COUTTS

Redefining a 300-year-old legacy: A complete refresh and modernisation of the Coutts website to deliver and reimagined digital experience.
2025/26  •  1 year project  •   Redesign   •   Rebrand   •   Replatforming
Final project outcome.
The Story
Coutts is an iconic private bank with over 300 years of excellence. However, its digital presence had become fragmented and failed to reflect its modern business ambition. I spearheaded a 1 undertaking to completely redesign, rebrand, and replatform Coutt.com.
Role: Design Lead. I managed a mid-weight designer and acted as the primary design authority for all departments, leading all design meetings and workshops.
Key Deliverables:
The Challenge
The legacy site suffered from critical usability and brand issues that hindered growth and failed to meet the expectations of a high-net-worth audience:
Navigation & IA: A fragmented information architecture made key pages and tools hard to discover, many remained inaccessible via global navigation or hidden as links within other pages.
Inconsistency & Brand Alignment: A lack of visual cohesion, with an excessive variety of colours and type sizes, meant the site failed to reflect the "modern luxury" feel and sophisticated aesthetic synonymous with the Coutts name.
Accessibility: The digital experience failed to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards.
Replatforming: Migrating to the NatWest AEM platform, ensuring all component structures and design foundations aligned with the technical build environment.
Stakeholder Alignment: Balancing competing business requirements and managed senior leadership engagement to deliver a high-profile transformation on a strict 1-year timeline.
Images of the old brand and web pages.
The Brief & Rebrand
“Portray a unique brand that feels authentic and appropriate for a sophisticated audience”
We sharpened and modernised the Coutts visual language to match our heritage and business ambition. The goal was to create a distinctive, elevated brand while ensuring we remain a relevant leader in a competitive market. Every key element was updated to reflect a "Modern Luxury" aesthetic.
Typography: We replaced hard-to-read bolds and caps with elegant sentence-case Siena for headings, paired with Forme Grotesk for highly legible, accessible body copy.
Colour: The palette was refined around a foundational Signature Burgundy and sand, creating a sharp, consistent, and elevated visual language.
Imagery: We shifted from generic stock photography to bespoke brand imagery and curated artworks, ensuring the digital experience feels authentic for a sophisticated audience.
Design System: Componentry
To ensure long-term consistency and scalability, we developed a comprehensive component library tailored to the brand's new aesthetic. We designed, tested, and built 55 components optimized for the AEM migration.
The examples below is the Article Header component. Engineered for adaptability, it seamlessly supports multiple configurations, including center or left alignment, optional primary/secondary CTAs, and varying body copy lengths, while maintaining visual integrity across all use cases.
Click on images to enlarge.
Motion
Five motion-based elements were also created to inject brand personality, dynamism and deliver moments of delight to the site.
Documentation
Detailed component documentation was created for both designers and developers to support a seamless transition. See example of the button docuemtation below.
Click on images to enlarge
The Onboarding Journey
The "Become a Client" (BAC) flow is the bank’s most critical conversion point; as the sole entry path for all new clients, it facilitates hundreds of millions of pounds in value annually. Previously, only 5% of 5.8k monthly enquiries were eligible, leading to significant wasted resource; therefore, it required a complete strategic refinement and optimisation.
Previous Journey
Optimised journey
Key Improvements:
Strategic Filtering: Collaborated closely with the business to refine the underlying logic, ensuring the journey effectively filters out ineligible prospects while providing a "concierge" feel for prospective clients.
Consolidated Intelligence: Merged three fragmented journeys into a single, dynamic flow. Using conditional branching, the path now adapts in real-time to user input, streamlining the lead-capture process.
User-Tested Optimisation: Conducted three rounds of dedicated user testing to identify and resolve friction points.
Commercial Impact & Performance Results