Santander Private Banking

Core platform and design system rebuilt for live private banking operations: zero downtime, zero disruption to active client portfolios

The core advisor platform had grown with fragmented patterns and high-friction task flows, creating execution risk for bankers.

Private banking operates on trust, precision, and speed. In Santander wealth management, bankers faced complicated processes and data views that were hard to make sense of; many ended up printing documents just to work with clarity. Completing a single commercial proposal for a client burned a disproportionate amount of time. With portfolios in the tens of millions, that friction puts the operation at risk, not just the banker's comfort. We had to redesign the core platform without disrupting live operations, and do it while building a new Design System from the ground up.

I led a team of five designers across two parallel workstreams: platform redesign and Design System development. Running both at once was deliberate.

The first phase was diagnostic. The finding that reoriented the project: information architecture was the bottleneck.