Client Overview
The client is one of the largest personal finance providers in the U.S., offering personal loans, credit cards, and financial wellness tools through both digital channels and more than 1,200 physical branches. Their digital organization supports a wide range of experiences, from customer acquisition and loan servicing to internal tools used in call centers and branches.
As they moved toward a multi-product digital strategy, they identified the need for a shared design foundation that could scale across customer and employee experiences. The initiative focused on unifying fragmented patterns, reducing duplicated effort, and enabling teams to deliver a cohesive experience with greater speed and consistency. The result was a production-ready enterprise design system that now underpins the digital platform and supports ongoing product expansion.
Customer Challenge
Key challenges:
Multiple product teams made independent styling, spacing, and interaction design choices, resulting in a scattered experience — with nine inconsistent button styles across customer experiences alone.
Internal tools used different layouts and workflows depending on the product lane that built them, decreasing efficiency for branch and servicing teams.
Branding updates and UI adjustments required months of effort because designs were hard coded across many independent repositories.
As the move towards a multi-product digital strategy happens, these inconsistencies made it difficult to create a single, seamless experience.
What was at stake?
As the client prepared to bring various financial tools into one unified app, they needed a shared design foundation. Without it, teams would continue to solve the same problems differently, slowing delivery and creating friction for customers who should feel like they’re interacting with one single product, not several stitched together.
Ness Solution
To execute this strategy, the client partnered with Ness I&D to design, build, and operationalize an enterprise design system supporting every digital product and internal tool.
Key initiatives:
End-to-end design audit
Across all customer-facing and team-member experiences, identifying overlapping patterns, inconsistencies, and shared design challenges.
Foundational design system setup
Including tokens, core components, interaction patterns, documentation structure, and technical architecture in Figma and Storybook.
Cross-team decision-making
Facilitating alignment across designers, engineers, product managers, brand, and an external agency working on the upcoming multi-product app.
Prioritization support
To concentrate early efforts on components and patterns with the highest cross-product impact, ensuring the design system delivered immediate value while establishing a strong long-term foundation
Component development and pilot adoption
Delivering new components on two-week cycles and using the multi-product dashboard as the first real production test.
Support for rollout and migration
Helping product teams begin replacing legacy patterns with system components in both design and code.
Engagement model
A senior Ness I&D designer was embedded directly into the digital organization for a full year, partnering with Head of Design and VP of Design to chart the overall design direction. He worked closely with the client’s design and engineering teams to align on the best design and implementation.
Unlike a typical vendor model, this embedded approach enabled us to:
What Changed?
The design system replaced fragmented experiences and duplicated efforts with a unified foundation that product teams now leverage across both design and production code. Key improvements included:
Collectively, these changes established a shared design foundation, significant gains in efficiency, and a new model for how teams collaborate to deliver a unified product experience.
Business Outcomes
The client’s Design System delivered immediate business value with a measurable impact on consistency, speed, and alignment.
Production launch
The multi-product dashboard and navigation launched on time in Q4 2025 in the customer-servicing app, built entirely using Design System components—demonstrating the system’s readiness for production-scale delivery.
Unified experience
Early signals from user testing and analytics indicate the new design successfully reframes separate products as a holistic, unified product experience.
Real engineering efficiency
The Design System’s token architecture reduced a brand color update that previously required 9 months of org-wide involvement to 1 month by a central team, unlocking product team capacity while ensuring colors are consistent and accessible
Real design efficiency
Design System adoption in Figma was completed one month ahead of schedule across all customer-servicing product lanes, reflecting both strong team alignment and a library that is highly learnable and easy to integrate into daily workflows.
Cross-team alignment
The Design System achieved 65% adoption in design across customer- and employee-facing product teams, with org-wide adoption planned in 2026.
No dependencies
UI Components were delivered as framework-agnostic pure JavaScript web components that are modular, composable, and reusable across any tech stack and free of 3rd party dependencies.
Strategic impact
From the outset, the client demonstrated a strong commitment to delivering a cohesive, customer-centered digital experience. The design system fundamentally expanded the organization’s ability to scale this vision with consistency, speed, and confidence.
By introducing a modern, intuitive experience across customer and employee products, the design system established a scalable platform for product growth. Its successful adoption in the multi-product dashboard launch, positions the client to scale its multi-product strategy quickly and consistently, while providing teams with reusable components and patterns that accelerate design, development, and testing.
More broadly, the design system reshapes how they design and build digital products, transforming design from disparate, isolated efforts into a shared product infrastructure. It reorients teams from maintaining separate products to collaborating on a shared platform where improvements made once benefit every consuming experience. This creates a sustainable operating model for design at scale and a durable foundation for future investments in accessibility maturity, performance, AI-assisted product workflows, and platform expansion.
By establishing a centralized foundation for the user experience, product delivery cycles, and team collaboration, the design system positions one of the largest personal finance providers in the U.S. to achieve sustained gains in experience quality, time-to-market, organizational agility, and long-term product growth.
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