Shawbrook is a specialist UK bank with an ambitious growth strategy: acquiring brands, entering new markets, and serving customers that high street banks overlook. They needed a digital foundation that could scale with them. Not a website. A system. One that could launch new brands quickly, hold consistent standards across every property, and absorb whatever came next. That is what we built together.
Year
2023-present
Industry
Financial Services
Scope of Work
Technology
The brief behind the brief
Shawbrook came to us with what looked like a website project. It was really a much bigger question: how do you build a digital presence for a bank that keeps getting bigger? Their portfolio already spanned personal savings, business lending, and property finance. Acquisitions were bringing new brands into the group. Each one had its own audience, its own tone, its own regulatory requirements. Managing all of that through disconnected, one-off builds was not a viable long-term strategy.
The work started with deep discovery: understanding not just the immediate website need but the shape of Shawbrook's ambitions, the brands already in the group, and the ones likely to follow. What emerged from that process was a clear architectural decision: build a design system first, then build the sites on top of it.
A design system built for a growing group
The Shawbrook Design System is a flexible, scalable component library that lets new brands be launched quickly without sacrificing quality, consistency, or security. Every element, from typography and colour application to form patterns and content templates, was designed to flex across different brand identities while maintaining the structural rigour a regulated financial institution requires.
This is not a theme applied over a single template. It is a considered system: one where a new acquisition can be onboarded into a high-performing, accessible, and secure digital product in a fraction of the time a bespoke build would take. For a bank growing through acquisition, that is a meaningful commercial advantage.
Performance that earns trust
In financial services, a slow or unreliable website is not just a UX problem. It signals something about the institution behind it. The rebuilt Shawbrook platform loads 30% faster than what it replaced, holds an A-rated security score, and is built on Umbraco CMS with a hosting infrastructure designed to handle the traffic demands of a bank running national campaigns across multiple products simultaneously.
The results reflect what happens when the foundations are right: commercial enquiries up 53%, logged-in users up 46%, and total site visits up 21% within the first year. These are not vanity metrics for a bank. They represent real people taking the next step with a financial product.
"Thanks to Cogworks, we deployed the new site on time and within budget. The team was highly responsive and flexible in terms of accommodating changes." Ben Jeffrey • Head of Marketing Technology • Shawbrook Bank
Got questions? We’ve got answers. Here’s everything you need to know about projects like this one.
What happens when we acquire a new brand?
We are in a regulated industry. How do you handle compliance and security requirements?
How do you balance brand differentiation with platform consistency?
We have several brands under one group. Does each one need to be built separately?
