Cadence Bank

Being a financial institution isn’t exactly easy. There’s immense pressure with watching over someone’s individual fortunes, helping families finance their forever home, providing companies the capital they need for new developments…the list goes on and on. And of course, there’s oversight and mandatory regulations from various institutions that must be adhered to.

And when two banks come together…things get more complicated.

This was the case when BancorpSouth Bank acquired Cadence Bank in 2021, becoming a top 50 bank in the U.S. And while the new venture chose to keep the Cadence name, an updated website experience was needed to communicate the full breadth of banking services available to both personal and business customers — while also reassuring customers that they could continue doing business as usual.

In tandem with the integration, Cadence wanted to amplify their digital experience and leverage their on-site reputation for banking that delivered ease and simplicity across every touchpoint.

This meant revitalizing the brand identity and streamlining the experience for its various audiences. All while showcasing Cadence’s breadth of products and services and conveying confidence, stability and technical innovation at every opportunity.

Collectively, Cadence and Horizontal understood that the first impression of the new digital experience meant everything.  

To ensure we lived up to our top tier ambition, we conducted a thorough discovery phase to understand the site experience strategy, website design vision and overall path forward. This included:

• Executive stakeholder interviews
• Site experience strategy
• User segment matrix
• Feature Matrix
• Design vision workshop
• Technical discovery including technical audits and stakeholder working sessions

Based on this foundation, our team of digital strategists, personalization specialists, measurement specialists, content strategists, UX and visual designers, copywriters, content strategists and technical leaders assembled to launch the brand-new bank experience. Deliverables during this phase included:

• Sitemap development
• Content migration plan for the two legacy sites
• Content matrix for 40 high-visibility pages across the new site which lead to content development for these pages
• Technical blueprint
• Measurement strategy for key metrics supporting business objectives
• Personalization roadmap and strategy – highlighting a select number of crawl rules to implement following site launch
• Implementation of a new site design system, which included design for 40 new components, responsive page design for 15-page templates and a digital style library for technical implementation

And during the implementation phase, we successfully incorporated 6 MVP sprints — during which the development team set up 4 environments including: Dev, QA, UAT and Production environments that live on Sitecore 10.2. New features were also added to better serve customers — ranging from dynamic, on-site maps to fraud identity alert and plenty more. Additionally, in the weeks leading up to launch the HZTL team content mapped and authored 300 pages of content for site conversion.