next steps would prioritize addressing remaining accessibility shortcomings, particularly integrating the out-of-scope problematic modal within the new design system

  • I'd also focus on continuous optimization based on ongoing analytics to further refine user experiences and explore personalized features