The communication layer of a regulated financial marketplace

The team was producing communications one at a time. Every campaign redrew the same rate grid, the same offer card, the same legal footer, slightly differently — and every one of them had to go back through compliance.

So I stopped treating the email as the unit of work. The unit became the block: rate grids, multi-column offer tables, CTAs, legal copy, promotional modules, each with agreed behaviour and agreed content rules. A campaign became an arrangement of blocks rather than a new build.

Two things happened that I did not plan for. Other managers and editors started using it, so it became the team standard. Then it was picked as the basis for an internal CVM communications service, now in pilot with managers and marketing teams — the work escaped my own remit.

The system has since survived two platform-wide rebrands. Only the skin changed; the compliance-approved logic underneath stayed put. That is the test I care about — a system that has to be rebuilt every time the brand moves was never a system.

The hardest recurring problem is not visual. It is fitting a comparison table that a person can actually read onto the narrowest phone still in the analytics, in an environment where the layout tools most designers assume are simply not available.

Insurance renewal cards carrying a logo, product name, price and CTA. Deposit rate grids. Bond yield tables. Insurance coverage breakdowns. Each one QA’d in Email on Acid and Litmus and then by hand across every major client, on mobile and desktop, because the automated preview and the real Outlook do not always agree.

Nobody asked for these formats. There was no process for complex data layouts when I arrived; I could see the gap and built into it.

Base64 images instead of hosted ones, to get past Outlook’s default image blocking. It makes the payload heavier and I know it. In a financial email where the blocked image is the rate you are being offered, the trade is worth it.

Legal copy specced as a design element — contrast ratio, size, placement — rather than dropped at the bottom in 9px grey. An illegible disclaimer is not a typographic preference, it is a compliance failure with a paper trail.

In the current redesign I work as a consultative partner to the design team: advising on Figma layouts that are technically buildable inside email-rendering constraints, and validating how a communication will actually look before anyone builds it. Internally I am the person people ask when they need to make a communication outside the standard process.

The design system itself is co-owned with the design lead in Figma — tokens, components, variants, states, usage docs — and I migrated the legacy template library into structured components during one of the rebrands.