Case Study
Banked
Banked lets merchants take payments by bank transfer instead of card. The marketing platform I designed and built ran without engineers, managed entirely by its team.
- Role
- Technical Lead
- Tenure
- 2021–2023
- Sector
- Fintech
- Scope
- Web, CMS & Design System
- Stakeholders
- CMO & CTO
Banked is a London-founded fintech whose open-banking technology lets merchants accept bank transfers instead of card payments, cutting transaction fees by up to 96%.
Lisa Scott, CMO at the time, needed a website that could win merchant and partner trust, and Joe Pettersson, their CTO, needed it to run without pulling engineers off the core product. I shaped the brief around both of these goals.
I led the design and build of a self-sufficient marketing platform (headless CMS, unified design system, and forms wired straight into Salesforce) that the marketing team runs without touching code.
Banked went on to enter the US market and close a $20m Series A led by Bank of America, Lisa was promoted to CEO of Banked’s EU operations, and the partnership kept extending. Pay by Bank and merchant microsites at first, then other projects like the Comic Relief donation pages.
Banked is a London-founded fintech. Their open-banking technology lets merchants accept bank transfers instead of card payments, cutting transaction fees by up to 96%.
Lisa Scott, Banked’s CMO at the time, had secured leadership buy-in for a series of initiatives to drive merchant and partner interest. The first and most urgent was a full website refresh. Something that could communicate Banked’s proposition clearly and quickly build trust with prospective merchants.
I coordinated with Joe Pettersson, the CTO, to keep the work clear of his engineering team. His priority was the core product, so the marketing site had to run independently, with no risk of pulling developers into firefights. The brief was for an engaging, self-sufficient site that wouldn’t burden the in-house teams.
Platform
The existing site had become a bottleneck. The design team had moved on to product work, and marketing lacked the autonomy to update content or build new pages.
My team and I replaced it with a hosted headless CMS as the content backbone. The marketing team could manage everything directly (copy, imagery, page structure) without touching code. Running on managed infrastructure with full support, it met Joe’s requirement that website issues never land on the product team’s desk.
Design
Working with Banked’s design team, I built a unified design system for the web that worked within the guidelines of their existing brand identity. The goal was consistency across everything published, from the website to social assets and sales collateral.
As part of this, I developed a standard graphics treatment process with guidelines for format selection and export. This gave the team a repeatable way to produce high-quality visuals without design review on every asset.
The design system later became a foundation beyond marketing. Following the website’s success, Banked brought me back for several more projects, including a set of merchant-facing payment components. You can read more about that in the Pay by Bank case study.
Modularity
Rigid content models age badly. I built Banked’s site around a library of block components, from simple text and image blocks through to complex, structured content types. Where possible, blocks referenced a single source of truth, so updating a product description or pricing detail once propagated everywhere it appeared.
I also provided a visual form builder that let the marketing and sales teams create forms without engineering involvement. When a conference landing page needs a new partner enquiry form, the team makes one themselves.
This approach gave the marketing team genuine autonomy to build and iterate on pages as the business needed them.
Integrations
The sales team relied on Salesforce for lead management, so I integrated the website directly. Using the custom form builder, the Banked team could spin up forms that routed submissions to email, Salesforce, Zendesk, or other systems as needed. All of this was configurable per form with no code-level changes required.
This wired the marketing site into the existing sales pipeline, so leads flowed through without manual handoffs.
Impact
The refreshed website immediately attracted merchant and partner interest.
Bank of America went from leading the Series A to launching Pay by Bank with Banked for its own merchants. Lisa Scott, the CMO who drove the initiative, was promoted to CEO of Banked’s EU operations.
- $20m
- Series A led by Bank of America
- 3+
- follow-on projects after the site launched
NAB has since acquired Banked, after years as its banking partner.
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