Featured Projects

Evelyn Partners: Brand Experience Toolkit

Introducing Human centric design to an Investment firm

Challenge

In the world of financial advice and wealth management, relationships are key. Evelyn Partners needed to adopt a user-centred approach to designing brand experiences that encapsulated the spirit of partnership between clients and advisors.

Project

Over a collaborative three-month programme, I brought together cross-functional teams around a shared vision through the creation of a practical Brand Experience Toolkit with the help of an agency.

  • Developed detailed personas based on extensive audience segmentation research. These personas were brought to life through illustrations, data points, and narrative formats, making them memorable and easily adopted by experience design, marketing, and front office teams.

  • Created functional tools such as the Experience Wheel, a graphic device that enabled the design team to continuously evaluate their work against core brand principles, ensuring long-term alignment.

  • Detailed tone-of-voice guidelines that included Consumer Duty and regulatory guardrails.

  • Delivered inspiring artefacts — both digital and print — that visually represented the brand's core values and experience principles.

Results

  • The experience toolkit and overall guidelines could be accessed by all employees through an online portal using Zeroheight and Sharepoint.

  • The toolkit became a frequently used set of guidelines for all experiences going forward, and was also duplicated in house, (without an agency) by my team for our DIY brand Bestinvest.

Bestinvest: Investment Platform App & Web

Challenge

Bestinvest was already an active web offering with a sizable user-base of loyal clients,so our team didn’t start with a blank canvas – which brought its own challenges. There were existing technologies and clients to consider, and established systems and processes to work around in order to modernise the brand and reach a wider audience base.

Project

As Head of Brand Experience & Digital Services, I led the end-to-end transformation across brand, UX, and digital product:

• Defined new positioning and proposition to modernise the brand and improve relevance with digital-first investors

• Led redesign of web platform and mobile app, focusing on onboarding, usability, and key conversion journeys

• Integrated brand, UX, and content strategy to deliver a consistent and intuitive customer experience

• Aligned cross-functional teams (product, marketing, compliance, and design) to embed a unified experience across all touchpoints

Results

In just over 6 months, the team was able to build, test, deploy, and refine the app. Within the year of release the Bestinvest app was been downloaded over 5,000 times and maintained a 4.5 star rating in the iOS store. (in 2023). It also achieved ‘Excellent’ status on Trustpilot, with over 650 reviews.

I played a central role in the following:

• Delivered £144m net new money (NNM) in 2023 (5.3x increase vs. 2022)

• Achieved 99% of 2023 Assets under Administration (AuA) target, exceeding prior year performance by +12%

• Contributed to 9 industry awards in 2023, strengthening brand credibility and market visibility

• Drove increased engagement, conversion, and platform competitiveness in a crowded digital investment market

• Contributed to overall platform and brand value ahead of sale to NatWest Group

From a solid, but dated web based platform to a modern online investment app

Evelyn Partners : The Future of Onboarding

Responding to a brief from the Group COO on what does good onboarding look like?

Challenge

Evelyn Partners client journey data showed that a significant percentage of prospective clients that starting the onboarding process, did not complete it. What’s more it was an area of sluggishness and frankly a dampening start to a new relationship. The CCO asked me what my team could do to help address the issues within the onboarding experience, and make it shorter, less clunky and digitally optimised.

Project

  • Delivered the first ever as-is onboarding journey, with all its variations and complexities.

  • Partnered with front office teams, advisors and SMEs to fully understand the fixed constraints, identify pain points and opportunities to digitise and improve the experience.

  • Futurefy workshops to explore automation, best in class tools and systems, and inspiration from others within and outside finance.

  • Delivered persona and use case driven journeys to show what a north-star experience could look like from lead generation to completed on-boarding.

  • Highlighted key moments that help Evelyn deliver on its new principles, purpose and values, as well as quick opportunity identification for implementation.

Results

  • An engaged cross-functional team was put in place through an unconstrained and exciting piece of work which we time-boxed, and delivered impressively within a strict budget.

  • We made some strong relationships with (usually resistant) front office teams and relationship managers by assuring them that we were there to make their lives easier and to enhance the quality of the digital experience by learning from them.

  • A blueprint and pre-oiled team to inform the next phase of work — the new client portal.

  • See next case-study to see implementation.

Evelyn Partners: Wealth Client Portal

A mass client portal migration with an unmovable deadline

Challenge

We had 18 months to migrate our full client base to a new wealth management portal as the current portal provider relationship was coming to a close. This was a unique opportunity to migrate the portal to the new brand (using the Experience Toolkit), upgrade the client experience, and improve the onboarding experience based on the North Star learnings. It was also done amidst a lot of pressure, and we had to stick to the timelines, while delivering high quality UX and UI.

Project

  • I led the full UX design and experience function, collaborating with SMEs, product, digital delivery teams and, very importantly, the new platform provider, a global digital banking solutions company: Backbase.

    • Delivered hundreds of new brand designs for complex client journeys for new and existing clients, replacing more than 20 legacy onboarding modules.

    • Ensured the use of personas to drive client-centricity.

    • User tested proposed design changes with real wealth clients.

Results

  • 20 legacy onboarding modules deprecated. Unified platform live.

  • Onboarding effort significantly reduced freeing up RMs time.

  • 75% adoption in 30 days across 35,000 clients.

  • Expiring portal retired with no issues - an unmovable deadline met!

Western Union: Brand x UX

Modernise the digital user experience by creating a strong partnership with UX teams

Challenge

Brand and UX/digital team were operating in complete isolation; separate departments, separate agendas, separate countries. My KPIs centred on increasing brand consideration and usage, but the way digital teams were applying the brand guidelines was outdated and was hurting the perception of the brand by digital first audiences.

Project

  • I partnered with the development teams in San Francisco to unite Western Union's fragmented digital ecosystem by creating master digital and tone-of-voice guidelines and redesigning their web presence.

  • Working with a leading global design agency, I delivered master digital guidelines for all spaces with detailed templates for core proposition pages, working with leading markets from each region.

  • Delivered global brand experience toolkit, including principles, personas based on segmentation research and tone-of-voice guidelines.

  • Redesigned all consumer and corporate websites in 20+ markets.

  • Delivered a North Star vision for what the app could look like — with regulatory constraints considered.

Results

  • Web templates adopted by 20+ markets.

  • The toolkit became a frequently used set of guidelines by global digital teams responsible for versioning the master templates in Dubai, Casablanca, Lithuania, Costa Rica and India.

  • See next case study for metrics

Western Union: Global Ecosystem Rebrands

A full end-to-end global rebrand for Western Union to prevent its ‘Kodak moment’

Challenge

Western Union faced declining relevance in an increasingly digital, fintech-driven market, with a legacy perception tied to physical money transfers. One key objective was to drive app adoption and increase digital revenue.

 Project

  • As Global Brand Strategy Director, I led a multi-year global transformation to reposition the brand and align it with a digital first future

    • Defined a new global brand positioning (“north star”) to shift perception from legacy provider to modern digital platform 

    • Led global rollout across 200+ markets, aligning marketing, product, and customer experience 

    • Directed a full brand identity refresh (including logo and visual system) to modernise the brand at scale 

    • Simplified complex brand architecture across consumer, business, and corporate portfolios 

    • Embedded human-centered design into brand and product development, influencing digital products and innovation pipelines 

    • Led transformation of global digital ecosystem (10K+ page website), improving UX, content strategy, and conversion 

Results

  • Contributed to $5.1bn global revenue, representing +5% YoY growth (+4% constant currency) 

  • Delivered +22% growth in digital money transfer revenue, surpassing $1bn, accelerating the shift to digital channels 

  • Strengthened brand relevance and engagement among digital-first audiences across global markets 

  • Achieved consistent global adoption of new brand system, improving execution efficiency and brand coherence 

  • Positioned the business competitively within the evolving fintech landscape and supported long-term digital transformation