Arion Bank invests in scalable content, launching 3 brands in 3 months with Contentful

Financial institutions used to play the long game to build customer trust, relying on exchanges at physical branches and one-on-one meetings with esteemed advisors. For Arion, a big-three Icelandic financial service provider offering everything from corporate banking and investing to asset management and insurance, those relationships have long been at the center of its business. But today, most of these interactions have moved online. 

With customer impressions dependent on the speed and accuracy of digital content, institutions have had to rethink how they manage and deliver digital experiences. To meet these new expectations, Arion Bank needed to replace its custom-built content management system (CMS). While the platform served the bank well for years, a tightly coupled, page-builder approach made it increasingly difficult to scale operations and manage content efficiently across Arion Bank’s retail banking website, Arion Banki, and subsidiary sites for Stefnir, its investment company, and Vörður, its insurance company. Maintaining and evolving the platform had become increasingly resource-intensive for Arion Bank’s lean team of developers and editors. 

Eager to speed up publishing timelines and simplify content management across its brands, Arion Bank set out to find a content platform built for the realities of modern banking, before finding the right in Contentful.

Banking on a headless CMS to unite and structure content

Arion Bank began exploring alternative CMSes in 2021, and in 2023, the institution committed to a headless architecture. After evaluating alternatives, they locked in Contentful. The bank saw Contentful’s headless architecture as a way to break free from the constraints of traditional page-building systems, giving their teams greater flexibility to scale content across brands and launch new digital experiences faster. While they explored several alternatives, they had already been using the platform for the Vörður website. This familiarity, combined with Contentful’s track record of reliability and leadership in API-first content management, made it the clear choice. 

Arion Bank’s engineering team invested time up front to establish a scalable foundation before migrating its digital properties. They adopted a ‘per-space’ approach with each brand having its own content entries, assets, users, and publishing workflows, but built from the same content model, establishing governance and encouraging consistency across all three brands. After the foundation was laid, the plan was to launch one website internally and QA it before going any further, starting with Arion Bank. 

“In January, we internally launched the first website with Contentful, and it was a glimmering success — we had no issues,” Tryggvi Freyr Sigurgeirsson, Front-end Developer, Arion Bank, shared.

“Our technical project manager was so inspired, he said, ‘Rather than launching that first website now, why don’t we speed up production on the remaining two and launch all three publicly at once?’” said Freyr Sigurgeirsson. Their goal was to complete the project by the end of March.

Celebrating high-yield content operations

Since migrating to Contentful, Arion Bank has seen continuous improvements in its go-to-market speed. With its old CMS, editors would stage and preview content, then wait upwards of 30 minutes for changes to deploy due to caching limitations. Today, content can be published to the site almost instantaneously. By combining Contentful with a modern web development framework, Next.js, Arion Bank created a near-real-time publishing workflow that empowers teams to move faster, respond more quickly to business needs, and keep content fresh.

While Contentful helped Arion Bank move faster, it also provided the structure needed to manage content at scale. Following launch, Arion Bank leveraged native platform governance features to add granular roles and permissions around who could access and modify content. For a lean team of five developers and a few content editors per brand, these guardrails made it easier to manage content at scale while preserving the flexibility editors need to work independently. "One thing that has definitely eased managing all the spaces is Contentful Roles," said Sigurgeirsson. "It allowed me to granularly define what a developer was actually allowed to do."

Translations that pay dividends

“Contentful has really become the beating heart of our web experience,” said Sigurgeirsson, explaining how Arion Bank is using AI Actions and cross-space references to help translate content at scale and support a richer digital experience without overloading their team.

“We’ve been really happy with AI Actions. It’s allowed us to bulk translate content from Icelandic into English, saving us days, or, more likely, weeks of work,” Sigurgeirsson said. 

The success of this project is encouraging Arion Bank to explore adding additional locales to its website. This comes with the potential to attract a new base of clients while staying true to the bank’s goal of building lasting customer relationships. 

*This is an estimate meant to demonstrate potential efficiency gains.