Hodge Bank – An experience you can bank on

Hodge Bank and their customer-focused approach

Hodge Bank is a lending and savings bank, headquartered in Cardiff and has been dedicated to serving its customers in the UK since 1987. With a mixture of both consumer and commercial savings and lending products, the bank is on a mission to provide a uniquely personal service, putting customers at the centre of everything they do.

With this mission in mind, Hodge began a journey of digital transformation towards online banking, servicing and marketing, to serve the needs of its increasingly technology-savvy audience.

Already using WordPress for its external marketing websites, Hodge Bank sought a specialist WordPress agency to help its technology team make the most out of the content management platform.

Our Work with Hodge Bank

The team at Illustrate Digital began building a relationship with Hodge Bank in 2018, offering WordPress consultancy their in-house development team. With the same compliance challenges that most banks and financial service marketing teams face, they were in search of a better approach to both development and content workflow – in a nutshell, making it quicker and easier to launch new pages and content.

After seeing the team’s positive impact on workflow at Hodge, and benefiting from our expert knowledge of the WordPress platform, we were invited to work on developing the new Hodge Bank website. A task we’d gladly accept!

And following a successful rebuild of the main bank website, this relationship developed into an integrated approach to helping Hodge and their marketing and IT teams to research, strategise, develop and deploy constant improvements to better serve its growing customer base.

Strategy, Implementation and Great Results

In the world of financial services, trust in your suppliers is important. There’s one thing to have solid creds like our ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications, it’s something else to build a great relationship that delivers real results and success for your clients. And that’s exactly what we did.

From an initial consultancy on development workflow, this relationship would blossom to see our team leading on Hodge’s customer resarch, their 5-year digital strategy, and UX design and WordPress development projects and sprint cycles across the website estate.

And the results of this work really do speak for themselves. Results like these:

• A conversion rate increase from 14.34% to 21.14% as a result of optimising content and UX
• An increase of 76% in savings product applications
• Average time on page increased from 44s to 128s

Hodge Bank and Their Relationship with WordPress

Aside from being featured in the very prestigious WordPress Showcase, using the world’s most popular content management system has delivered a lot of benefits to Hodge.

Navigating compliance in financial services is a tough gig for marketing and content teams. It’s made a heck of a lot easier with a flexible, easy-to-use content management system like WordPress.

Benefitting from our expertise in enterprise WordPress development, the bank has taken advantage of a website infrastructure that’s incredibly secure, fast and can be updated with ease and agility using the content management features we’ve planned and created over time.

hear from the client

Nathan Harrington Head of Brand, Hodge Bank

“We engaged Illustrate Digital to support us with the build of a new Hodge Bank website. Throughout the project, the team have proven themselves to be knowledgeable, creative, adaptable and committed in completing the project. They’ve demonstrated real value by going above and beyond the scope of the work, supporting and educating us throughout the project. We would recommend Illustrate Digital to anybody looking for expertise in the digital space.”