How Ponce Bank amplified community impact by modernizing its digital presence with Webflow
To break free from the traditional web development tools that often limit community banks, Ponce Bank turned to Webflow to deliver higher-quality digital experiences.
“Webflow really allows smaller banks like us to take ownership of our brand and story so we can all show up better for our communities.”
It’s 1960 in the Bronx, New York. Practically every bank has abandoned the so-called “community in decline” except for two migrants from Puerto Rico—who saw overwhelming potential in the borough’s low- to moderate-income inhabitants. Serving the New York City Metro Area for more than 60 years, Ponce Bank is now certified by the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI). This means the bank is required to invest 60% of its loans back into the communities it serves, and in reality, it often surpasses this threshold, investing 80% or more.
Originally hired to lead branch transformation, Steve Hamilton has extensive experience outside the banking world. A champion for design-led innovation, he brings a valuable experimentation mindset to Ponce as its Senior Vice President and Designer-in-Residence. When the Covid pandemic hit, Steve’s focus shifted to crisis communications and how the company would adopt an agile mindset. Working with a traditional CMS, he didn’t have the power or control to manage Ponce’s main marketing site and other web properties. As a result, Ponce was left unable to control its narrative—which, ultimately, made it harder to demonstrate how community banking could be used as a powerful engine for social equity.
Cashing in on design-led marketing and unprecedented agility
As the primary means of our marketing efforts, our digital presence has gone through a transformative change with Webflow.
Most small community banks today use one of three financial technology tools. These solutions offer a most-sizes-fits-all bundle of web offerings, forcing teams to sacrifice agility, quality, and control. For Ponce, account support was slow and inattentive at best, and the team had to go through a month-long process with developers to make the simplest changes, like replacing an image. Until they staged anything on the site, they didn’t know what it was going to look like—and once they did, they’d often needed to make changes, which was frustrating, time consuming, and costly.
Manako Tamura, Ponce’s Customer Experience Designer and the first design hire after Steve, led a comprehensive analysis of CMS platforms and typical agencies to determine how best to move forward. Webflow Enterprise was the marketing-friendly solution that would allow the team—now seven in total—to take ownership of their brand narrative, make metrics-driven decisions, and support the future launch and growth of a digital bank.
For additional support when onboarding and learning Webflow, Ponce worked with Webflow Expert Zabal Media, which quickly became an extension of their team. “Zabal was truly our consultative partner and helped expedite our learning of Webflow.” Zabal also helped break down historical silos within Ponce and engaged all departments, asking for feedback along the way to ensure everyone felt invested in the final results.
The new site is hardly recognizable compared to its predecessor: Information is well-organized and easy to navigate, taking users through a compelling narrative that prioritizes accessibility and usability. Plus, Steve’s team now has access to important site metrics—like who’s visiting the website and how they’re engaging—which allows the team to continue to optimize for performance.
As a bank, website changes often require a two-week compliance review, but what previously took one month to build now takes Ponce two to three days—or sometimes just a few hours. They can finally create in-house content, from landing pages to blog posts, quickly and without help from developers. “Webflow is a really powerful way to efficiently apply our foundational branding to all of these other initiatives,” says Manako. By migrating all of their professional brand sites to Webflow, and leveraging a powerful design system, the team operates with full ownership of their brand. “We envision Webflow as the mothership for all of our brands across our organization, including Ponce Radio, the Ponce de Leon Foundation, Ponce University, and Mortgage World Bankers, our residential mortgage company.”
Pushing the creative limits on and offline
Having the flexibility and ability to make changes in Webflow without relying on anyone is really powerful. If we know anything is possible, it gives us more room to get creative and constantly improve.
Across the bank, every department has seen the brand come to life, and is now even more invested in its success. “We’re all excited for the possibilities with Webflow,” Manako says. Even the CFO requested to leverage the team’s expertise to update our investor relations website.
Zabal Media also helped Ponce identify how to properly grow their SEO ranking and optimize traffic via Google ads, giving teams across the bank greater visibility into campaigns, and the ability to track ROI. Now that the team has the flexibility and speed with Webflow, they’re able to increase the velocity of their web builds. In 3 months, the team launched more than 6 pages, compared to 3 the entire previous year.
For example, a recent activation was the 116th Street Festival, an annual celebration of Puerto Rican history. Ponce Bank always has a booth present to celebrate its Puerto Rican roots and connect with the community. This year, they spun up a webpage to serve as the main hub for lead generation. At the last minute, they realized they needed a second landing page specifically for a sweepstakes they were running at the festival booth—and were able to create one in 2 days thanks to Webflow.
For the first time ever, Ponce has the ability to track the ROI of the festival (the previous year, they collected phone numbers on physical tickets, but they needed to be manually entered into their CRM system and it proved difficult to follow up). This year, Ponce’s booth had a QR code for attendees to scan that led them to the main landing page, where they could fill out a form to enter the sweepstakes. The form submissions are then synced to their CRM which allows them to automate distribution of the leads and follow up accordingly.
Becoming a $5 billion bank by 2025
Webflow allows us to focus on our mission–bringing joy to banking by treating every customer like they are our best customer.
As Ponce grows, the team is confident Webflow will scale with them: Their “5x25” initiative centers around the goal to double in size and become a $5 billion bank by 2025. Recently recertified as a CDFI, Ponce’s goal for growth revolves around being able to move into their communities and offer everyone the concierge-level financial services they deserve—and that can only be done with technological efficiency.
“Webflow fulfills my purpose at Ponce,” says Steve, “which is to empower my team to constantly evaluate, improve upon, innovate, iterate, and transform in order to deliver on our mission.”
Explore more Enterprise stories
Before Webflow, Waste Connections juggled dozens of disconnected sites across 300+ brands. Now, with Webflow and Enova, they’ve unified their web presence into a scalable system that empowers their technical teams, streamlines growth, and supports ongoing acquisitions.
Dropbox needed to evolve their brand guidelines from a static webpage to an interactive experience that reinforced their brand ethos. With Webflow Partner Daybreak, they used Webflow's visual-first CMS to enrich collaboration, building a site that brings their brand to life.
Driven to disrupt the industry and transform beyond their legacy roots, Docusign needed a powerful web solution. With Webflow and strategic agency experts, they gained creative freedom and global recognition in the emerging Intelligent Agreement Management space.
Once struggling to update a static, outdated CMS that didn’t reflect their modern brand, Walker & Dunlop tapped into Webflow's WXP to transform their website into a dynamic, high-performing sales and marketing tool that boosts engagement and drives meaningful business results.
The global fitness pioneer recognized the need for a more agile and efficient web platform to support its growth and innovation. With Webflow’s WXP, they transformed their digital presence, unlocking new revenue streams and delivering dynamic content experiences worldwide.
With hundreds of clients and complex site migrations, Poetic was limited by traditional webstacks that made them overly reliant on developers. With Webflow, Poetic now has the freedom to own their own website, all while helping their clients efficiently build and manage their web presence.
Previously reliant on developers and external resources to manage their web presence on WordPress, Healius migrated to Webflow to bring their team more flexibility, efficiency, and peace of mind.
Looking for a web development platform that could support ambitious business goals, Fivetran turned to Webflow to accelerate their speed to market, improve internal collaboration, and take their digital presence to the next level.
An integral part of the Dropbox suite, Dropbox Sign used Webflow to streamline development processes, empowering its design and marketing teams to deliver the most impactful services, faster.
Searching for a platform to easily build microsites, reduce costs, and unify their brand, the leading access control company turned to Webflow to build new web pages that met their global brand standards.
Grubhub worked with certified Webflow Expert, Wondersauce, and leveraged Webflow Enterprise to bring a viral brand moment to life in 7 weeks.
Looking to modernize their tech stack and bring more experiences to life on the web, NCR turned to Webflow to accelerate their time to launch.
In the midst of a major rebrand, Attentive moved from WordPress to Webflow to unlock the creative potential of their website. From refresh to rebrand: Webflow as a catalyst for growth.
The Pacific Funds team moved from their existing CMS implementation to take control of their site and create a better customer experience.
Rakuten SL saved time, money, and security headaches by switching from WordPress to Webflow.
Explore more stories
With Webflow Optimize, Retool went from reactive updates to a proactive growth engine. Embracing experimentation, their marketing team gained the freedom to test, learn, and iterate rapidly — driving more demo bookings, a smoother sign-up flow, and stronger collaboration.
PushPress needed a faster, more flexible way to build unique, branded sites for fitness businesses. With Webflow, they can now deliver high-converting sites at scale — helping gym owners grow faster without bottlenecks or complexity.
Aspect set out to create a new digital presence from scratch, while honoring their legacy brand. With Webflow, they built a global, modular, high-converting site in just two months — empowering their marketing team to move fast, experiment freely, and scale smarter.
21.co previously relied on engineers for every update, hindering growth. With Webflow, the team builds better together – marketers and designers can move fast to scale content across global markets, while developers step in for more complex web builds and integrations.
Recognizing the challenges clients face with traditional DXPs and developer-intensive headless CMSs, Verndale turned to Webflow’s WXP. The visual-first, composable CMS allows Verndale to create high-impact digital experiences for their clients – minus the technical overhead.
Typeform’s marketing team struggled with a CMS that hindered agility, experimentation, and digital growth. After partnering with Webflow and MakeBuild, they reclaimed website ownership, improved SEO performance, and accelerated speed-to-market.
Known for delivering award-winning sites in record time, OFF+BRAND. uses Webflow to create high-performance, scalable content that blends striking design with seamless functionality, enabling clients to manage their sites independently while achieving real business impact.
AutoTrader aimed to scale high-performance shopping experiences for individual car brands. By partnering with Composite and Webflow, they improved development efficiency and accelerated speed to market.
For years, a custom-coded legacy website stifled the fee-free mortgage broker’s creativity, and long development cycles made even the simplest edits cumbersome. Now, L&C’s marketing team has the flexibility to truly own their growth with a more scalable web presence.
Code42 drove thousands of incremental conversions leveraging Webflow Optimize. By using robust integrations and AI, they are able to test faster and glean more comprehensive results than before.
With an ambitious vision of evolving from a talent management tool to an end-to-end HR platform, Lattice bet on Webflow Enterprise to transform their website into a revenue-driving engine that empowers HR professionals around the world.
Vanta had ambitious plans to stand out in a competitive space. To bring their new brand to life while unlocking greater flexibility and collaboration, they upgraded to Webflow Enterprise and worked with trusted Webflow partners.
Previously reliant on developers to launch and manage custom sites, the cultural exchange group has optimized localization with Webflow Enterprise, significantly increasing speed to market and providing bespoke, branded experiences globally.
As the company shifted their focus upmarket, they needed a powerful solution to turn their website into their biggest strategic asset. With Webflow and its expansive Apps ecosystem, Jasper has supercharged their workflows to deliver the most performant web experiences.
As a Webflow Enterprise Partner, Refokus uses Webflow as a key part of their innovation toolkit to reduce development times and costs while delivering websites that increase engagement and help brands emotionally connect to global audiences.
Fueled by the power of Webflow, Outliant drives dramatic reductions in tech costs while empowering enterprise clients to dominate their industry with best-in-class digital experiences.
Quickly growing past the limits of Webflow self-serve for their global web presence, Kajabi upgraded to Enterprise to empower internal partners to build more robust web experiences, while ensuring governance.
Boutique agencies can often lose business due to long production timelines and tedious feedback loops—but DIKO has moved beyond those constraints to deliver even the most technically challenging projects for big clients.
Without a centralized design approach, the global HR company was dealing with an inconsistent brand presence. The team upgraded from self-serve to Webflow Enterprise to uplevel team collaboration, scale global web initiatives, and elevate their brand.
The full-service creative agency can deliver its signature high-design work without having to wait for developers, ultimately saving time and opening the door to more client opportunities.
Since migrating to Webflow, the recruitment marketing agency has bypassed the need to outsource web development, attracted bigger clients, and introduced a new revenue stream.
With limited resources and no in-house developers, the Funsize team can tap into the power of Webflow to push creative boundaries and exceed client expectations—delivering better work, faster.
To break free from the traditional web development tools that often limit community banks, Ponce Bank turned to Webflow to deliver higher-quality digital experiences.
As a Webflow Enterprise Partner, Social Driver expands their client base and leverages comprehensive features to tackle custom builds with high security standards — all while moving quickly with less reliance on developers.
Nursa migrated to Webflow Enterprise to unlock better team collaboration and improve SEO, while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in engineering resources.
Looking for more design flexibility and the ability to empower more of the team to manage site updates, Wave turned to Webflow Enterprise to reduce their developer dependency.
Looking to tackle a redesign on a tight timeline, Ramp turned to Webflow to give its marketing, design, and engineering teams the ability to move quickly together.
What started out with just three pages showing what can be built with Webflow was the springboard to redoing the entire website.
Virta gained a whole lot more than a flexible CMS with their move to Webflow — they also reached a new level of collaboration, creation, and accessibility.
The team at Brink — a mobile Election Guide built with accessible technology to make democracy available to everyone — worked with design agency 8020 to build a website that was accessible by design.
SunWest Credit Union switched from Fiserv to Webflow to give their marketing team control of their site.
Adding Webflow to their toolkit enabled the team at Barrel to significantly streamline their development and review processes with clients — all while empowering designers to do their best work.
The popular company for fund managers, investors, and venture capitalists has turned to Webflow to empower their marketing team and reach their growth goals streamline their work.
Mural moved from an engineering-owned site to Webflow to let their design team "control their own destiny".
Ramotion switched from React to Webflow to build their marketing sites faster and give clients more control over their site after launch.
Freshly moved their blog from WordPress to Webflow to give their marketing and design team control.
Getaround is a quickly growing car sharing network with over $400 million in funding, and runs their marketing pages on Webflow.
Designers JT Helms and Matt Cowen work together to build custom sites for major clients — and do everything without relying on developers.
With over $380 million raised, Petal is changing the way people get access to credit, and runs their entire marketing website on Webflow.
Get started for free
Try Webflow for as long as you like with our free Starter plan. Purchase a paid Site plan to publish, host, and unlock additional features.
Try Webflow for as long as you like with our free Starter plan. Purchase a paid Site plan to publish, host, and unlock additional features.