The terms of the game.
Caja Ingenieros' digital banking dates back to 2012, and everything about it had sprawled with age — the renewal programme itself has been running for seven years. Trading lived in a third-party Norbolsa terminal bolted onto Banca Online: its own navigation, its own look, a yellow "Volver a Banca Online" button as the only way home. Three locks were set before we arrived: an ecosystem from 2012, a terminal whose data and charts belonged to the provider, and a pace set by banking itself.
Immerse before anything.
I couldn't move the constraints — but I could know them better than anyone else in the room. The first quality lever was fluency. I studied five reference platforms — TradingView, Yahoo Finance and eToro among them — flow by flow: how each handles navigation, treats components, manages density. I wasn't hunting for a single decisive insight; I was building fluency in a domain with hard conventions, and a living reference that answered pattern questions for the rest of the engagement.
Map first, draw second.
The second lever: total knowledge of what already existed. The terminal worked — a decade behind at the UI level — but it had never been mapped. So I mapped it before drawing anything:
Unglamorous — and every screen that follows stood on it.
One skeleton for every screen.
The layout was a surface we fully controlled — so it got pushed the furthest. Before any screen, I explored and settled a small family of templates — two columns at 8/4, two at 6/6, a single full width, with or without the main header — locked to three desktop breakpoints. The pieces every screen shares — sidebar, header, footer — I designed once and reused everywhere; and modules that sat in the wrong place, company search among them, I rehomed to where the work actually happens.
Keep the data, change the hierarchy.
The charts were the surface we didn't control. Norbolsa — the ecosystem's data provider, since acquired by Kutxabank — renders them, so they could not be redesigned. And in platforms like these, chart design is much of what makes them feel usable, modern, authoritative. With that piece locked, the scope became clear: a renewed UI, targeted UX improvements where the constraints allowed — and getting the most out of everything we could touch.
A broker's instrument page is the densest screen in banking: live price, order book, seven tabs of analysis, news, charts. On the inherited terminal it arrived as one undifferentiated wall. The redesign removes nothing — same tabs, same data; members trade on that information. What changed is the hierarchy: one price block owns the page, best bid and offer beside it, Comprar and Vender always in reach, news and charts in their own columns. That treatment became the pattern for every dense screen in Mercados.
Much of what makes a trading product feel premium is the charts — the one part we couldn't design. Everything around them had to carry the quality instead.
This was the hardest part of the whole engagement: screens years out of date, hard limits on what could move — and still finding the places where better UX could land.
The broker, rebuilt.
This is what those levers add up to. The broker's home — the same page this case opened with — rebuilt on the bank's shell, the hierarchy from the instrument page scaled out, and the provider's charts slotted into the new layout.
A handful of screens shown. Forty-five flows behind them.
How far did the controllable surfaces get pushed? Five areas rebuilt flow by flow, every screen specified for build — states, focus order, screen-reader behaviour — and a months-long design-QA pass guarding the build as it went in.
Bizum, built from the bank's own parts.
The same approach, applied to the everyday flows. This case is the broker; the engagement was wider — Bizum is one example of the rest. Designed from zero on the new platform, the Alta Bizum flow recomposes the bank's existing components, adding new parts only where the flow genuinely needs them.
The flow is still in implementation with the bank — the full interactive prototype is available on request.
On banking time.
Even shipping wasn't ours to control: banking time runs through strict security review, several vendors and a long chain to production, with the new platform planned for around 2027. What we did control got adopted — the work ran inside the renewal's agile programme, the screens were approved, the redesign verified, and it's in implementation now, with a mobile version in development on the back of it.