Bankwest.com.au — Uncomplicating Banking for Australian Families

Australians consistently report feeling overwhelmed and disempowered when choosing banking products. Research indicates a significant portion struggle to understand complex financial concepts and effectively compare how options impact their situation, leading to suboptimal choices and increased financial stress. Bankwest recognised an opportunity to disrupt this landscape by becoming a truly customer-centric digital challenger bank — and the website needed to reflect this. The challenge was to create a new, accessible website that demystified banking, encouraged informed decision-making, and gave customers confidence in understand the impacts for their specific circumstances — all while bringing to life a completely new brand and digital experience.

Recognising the complexity of financial products, the new website simplifies Bankwest's digital experience around core customer needs: Spend, Save, Borrow, Support. Needs-led navigation and interactive comparison tools allow customers to understand and compare features, rates, and terms side-by-side, fostering confident choices. Built for Australia’s digital natives — animations, interactions and visual design bring the new experience to life. We used innovative development approaches on industry-standard tech — balancing customer experience alongside security, speed and scalability. Crucially, this solution wasn’t developed in isolation. We iteratively tested prototypes over 50 hours with customers, validating assumptions and ensuring we were meeting real user needs.

For customers, the new website supports informed, confident financial decisions. Ultimately feeling more in control of their money. “The site is so much easier to understand now; I finally feel confident about making a financial decision.” — Customer testing For Bankwest teams, the technical foundations and considered component designs empower them to deliver more impactful solutions for customers now and into the future, faster. For Bankwest overall, it represents the start of their digital journey and demonstrates the power of a customer-centric design approach in building trust, empowering informed decisions — ultimately driving sustainable growth for Bankwest.

The re-imagined Bankwest website prioritizes accessibility and ease-of-use to empowers customers at every step. Find what you need. Helping customers navigate with ease through intuitive navigation, robust search and strategically placed modals. Understand the product. Providing clarity and confidence through infographic breakdown of rates and fees, personalised calculators and clear but comprehensive product information. Choose the right product for you. Supporting customers to easily compare products with interactive side-by-side comparisons, detailed drop downs, product cards highlighting key features and editorial-style guides. Enquire easily. Reducing complexity in the home loan application process with single-page enquiry forms, dynamic content surfacing, and animated calls to action. Support when you need it. Strategically providing different levels of help through a structured self-serve support section, clear help articles and pathways to human help channels. These features were designed in collaboration with customers over 50 hours of testing, informing the overall vision for the website and what was prioritised for first release. Visual design and content principles were developed to anchor features to customer needs. All delivered through an innovative development approach by separating out the React frontend to enable animations and transitions — not seen before on the chosen technology.