How to plan and design a financial services intranet

Key takeaways

• Put the right team or person in charge. Internal communications, HR, or marketing owns the intranet. IT approves sign-in, user sync, and hosting
• Design for the counter. Rates, wire procedures, and member services pages should be one search or one click away
• Plan security early. Use your existing sign-in with multi-factor authentication, limit access by branch, team, or role, and keep member data in your core systems
• Give policies one home. Keep them in a central area, link to them from team pages, review them yearly, and use required reading to track who has read them
• Keep content current. Every page gets an owner and a review date, and monthly search checks show what’s missing
• Plan for change. Mergers, product launches, and rate changes all go smoother when the intranet already has a place for them

Below, we walk through how financial services organizations, including banks, credit unions, insurers, and wealth management firms, can plan an intranet project, from the first project meeting to launch day and beyond.

What is a financial services intranet?

A financial services intranet is a private website where branch, contact centre, and head office staff find current policies, procedures, rates, forms, and people, and get the news that affects their work. Its job is to help staff give members and customers the right answer the first time, at every branch.

Signs your bank or credit union could benefit from an intranet are:

• Employees struggle to find policies or don’t trust they’re up to date
• Compliance documents are scattered
• Branch communication is inconsistent

Planning and designing a financial services intranet: Best practices

1. Start with an owner, a team, and a few clear goals

Most intranet projects start because something changed. A new comms or HR lead inherits an intranet nobody trusts, a merger is on the way, a new product is launching, or an old system stops being supported. Whatever started yours, it sets your deadline, so decide on the timeframe early.

Then pull together a small team:

• An owner on the business side. This is usually comms, HR, or marketing. Intranets updated only by IT tend to get outdated fast, because ownership is unclear and teams are waiting on an IT ticket for updates to be made
• IT and security as approvers. IT rarely starts an intranet project. It’s important to bring them in at kickoff for sign-in, user sync, and hosting questions
• A compliance or risk voice for anything to do with policies
• One or two branch leaders who know what the frontline actually needs

Finally, write down two or three goals you can check later. For example: important messages get read, every branch gives the same answer, and fewer repeat questions land on comms and IT. We’ll come back to these when it’s time to measure.

2. Focus on the people who serve your members and customers

Financial organizations have a lot of customer and member-facing employees. This includes tellers, loan officers, branch managers, and even call centre operators. Information they depend on includes things like:

• Account information (fees, interest rates, etc.)
• Up-to-date interest rate sheets
• Wire transfer procedures
• Troubleshooting tips for using online banking
• Account closure guides

By helping employees quickly find this information, you can increase member and customer satisfaction, which can directly impact the bottom line and help grow deposits. 

Before you design anything, map out who will use the intranet and what each group needs from it. Talk to a wide mix of employees across roles and locations, not just head office. Many staff will check the intranet on a phone between customers, so plan for that too.

Role	What they need from the intranet	Plan for it by
Tellers and contact centre staff	The current rate, procedure, or form while a member or customer waits	Putting rates, wire and account procedures, and member services pages one search or one click away
Branch and operations leaders	Every branch giving the same right answer	Branch pages they own, plus procedures written once and shared everywhere
Comms, HR, or marketing	Not being the only person who can update things	Templates, page owners, and departments updating their own pages
Compliance and risk	One current version of each policy, and proof staff read it	Review dates, required reading, and archiving old versions
Leadership	Messages that actually get read	Leadership updates, read tracking, and a few clear measures
IT and security	Something safe that doesn’t add work	Existing sign-in, directory sync, and access set by branch, team, or role

3. Build navigation around how frontline staff work

Every intranet has a top navigation, but how each one of our customers organizes this information is often quite personal. However, we often see financial organizations include specific information about their products and services. We usually see the top-level navigation may include these links:

• Home
• People Directory
• About the Company
• Products and Services
• Branches and Locations
• Policies and Procedures
• HR and Career
• Fun/Social

The Products and Services section is important because it holds the resources frontline employees need to deliver great service. By gathering all the information they need in one place, you make it easier and faster for them to find answers to member and customer questions. Including this section in the main navigation ensures that the information is always just a click away.

The decision about where information goes should be based on user input and habits. Our Professional Services team focuses on user-centered design techniques, such as intranet card sorting and task testing to inform those decisions.

A few more tips for making navigation work:

• Use visual navigation cards, modules, and templates. A long list of 20 or 25 links is hard to scan. Cards with icons, colour, and their subpages showing help staff recognize the right section and skip a click
• Put the most important information first. At the beginning of the page, paragraph, or even sentence. You don’t want to bury key details in the second half of a page
• Write for skimmers. Most people are skimmers, especially when it comes to reviewing documentation in the workplace. Clear headings, and a table of contents on longer pages, help them jump to what they need
• Add one-click links to the apps staff use every day

4. Plan security and access with IT from day one

Trust is everything in financial institutions, and that includes the tools your staff use every day. Security isn’t something to bolt on after the intranet is built. Plan it with IT and security from the first meeting:

• Run the security review early. Ask vendors for the security documents and questionnaire answers your team needs before you build a shortlist.
• Ask where your data is hosted. Many institutions, especially in Canada, treat hosting as a deciding factor
• Use the sign-in staff already have. Single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, plus syncing people from your existing directory, means people who leave lose access automatically
• Give each group only the access it needs. Decide what everyone sees, what each branch or team sees, and what stays limited, like HR or leadership content. Decide separately who can publish
• Keep member and customer data off the intranet. Link to your core systems instead of copying account details or loan files
• Decide what an AI assistant can read before you opt in to turning it on. Read the AI Vendor Checklist for more details
• Keep files where they already live. Keep files where they already live. If documents sit in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive, connect to them instead of copying them over, and use the intranet for the policies, procedures, and updates your branches rely on

When you evaluate platforms, look at how each one handles these, not just what it lists on a features page. You can see how ThoughtFarmer approaches it on our security page.

5. Give branch operations their own home

Another common practice is to create a bucket of information about daily branch management. This includes information such as:

• Security protocols
• Opening and closing procedures
• Teller cash-in and cash-out procedures
• Courier pickup times
• Night drop logs
• Branch inspections

This information is particularly critical during an emergency, when your employees need to know where to access it. Decide ahead of time where staff should go if normal channels are down, and make sure they can reach it from their phones. Our guide to intranet crisis communication covers this in more depth.

Resource and branch information is often listed under the Products and services area, which might have a broader title, such as “Banking services”.

Many institutions also give branches their own top-level section, with a page for each location covering hours, key contacts, branch-specific procedures, and local news. Let each branch leader own their page. It keeps the information current, and it helps staff hours away from head office feel like part of the team.

Two more things help branch staff a lot:

• Write procedures as text on the page. A workflow saved as an image might look nice, but search and an AI chat bot can’t read it well
• Embed fillable forms right on the page. Staff fill them in and download them, and the page always holds a fresh blank copy

Ready to learn more? Our latest guide showcases some of the best and brightest credit union and bank intranets. Download now

6. How should a financial services intranet handle policies and procedures?

Policies and procedures go out of date faster than most intranet content, and in a regulated environment, an outdated procedure isn’t just annoying. It can turn into a compliance problem.

Keep one central home, then link to it

A lot of teams come to us with the same problem: four versions of a policy on the intranet, updated in one place but not the others. The fix is a central area for all policies and procedures, with links to it from department, location, and role areas. Someone in lending can click “Lending policies” from their team page and land in the right spot in the central area.

• Keep all policies in one place and all procedures in another
• Within each, group by topic or task. In a bank or credit union, that might be loan policies, deposit operations, back office procedures, HR, and IT
• Keep lists short. If you have 100 policies, splitting them into roughly 10 groupings means staff scan 10 at a time, not 100
• Show the groups as visual cards with their subpages visible, so staff can see everything from the central page without clicking into each group

Policies and procedures are usually important enough to sit in your top-level navigation, rather than as a quick link on the homepage.

Make each policy easy to read and easy to trust

• Use one template for every policy. Include a policy number, adopted, reviewed, and revised dates, who approved it, and a short note on what changed. It makes each page feel official, and staff can see at a glance that it’s current
• Put policies on the page as text, especially for mobile staff. It’s okay to have PDFs. But nobody wants to zoom, zoom, zoom through a PDF on their phone to find the step they need. Text resizes to fit the screen
• If you do use PDFs, make sure the text can be highlighted. If the PDF only contains a scanned document, that scanned image wouldn’t be searchable, but the title of the pdf would still be searchable. However, if the pdf is created from a presentation or a Word document, then the full text is searchable.

Decide who owns each policy

There are two models that work well:

• Policies live in each department’s area. The manager who owns that area automatically owns its policies, and the central Policies and procedures page links out to them
• Policies live in the central area, with an owner set for each group

The trade-off with the second model: when a manager reviews “their” content, they might only think to look at their own department’s section. Whichever you choose, review policies at least once a year, and when a policy changes, note what changed and ask staff to read it again.

Track who’s read it

Required reading is most often used for policies, because of the compliance side. A common approach is to pick a month, like March, assign the annual review to everyone, give staff until the end of the month, and follow up with anyone who hasn’t finished. A Required Reading card on the homepage and friendly reminder keeps it top of mind, and the completion report gives leadership a clear record of who has read and agreed to each policy.

Archive old policies instead of deleting them

When a policy is replaced or no longer applies, archive it. Archived pages drop out of search and AI answers, so staff won’t find the old version by accident, but admins can still pull the record if they ever need it.

Get policies ready for AI search

Policies are where an AI assistant shines, because the content is so black and white. A few setup tips:

• Make sure every policy page, and the PDFs attached to it, is included when you set the assistant up. If attachments are left out, the AI won’t know what’s in them
• Tell the assistant where to send people when it can’t answer, like the policy owner or a help desk ticket
• Keep the tone serious on sensitive topics such as harassment, bereavement, and mental health, and point people to a real person who can help

Help staff break the desktop-copy habit

Staff love saving a copy of a form or policy to their desktop. Then it goes out of date. Training is the biggest fix: remind people that if they use the wrong version, they’ll have to redo the work, so grab it from the intranet every time. Suggest staff bookmark frequently-used policies and procedures for easy reference.

7. Keep staff current on products, rates, and training

In financial services, critical information changes fast. If frontline staff don’t hear about key changes, they can’t provide effective service. Here are a few ways to keep staff current:

• Give every product and rate change a home. Update the product page, post a short news item, and link the two
• Assign must-review materials with required reading, like new product details, procedure changes, and annual policy reviews, and track who has finished
• Open a discussion forum for each product line or launch, so branch staff can ask questions and the product team answers once for everyone
• Use forms for the simple stuff, like training sign-ups, requests, and feedback after a launch
• Build a new-hire and onboarding hub with key policies, who to contact, and how to use the intranet itself
• Link to your learning system for formal courses instead of rebuilding them on the intranet

8. Give every page an owner so content stays current

If information’s stale, people stop coming back. The easiest way to keep content current is to make sure every page has a real person accountable for it:

• Give each page a named owner and a scheduled review date
• Let departments own and update their own sections, instead of routing every change through one comms person or IT
• Every couple of weeks, or at least monthly, look at what people searched for and didn’t find, and what they asked the AI chat bot. It’s the fastest way to spot missing or unclear content

9. Make it a place people want to visit

A final practice we’ve seen is the focus on building a positive work environment. This includes online and offline efforts to keep employees engaged and enjoying their work, as well as helping them share knowledge and expertise.

Common employee engagement intranet features and activities that fit this pattern include:

• Rich employee directory
• Discussion forums focused on products and services
• Recognition and shout-out forums
• Leadership communications
• Photos from every branch
• Community spaces for sports teams, recipe sharing, etc.

This matters even more when branches are hours away from head office. A few small touches help too. Let employees vote on the intranet’s name, set it as the default homepage on every computer, and decide on purpose whether it should look exactly like your corporate brand or have a personality of its own. When employees feel the intranet is theirs, they engage with it differently.

Consider creating customized homepages that surface content that’s most relevant to that specific person’s role, department, or location. 

10. Plan for mergers and acquisitions

Mergers are common in financial services, and the intranet is one of the first places employees look for answers. The legal merger and the technology merger happen on very different timelines. The legal side can close quickly, while aligning systems, consolidating content, and migrating user data can stretch over months, so plan in phases.

You don’t have to wait for everything to be decided. Consider setting up a merger resource centre, a dedicated area where staff can find updates, ask questions, and stay informed. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Even a simple hub with news updates from leadership, an FAQ page for staff and members, a forum for questions, and a feedback form can do a lot to reduce anxiety while things are still in flux.

And start thinking about policies early. You’ve got two sets of policies and procedures, and eventually, you’ll need one.

11. Plan a realistic launch

• Try before you commit. Get hands-on with the platform before you decide, so your team knows how easy it is to update. ThoughtFarmer offers a free 30-day trial site customized to your business, so you can see what it would look like and test it out with your team
• Keep the scope realistic. A small team with a good vendor partner can launch faster than most expect. ThoughtFarmer’s Professional Services help teams launch at intranet the right way the first time
• Test properly. Don’t only test with your IT team. Before you flip the switch, create a dummy account and add it to different security groups to make sure the experience is as expected. Make testing a formal, named step in your plan, with a clear owner and a deadline
• Tie the launch to a company event, like a town hall or a merger milestone

12. Measure what’s working

Go back to the two or three goals you wrote down at the start. The intranet is working when staff use it to answer questions, not just to read the news.

Goal	What to track	What it tells you
Staff find answers fast	Top searches, and whether people found what they looked for	Rates and wire procedures should be easy wins. Failed searches show what’s missing
Important messages get read	Read counts on key news and required reading completion	Whether leadership and compliance updates reach every branch
Content stays current	Pages past their review date, by owner	Where outdated procedures could slip through
The frontline relies on it	Most-viewed pages and monthly active staff	Member- and customer-facing pages should be near the top
Fewer repeat questions	Questions to comms, HR, and IT, plus questions asked of the AI assistant	Whether self-serve is working, and where the gaps are

Want to turn these numbers into a business case? Here are real examples of how high intranet engagement creates ROI.

Frequently asked questions

What should a financial services intranet include?

At a minimum: a Products and Services section, a central Policies and procedures area, branch operations resources, a people directory, and news. Most also include forms, required reading for key policies, and spaces for recognition and culture.

How should policies and procedures be organized on a financial services intranet?

Keep them in one central area in your top-level navigation, grouped by topic or task, and link to them from department and branch pages instead of copying them. Give every policy an owner and a review date, and archive old versions instead of deleting them.

How do you track that employees have read a policy?

Assign the policy as Required Reading, set a deadline, and use the completion report to follow up with anyone who hasn’t finished. Many institutions do this once a year, and again whenever a policy changes.

How should a financial institution secure its intranet?

Involve IT and security from the first meeting. Use your existing sign-in with single sign-on and multi-factor authentication, limit access by branch, team, or role, ask vendors where data is hosted, and keep member and customer data in your core systems, not on the intranet.

How should an intranet support a merger?

Open a merger resource centre early with leadership updates, FAQs, and a place for questions, then plan how two sets of policies become one. The technology side usually takes longer than the legal side, so plan in phases.

How long does it take to plan and launch an intranet?

It depends on how much content you’re moving and how quickly decisions get made. A focused team with partner support moves fastest.

Who should own intranet content?

A business team, usually comms, HR, or marketing, owns the intranet overall. Each department owns and updates its own pages, and every page has a named owner and a review date.

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