SUMMARY

Erste Group, one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe, has a clear mission to improve the financial health of its customers. They launched George, its digital banking platform, in 2015 with three guiding principles: to be as user-friendly as possible for as many people as possible, to be accessible for everybody, and to provide a memorable experience.

In a crowded market, Erste Group believes its focus on straightforward, relatable copy, beautiful illustrations and helpful micro interactions help give it a point of difference. To achieve all that takes many heads and hands and, spread across six countries, they needed a platform that would help them collaborate seamlessly. Enter Figma.

Reframing the value of design

Erste Group’s design leaders say the company is committed to putting customer experience at the very heart of everything it does. In an industry dominated by finance and operations expertise, design can be the underdog—often relegated to making things 'look nice' rather than being recognized as a strategic business driver.

The turning point for Erste Group came in 2021 with the appointment of Maurizio Maurizio Poletto as their first-ever Chief Platform Officer (CPO). The Italian-born executive fundamentally shifted the organization's understanding of what design could achieve. Under his guidance, design evolved from being an afterthought to becoming the lens through which all digital customer interactions are viewed and optimized.

“In our organization, we don’t need to fight for the value of the experience,” says Stefanie Prinz, head of platform UI/UX, Erste Group. “Our executive board demands it and pushes for it from the top down. We always say that George is ‘designed’, never ‘built’.”

Aligning 5,000 people with Figma Enterprise

Erste Group’s core design team consists of 26 designers based in Vienna, Austria. Across Europe, that number expands to 80, and at first the different teams weren’t joined up. Stefanie told us, “The old way was like having brilliant teams working in soundproof rooms—lots of talent, sluggish transparency.”

Stefanie identifies Erste Group’s upgrade to Figma Enterprise in early 2023 as a key moment in aligning product builders across the company. Over the next six months, everyone was in, and fast-forward to 2025 there can be more than 5,000 people with access to the shared Figma files, including legal, data, marketing, and HR.

“After moving to Figma Enterprise our teams can seamlessly collaborate. We're working as one brain across multiple countries,” says Stefanie.

Now everyone, across six countries, works in a shared workspace which provides them all with a single source of truth. George has three product lines that share the same design system, which was entirely rebuilt following the introduction of variables to Figma.

Leading by design

Fast-forward to 2025, and every six weeks the whole company gets together on a call hosted by designers to share what they’re working on. It’s an opportunity to look at work in progress and for everyone to see what’s going on across multiple products. From this base, everyone is regularly updated, which means opportunities to share and collaborate are surfaced early. Stefanie says, “We have this constant back and forth. Everyone knows the touchpoints and who to connect with at which stage.”

This way of working means they also have a natural cadence of continuous quality assurance and improvement—not just for new features, but for existing ones as well. Stefanie says every digital touchpoint—from mobile apps to digital onboarding and customer service—is crafted with the same attention to user experience that customers would expect from leading tech companies.

As well as the advantages to working collaboratively, Erste Group found their move to Enterprise helped with their tight security requirements. In a heavily regulated industry like finance, EU data hosting for Figma and FigJam files gives Erste Group the power, scale and efficiencies of a cloud-based design platform, but with greater control over where their data is hosted—critical for compliance with GDPR and other EU data protection standards.

Optimizing into the future

Even with an efficient design process now well established, Erste Group knows better than to call it ‘done’ and rest there. The habits and processes they’ve been able to create to continuously optimize ways of working means they should avoid any need for a large scale and expensive rip and replace further down the line. It’s intelligent future-proofing Stefanie believes will keep them on their path to fulfilling their mission. After all, people’s financial health is something that also needs continuous optimization. As Stefanie told us, “We are always looking at new ideas. How can we increase the financial health of our customers? We’re improving the quality, all the time, with the help of Figma.”