Digital Experience — 2025
Meridian.
Banking, Reimagined
A ground-up digital platform for a challenger bank — design system, marketing site and a product experience that made finance feel human again.
- Client
- Meridian
- Year
- 2025
- Services
- UX/UI Design · Website Design & Development · Content & Digital Experiences
The
challenge.
Meridian was launching a challenger bank into the most crowded market in fintech. Incumbents outspent them, rivals out-featured them, and their early product prototypes tested as 'another banking app'. They needed a digital experience customers would genuinely feel differently about.
Creative
strategy.
We positioned Meridian as the bank that speaks plainly. Every design decision — from typographic scale to transaction language — was built to remove the anxiety finance creates. The creative strategy paired editorial-grade content with a calm, spatial interface language: light, depth and one confident accent colour guiding every action.
Design
process.
Discovery started with 40 customer interviews and a competitive teardown of every major banking app in the UK market. We mapped the emotional journey of money — the spikes of anxiety at payments, statements and overdrafts — and designed against each one.
The interface language is spatial and calm: generous negative space, a restrained neutral palette, and a single accent reserved exclusively for moments of action. We built a 240-component design system in eight weeks, covering the marketing site, product app and internal tools, with accessibility baked in at WCAG AA from the first sketch.
Development ran in parallel with design in two-week cycles. The marketing site launched first as a waitlist engine — long-scroll editorial storytelling with motion that responds to scroll position — converting at three times the fintech benchmark and feeding the product launch a quarter later.
Final results.
92K
Waitlist signups pre-launch
4.9★
App store rating at launch
-52%
Drop-off in onboarding flow
“The team treated our product like their own. The design system they built still shapes every feature we ship two years later.”
James Whitfield
Co-founder & CEO, Meridian
Visual gallery.
