Growing Adoption and Trust Through Digital Transformation
How do you save your team 100,000 hours, or $15M, in a single quarter? That's not a typo.
For T. Rowe Price, it started with a hard truth: scale had outpaced simplicity. After 85+ years of building trust — and $1.79 trillion in assets under management (as of January 31, 2026) — the firm’s digital ecosystem had quietly fragmented into 47 independently managed sites across six languages.
The result: Countless design inconsistencies. Duplicated work. Slower execution.
In an industry where trust is built in the details, the experience wasn’t keeping up with the brand. Plus, in a regulated environment, complexity doesn’t just slow you down — it compounds risk.
T. Rowe Price trusted Code and Theory to lead full-scale digital transformation, anchored by evolving Beacon, the existing design system, into a unified, governed enterprise-wide operating model powering global experiences, personalization and product innovation.
The objectives:
- Drive growth through stronger organic performance and conversion.
- Elevate customer experience through consistency and personalization.
- Unlock efficiency through faster publishing and lower operational costs.
After more than a year of integrated creative and technology work, we've helped T. Rowe Price tangibly elevate digital experiences for investment professionals, accelerating time-to-market and reducing operational overhead.
Key Takeaways
- Unified 47 independently managed websites into a scalable enterprise digital foundation capable of supporting global investor experiences.
- Evolved Beacon (existing design system) into a governed design operating system, accelerating delivery while maintaining compliance in a highly regulated industry.
- Beacon established the foundation for scalable personalization, AI-ready data structures and faster product innovation.
Impact
- Enterprise organic site visits: 61% increase (improved SEO and discoverability)
- Conversion rate: 17% increase (more visitors converting to desired outcomes)
- Beacon adoption: 500% increase (standardizes experiences, increases client trust, reduces duplicated work across internal teams)
- Cost avoidance: $15M in cost avoidance (reduces spend and frees budget for product investment)
- Design and development time saved: 100,000+ hours (frees team capacity for higher-value work)
- 4X Winner in Association of National Advertisers B2B Awards across Customer Experience, Brand Website, Digital Tools and Financial Services Leadership
Unlocking Speed and Trust
After getting an embedded into T. Rowe Price’s ecosystem, we quickly uncovered how advisors, intermediaries and institutional investors needed faster, clearer ways to evaluate products and complete critical workflows. Internally, teams were moving quickly, but without shared guardrails, creating inconsistency and duplicated efforts at scale.
Speed and trust were in tension.
Our strategy revolved around evolving Beacon, the existing design system, into a governed, enterprise-wide operating model powering global experiences, personalization and product innovation. We didn't need to explained to T. Rowe Price that performance compounds when systems are built to scale. We built the infrastructure to enhance how the business delivered across markets, regulations and complex B2B needs.
Making the System the Product
We didn't start T. Rowe Price's transformation with a redesign. We started with a mindset shift that centered around making the system the product.
The big idea was to use a global brand refresh and enterprise migration as the forcing function to evolve Beacon into a governed operating system for digital experience.
Beacon began as a component library, but, in partnership with T. Rowe Price, we transformed it into something far more powerful — an adaptive, compliant, global system built for scale. Compliance and risk weren’t checkpoints, rather they were embedded from the start, turning governance into a growth driver.
Early pilots proved the model.
For the first time, cross-functional teams across regions delivered a unified global experience, consistent in design, flexible in execution and fast to market.
That momentum unlocked everything else.
A single enterprise site replaced fragmented properties, serving both U.S. consumers and global B2B audiences. Core workflows were productized into two scalable platforms: Client Portal and Product Explorer.
Beacon became the engine behind it all: enabling reuse, accelerating delivery and creating a system that gets smarter, faster and more valuable with every release.
A Rebuild and Roll-out — All in One
Our execution began with internal alignment. Leadership unified global teams around Beacon as the standard, supported by cross-functional enablement and a structured, market-by-market launch.
Then came consolidation. Dozens of fragmented sites were migrated into a single enterprise platform, simplifying journeys, improving discoverability and enabling personalized experiences by audience type.
At the same time, key B2B workflows were reimagined as products. For example, the Client Portal became a productivity engine for advisors and institutional users, streamlining recurring portfolio tasks and increasing confidence in decision-making. Product Explorer was rebuilt as a high-performance discovery tool. Enhanced filtering, faster access to holdings and performance data and improved UX turned a previously complex experience into a clear path to evaluation.
Behind the scenes, Beacon enabled the creation of a self-service publishing tool that empowered regional teams at T. Rowe Price to create and deploy content independently, significantly cutting time-to-market and enabling faster response to market shifts (we’ll dig into the numbers later).
At the center of it all: Beacon.
Now the single source of truth across regions, Beacon standardizes design, accelerates development and embeds governance into every experience. As it evolves, Beacon is laying the groundwork for AI-ready, personalized experiences at scale.
Fueling a Growth Engine
By investing in a unified digital operating model, the firm signaled a shift meant to define its next decade: from fragmented execution to connected, enterprise-wide experience delivery. They also leaned into their roots, illuminating that the enemy of lasting impact is treating change as a one-off initiative rather than a long-term growth engine.
That signal extended beyond the product.
Figma, one of the most innovative design and technology platforms in the world, proactively sought out T. Rowe Price and Code and Theory to lead a financial services executive roundtable about shaping how financial institutions think about transformation in regulated environments. The once stodgy, old-school business was now a beacon (wink) for digital and product savvy, nimbleness in a not-so-nimble industry and the arbiter of the somewhat radical idea that governance isn’t a constraint — it’s a competitive advantage when built into the system.
For a brand built on trust, this is what modern trust looks like: a system that compounds value over time and a business that doesn’t just keep up with change, but leads through it.