Elevating a brand's perception in the financial market

Global financial leader SMBC was suffering from a fragmented digital experience wrought with legacy websites, outdated content, and a platform that hindered seamless integration across their business sectors while meeting strict regulatory standards.

To stay competitive, attract top talent, and resonate with their employees and target audiences, SMBC partnered with Stellar Elements to create a new brand direction and website.

Informed by research, interviews, and our brand audits, we helped SMBC create a design foundation that spanned their global brand, core industries, employee communications, and recruiting campaigns.

With this work, a new and elevated brand expression for SMBC emerged focused on clarity and strong design. We delivered an in-depth style guide, which spoke to core design elements across the brand: voice and tone, photography, typography, and color palette.

Aligning with our previous redesign efforts, SMBC sought to unify their web presence by consolidating eight websites for different business units into one cohesive website. We redesigned and unified the SMBC Americas website, implementing a new site structure and UX/UI improvements, with a new branded look, voice, and tone. This resulted in a reimagined, fully responsive web experience.

As part of these initiatives, we established the brand vision, values, and standards throughout their entire brand ecosystem, shaping a cohesive identity and guiding how SMBC communicates internally and externally through a responsive web experience.

Our core design principle was to foster clarity and focus, resulting in simplification of SMBC's production processes: the new design, reduction of unnecessary page templates, and a revised brand style guide transformed a previously chaotic process into a streamlined and simplified approach for updating site content.

This solution targeted and closed a number of customer experience gaps in the financial services industry, including integration and CX perception gaps.