Overview

Wintrust is a financial holding company that operates 15 chartered community banks in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Each community bank maintained its own unique brand and digital platform. Agency 39A developed a strategy for a customer experience that brought all 15 sites into a unified digital brand platform.

Challenge

Wintrust needed a unified brand identity that integrated all 15 of the chartered community banks within the Wintrust ecosystem. To do so, it was critical to understand and define customer pain points and needs, create a unified navigation model across all community banks, and design a unified user experience that provides centralized access to key functionality. They also needed a content strategy that identified redundancy, needs, and improved keyword performance.

Solution

Our work began with stakeholder interviews that informed our initial understanding and shaped a collaborative design sprint to refine the scope, scale and focus of the program. We conducted a content gap assessment to determine the effectiveness of existing content and identify where new content was needed.

Agency 39A developed an improved information architecture to support the 15 community banks, providing universal access to centralized account management functionality and supporting content. We designed, prototyped, and tested new user experiences and developed comprehensive wireframes and user interfaces for deployment within the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) environment.

Result

We designed and developed content-managed templates that could be leveraged across all of Wintrust’s business units as well as their flagship digital platform.

Our work extended the reach of the Wintrust brand to each community bank while retaining key features and attributes of its subsidiaries, ensuring a seamless experience for all of the community banks, and preserving link paths to key functions while improving the overall site experience.