Empowering British Business Bank with Scalable and Unified Digital Experiences
Delivering time-sensitive initiatives while transforming a fragmented digital ecosystem
British Business Bank (BBB) is the UK’s government-owned economic development bank, dedicated to making finance markets work more effectively for smaller businesses. Through its subsidiaries and programmes, including British Patient Capital, the bank supports businesses at every stage of growth by providing loans, guarantees, and venture capital to help them innovate and thrive. A national treasure that deserves a premium user experience platform.
The Challenge
BBB faced two distinct but connected challenges that highlighted the need for speed, scalability, and consistency in their digital estate.
Future Fund: Breakthrough Launch
In March 2021, the UK government announced the £365 million Future Fund: Breakthrough scheme. British Patient Capital was tasked with launching the programme to coincide with the Chancellor’s Budget speech. The challenge: create and publish a seamless digital experience under strict confidentiality and with an immovable deadline.
A Fragmented Digital Landscape
Beyond urgent initiatives, BBB’s wider digital ecosystem was complex and inconsistent. Multiple sites and platforms served different audiences—ranging from start-ups and fund managers to job seekers—resulting in a fragmented user experience. Internally, outdated CMS platforms created inefficiencies, an over-reliance on external agencies, and duplicated effort across teams.
Our Approach
Future Fund: Breakthrough
Audience-Centered Design: Worked with BBB to understand the needs of R&D-focused businesses, ensuring clarity and accessibility of information.
Modular Development: Adopted a component-based approach for rapid delivery and future reusability.
User Experience Design: Presented multiple UI options for mobile and desktop, then delivered a final design featuring FAQs, tailored navigation, and a custom homepage module.
Risk Management: Implemented back-up resources, out-of-hours support, and contingency planning to meet the hard deadline without compromise.
Digital Ecosystem Transformation
Discovery and Audit: Conducted stakeholder interviews, technical analysis, and content audits to map user journeys and identify pain points.
Information Architecture: Created a streamlined navigation system and a “north star” vision for a unified platform.
Triage Process: Designed clearer user flows to direct audiences to relevant content quickly.
Platform Recommendations: Proposed scalable solutions covering CMS, content strategy, and personalisation to support BBB’s long-term digital transformation.
Roadmap: Outlined a phased “crawl, walk, run” strategy to deliver both immediate wins and sustainable improvements.
From Transformation to Optimisation
Architecture delivery: Delivered a single platform capable of powering BBB’s rationalised web estate.
Publishing speed: Low code editing environment that allows instantaneous publishing by non-technical editors.
Decentralised publishing: Enabled business unit editing teams to run test and learn content iteration.
Centralised governance: Brought brand, accessibility, user experience and technical governance into centralised control without impacting marketing communications workflows.
A target operating model for growth: With a combined user research, user testing, experience design and data practice, we created a centre of excellence model to deliver constant user outcome improvement.
The Outcome
Together, these projects delivered both immediate impact and long-term transformation for BBB.
Key achievements include:
On-Time Launch: Future Fund: Breakthrough website delivered in full alignment with Budget 2021.
Reusable Components: Modular design enabled future flexibility for other initiatives.
Unified Experience: Clearer navigation and triage processes improved user journeys across the wider estate.
Operational Efficiency: Content management processes were simplified, reducing dependency on external support.
Consistency and Scalability: Recommendations set the foundation for a cohesive, future-ready digital platform.
“From the outset, Coherence understood the time-sensitive and confidential nature of the Future Fund project. They were calm, efficient, and delivered on time and on budget with no complications. At the same time, they’ve helped us take a broader view of our digital landscape, ensuring we have a roadmap for long-term transformation. Both projects reflect a shared commitment to clarity, agility, and impact.”
— Amanda Madigan, British Business Bank
In Summary
BBB have shown the way in developing a communication platform based on user-centred expertise, flexible publishing technology and solid technology governance. This allows them to react promptly to unfolding events without compromise on user experience. It also allows them to test and learn for improved outcomes across a complex set of audience segments, without the drag factor of an inflexible and costly development lifecycle.
