I owned a set of core components, from buttons and form controls to action bars, in a design system rebuilt across 100+ banking applications

A global financial services company ran more than 100 internal applications, consumed by over 500 banking partners. Each had been built by a different team at a different time. There was no shared design language, no shared component set, and no consistent accessibility baseline.

The company committed to unifying all of it under one visual system, on a ten-year horizon. I joined as one of seven UX consultants on that programme and owned the components everything else was built on top of.

The rest of this case study covers the decisions, the reversal we had to make partway through, and how the work was validated. It’s behind a code because the client, the interfaces and the internal research are covered by NDA.