Gateway Bank website redesign case study

Background

Gateway Bank, a successful customer-owned mutual bank based in Sydney, serves over 30,000 members across Australia with award-winning financial services. This year, Gateway decided to change website providers to move hosting in-house, upgrade their CMS, and enhance their digital offering.

Known for their agility and innovation, Gateway sought a digital partner that shared their dynamic approach. They engaged Sitback due to their expertise in financial services, user experience (UX), and sales optimisation. Sitback’s capability to deliver on time and within budget made them the perfect choice for the project.

Problem

Gateway’s previous website provider was increasingly unable to provide the flexibility and agility Gateway required alongside challenges in demonstrating required regulatory certifications. Combined with this was an ageing CMS platform that required significant upgrades to enable required functionality and UX enhancements. 

Solution

Sitback utilised their Banking Website Accelerator Platform to construct the new site, mapping existing components to the new framework. Gateway’s internal team managed the hosting on Azure, with Cloudflare integration for enhanced security. Comprehensive efforts were directed towards SEO and content writing due to Gateway’s extensive suite of financial products and services. The Accelerator platform offered greater design flexibility and usability compared to the previous CMS, as well as a streamlined development timeline.

Several new features were developed and integrated into the core Website Accelerator Platform, including Dynamic Document Lists that simplified the management of PDF documents, allowing users to easily add individual documents or entire folders of PDFs to a page with a single click. This features greatly reduces the manual effort required and reduces operational risk to ensure the website remains compliant with mandated requirements. 

The Website Accelerator Platform has Product Management features out of the box, allowing content editors to easily display product rates anywhere on the site using a simple token. For Gateway, we enhanced this capability to showcase comprehensive product features which are dynamically pulled from the centralised Rates Management tool. Furthermore, reusable global content elements like banners and callout cards were introduced, allowing content edits in one place to be reflected site wide. Flexible layout options were also provided through new column components, enabling diverse page layouts to accommodate any design Gateway have in mind and enable optimisation through product pages.

Customisation of the user interface was achieved using custom fonts and by incorporating Gateway’s brand colours stored as variables across site components. This means content editors can easily keep everything on-brand without having to refer to a style guide all the time. 

The site’s accessibility was enhanced demonstrating a strong commitment from Gateway to equity and inclusivity, considering the access requirements of older users across their customer base. 

Smooth project execution was ensured through strong collaboration between Sitback and Gateway’s marketing and technology teams, including Gateway’s SEO vendor, Gorilla, who we collaborated with on the content migration process, ensuring proper URL redirect mappings for all pages between the old and new sites, preventing any drop in search rankings through the transition.

Results

The end-to-end project was completed in 4 months, ahead of the license renewal deadline. Key outcomes included a highly secure, CPS-234 compliant hosting environment, an upgrade to the latest Umbraco CMS, and intuitive product management with full control over site design, layout, and content.

The Google Lighthouse score for accessibility improved from 74/100 to 100/100. Additionally, the cost of the new build and upgrading to a modern CMS was less than the cost of a simple upgrade from the previous supplier. Future plans include the addition of personalisation features and ongoing enhancements through Sitback’s Support & Optimisation team.

“Throughout the project, we had excellent developers and builders working seamlessly with both our marketing and technology teams to ensure a smooth transition to internal hosting. We now have the capability to invest cost-effectively in enhancing our digital resources and the experience we offer new and existing members.”

Adam Norman

Chief Marketing Officer

The secret sauce

Banking Website Accelerator Platform

The Website Accelerator Platform is designed to offer quick and efficient deployment of new websites for financial institutions like credit unions, mutuals, and member-owned banks. The platform’s flexibility allows for extensive customisation and easy content management, enabling institutions to provide a superior digital experience for their customers – in less time and with lower overheads.

By leveraging features such as centralised Rates Management, Dynamic Document Lists, product feature tables, and reusable components, the Website Accelerator Platform ensures that institutions can maintain an up-to-date, accessible, and fully compliant online presence, with budget left over to create an exceptional customer experience.

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