Giving an Age-Old Investment Behemoth New Digital Prowess
1
The Background
Nuveen came to Code and Theory with two main goals: to relaunch their brand digitally, and to leap forward from labyrinth-like hardcoded sites and antiquated systems to a modern system that could scale with them as they scaled as a brand.
We defined, designed and developed Nuveen’s global digital ecosystem, ensuring that it can grow and scale over time, from US retail to US institutional, global, regional and local sites. To effectively communicate Nuveen’s new focus on investment solutions we also established a companywide focus on go-to market themes and a new emphasis on communicating thought leadership and expertise throughout the digital experience.
2
The Challenge
The site needed to establish Nuveen as a differentiated global investment manager that works in partnership with its clients to create outcome-focused solutions. The new site would both help clients secure their financial futures, and provide a platform from which to launch Nuveen's new brand.
Demonstrating the Brand
This new site needed to present the world with the new global Nuveen—a brand that is approachable and optimistic, built on a breadth of offerings, leader in alternatives, and a century of responsible investing.
Prioritizing User Needs
Taking a customer-centric design approach would help build the relationships needed to ensure growth of asset-gathering potential and achieve Nuveen’s evolving business goals.
Educating & Informing
The new Nuveen is a global brand that is more than municipal bonds and fixed income products. The brand needed to communicate solutions for its clients' wide breadth of financial goals and needs.
Flexibility & Control
To accommodate Nuveen’s growth from its initial state to a global brand, we needed to build a flexible system to give it the control to reach and grow its audience—and therefore its client base—while being easy for its team to manage.
3
The Solution
Build in Stages: Test, Learn, Iterate & Launch
Launching the first stage as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), we established an efficient set of only 9 templates and 34 modules in roughly 13 weeks. Full design was tested with Nuveen employees and prospective investors to validate the experience prior to launch. A second microsite was launched in tandem with MVP, reusing a subset of the existing tool kit (build once, launch twice). A third release with enhanced features will launch in both the US and the UK, taking full advantage of the same consistent set of templates and modules. With each new affiliate that we include, we are mapping content to the established design system and scaling to meet the new needs of each affiliate. Each of those new modules is then integrated into the whole system to further improve the already launched sites.
Provide Service to Multiple End Users & Clients B2B, B2B2C & B2C
Due to the complex nature of Nuveen's business and interrelated products and strategies, we developed multiple toolsets for multiple end users: financial advisors, institutional advisors, consultants and tenants who occupy their real estate investments and properties. This approach allowed us to take a very complex system of sites and maintain a very simple, branded narrative, and an intuitive approach to the site experience—all while adeptly servicing multiple audiences at once.
4
The Results
The success of transforming the one-hundred-year-old municipal bond firm into a digitally-focused leader is proven by the numbers. The new Nuveen site has resulted in:
- 122% Increase in users
- 52% Increase in page views per session
