Trumpets and Guerrilla Warfare: How UX Earns Its Place in Decision-Making at a Major Bank

What happens when you join a major bank as one of its first designers, and five years later people invite you to meetings not because they have to, but because they want to hear what you think? Róbert Peho, UX Lead at Raiffeisen Bank and guest of Ergomania's Business Breakfast, talked about building UX's professional credibility from the inside in a tightly regulated, multi-layered organization – and why AI isn't the biggest challenge.

 

The conversation was hosted by Ádám Drágus, design strategist at Ergomania, and centered on a word the guest himself handles with care: evangelism. In other words, the everyday, rarely documented work through which a design team wins acceptance within its own organization.

From Reinstalling Windows to Blocking a Lost Card

Peho's career hasn’t followed the classic designer's path. He studied economics and business information systems while already working at a design studio and a printing company. That in-between status earned him a question he’s heard for years: since he was some sort of IT guy, could he maybe reinstall Windows? The confusion over what a designer actually does is still with the profession; only its form has changed.

He found his way into UX more than 16 years ago, as a college student building websites on his own. Even then, he was sending out questionnaires and talking not just to clients but to their target audiences; he just didn't call it research. The realization that set his course came from his relationship with brand identity design: identity work is largely fed by ego with UX methods acting as a counterweight, restoring the balance.

Peho joined Raiffeisen about five years ago, which he admits was a big step. Until then, he’d mostly done contract and small and medium enterprise (SME) work rather than working in a corporate environment. Behind the move was an important consideration that is hard to pin down: people entrust the bank with their money, which makes it a matter of trust, exactly the terrain where UX methods matter most. His design challenge during the hiring process fit the theme: he had to design the flow for blocking a lost card, as part of a complaint-handling interface. He knew almost nothing about banking at the time, but he knew exactly what a person wants to feel in a stressful situation like that – and that was enough.

Trumpets and Guerrilla Warfare: The Two Faces of Evangelism

For a long time, the team avoided the word “evangelism,” treating it as something of a taboo. Yet according to Peho, it describes the situation precisely: sometimes it's a triumphal entry into Rome to the sound of trumpets; sometimes it's guerrilla warfare in the jungle. In between the two lies the most common and least spectacular case – when you can take a teaching approach with people whose thinking is already ripe for it. Contrary to what Peho had assumed, this doesn't depend on age.

He described the designers' capacity as a pie with every department in the organization sitting around it, each wanting a bigger slice. At the same time, a large company, by its nature, is slow to take in anything that doesn't fit its established rhythm. He had already seen this with service design: in its day, it felt as novel as AI does now, even though the methodology itself was nothing new – it was only then that the corporate world discovered it.

In this environment, his team’s approach is consistent: they never dictate what should happen based on rank or professional superiority; they always explain why. If the other side sees only resistance, they shut down; if they understand the argument, they see their own interest in it too. Their suggestions aren't driven by self-interest – there's nothing in it for them financially – but by wanting things to work well.

Converts and Bastions: How Allies Are Won

Several marketing and product development colleagues are a good example. At first, they strongly resisted design considerations. The solution wasn't argument; it was patience. At every step, the team showed them their reasoning behind what was happening and why. Today, these colleagues champion the same principles as the designers. Allies like these are effectively a bastion in another part of the organization – and the team collects them deliberately.

Two things help in discussions with adjacent teams about marketing, business, and development. One is easing tension. When a conversation threatens to stall, they steer it toward lighter topics for a while so they can return to the serious questions afterwards. The other is personal detachment. They don’t take disagreements personally. As Peho sees it, a designer's ego often helps in designing something, but in a large company you're not just building interfaces; you're building a circle of trust, brick by brick. And that means character development daily.

Five years on, the result is clear: the team is no longer invited because it has to be there, but because people know what it brings to the table. Sometimes a door still needs kicking in, but the starting point is fundamentally different from the early days.

From Early Days to a Shared Department

When Peho joined the bank, the design team was still in its very early days. Growth since then has been organic. Today, the team has merged with the service designers and researchers into a single department. The organizational merger mirrored the logic of the day-to-day work: these areas used to work separately, but now collaborate much more closely.

Asked whether the growth was driven by the team's evangelism or whether the organization recognized the need on its own, Peho answered, both. In the beginning, there was a lot of struggle. The bank also used external vendors. But, over time, it became increasingly important to have the expertise available in-house, directly.

Projects are typically cross-functional: each task involves a service designer, a researcher, and a UI designer, and success depends on their cumulative knowledge. That knowledge flows across roles but doesn't completely overlap. A service designer may, for instance, look at the website as well as putting the process together. The team deliberately gets involved in each other's work – not primarily to cover for one another, but so everyone sees the larger infrastructure they impact.

A Central Design System, Country-Specific Realities

Raiffeisen's Hungarian team works on two main fronts: web interfaces and the mobile app. Peho focuses mainly on the web and online banking, and is currently wrapping up a central rebranding that began two and a half years ago. The goal was to unify every country in the group.

The tension between the global design system and local realities is a recurring theme. The framework is set centrally and has to be applied, yet it also has to be adapted to each country. The Hungarian unit plays a prominent role here: a lot gets piloted locally before spreading further; the previous full redesign of the mobile app was also rolled out here first.

The pilot role comes with risk. Headquarters tries to set frameworks and rules for processes, and the Hungarian team helps by first testing the versions that could lead to failure, then reporting back. The collaboration works well: the international UX community is welcoming, and although they rarely meet in person, these occasions offer a great deal both professionally and personally.

Iteration as the Default State

One audience question came from the business side: How long does it take to get from a professionally elegant solution to one an ordinary user easily understands? Peho said that if designers at a company talk like this, it's a good sign – it means they're still idealists. In a major bank, though, the goal isn't elegance but an interface that works in everyday situations.

And that means continuous iteration. The banking process is considerably longer than at an SME, where you decide one thing one day and change direction the next. At the bank, if something doesn't work once it's live, it has to go through a three- or four-step process before it can be fixed. That's why you have to think further ahead and base the work on solid research; guerrilla research is often done before launch as well.

Iteration is present at the methodology level, too. They have reworked the website redesign process based on lessons from several projects, and it's now in its fifth version – with refinement still ongoing. They work in two directions in parallel: toward stable, proven solutions, and toward emergency protocols that prepare them for unexpected situations.

Whether a solution works also depends on more than the solution itself: it depends heavily on users' backgrounds and how they shape their attitude to the interface. Peho gave an example from a previous job. While he was working at the Central and Eastern European branch of a global brand, they rolled out the same solutions across neighboring countries; usage was exceptionally high in one, and the solution was almost completely rejected in another. The same solution can work in one market and fail in another.

AI Fever and the Catch-22

On AI, Peho takes a sober view of both the hype and the reality. He has heard the comparison that this moment is like when Nokia was sure of its market lead, and then the iPhone arrived. But in his view, the Jurassic Park effect is at least as true: we've priced and sold something we don't yet fully understand. We may be tightening a screw with a screwdriver right now, but we'll only see what we've built when we step back.

In a banking environment, this is especially acute. Regulation leaves very narrow gaps, yet you still have to move forward – a kind of Catch-22, as he put it. Two considerations guide them: security, and making sure implementation doesn't create double work. If every output has to be checked, that's extra work. But you have to start somewhere, because AI is here and here to stay. The only question is to what extent it gets built in.

In Peho’s practice, AI isn't a direct source of inspiration but a thinking partner. He asks it a question and gets a range of different approaches that set his own thinking in motion. Usually it turns out his own first idea was the best, but he understands better why. He used the analogy of handcrafted furniture: just as handmade pieces keep their value alongside mass production, so does design work that comes from a human.

Another audience member asked whether AI could replace UX itself – after all, what better experience could there be than a system that reads the user's mind? Peho answered that the AI fever of recent times is starting to settle. We're peeling off the unnecessary layers and looking at where it can really be applied. Under lab conditions, even a beginner can put anything together without constraints, but in a bank everything has to be justified. And that is precisely the new chapter of evangelism: explaining that adding an AI tool doesn't automatically make the UX good.

When Everything Works, There's Silence

How can UX justify its existence to the business side, and can its return be quantified? Peho calls this the profession’s million-dollar question, and fortunately it no longer comes up within his organization. As he likes to put it: Design is a profession where success means silence, but when something goes wrong, everyone gets loud immediately.

The value of UX can therefore be demonstrated from two directions. First, by showing the starting point and the results of the redesigned interface; there are so many badly built, poorly thought-out websites and banking interfaces that there's always something to show what happens without design attention. Second: it's not enough for something to work; it could still be faster and more convenient. In a bank, everything is measurable, so return and business benefit have to be quantified too; the team couldn't operate today if the business side doubted its value.

A regulated environment doesn't rule out big ideas, though. One participant cited Poland's Blik: In 2014, 12 banks approached the Polish central bank arguing that online payment traffic should be brought back into the country. The central bank agreed and backed the initiative with regulation. The system was built in two years together with Polish telecom companies. Where interests align, the regulator is not an obstacle but part of the process.

What Survives the Acceleration: Empathy

Asked about the future, Peho said the profession is currently at a kind of peak, but not one from which the only way is down. Technological change and AI bring acceleration, and designers' job is to make sure that acceleration doesn't become a burden for users. He trusts the human factor. When someone talks to a chatbot, even knowing it's a machine, beyond a certain point they'll want human contact. Some areas will transform quickly, but empathy will remain.

His closing thought for junior designers tied into this. UX isn't about following rules; it's a way of thinking. There are two kinds of designers, he said: those who learn the craft and those who live it. Both have their place, but you have to trust the perspective you stand for. Alongside all the restrictive rules, there's what we know instinctively about how the world works from growing up in a digital world – we just can't always summon it on command. Everyone recognizes the McDonald's logo instantly, but a red square on its own may not bring the brand to mind, even though the color is just as much part of the recognition. This knowledge works deep within us, below the level of consciousness; the designer's job is to bring it to the surface and put it to use.