Santander Private Banking

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

Private banking operates on trust, precision, and speed. Santander's wealth management division was running critical client operations on a platform that had grown organically, layered with complexity, inconsistent patterns, and no unified design language. For relationship managers handling portfolios in the tens of millions, friction isn't an inconvenience. It's a risk. The mandate was clear: 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 a deliberate call, not a resourcing accident.

The first phase was diagnostic. The insight that reoriented the project: the primary source of friction wasn't navigation. It was information architecture.