Dimitris Kontaris

Communication compliance technology for global financial institutions  ·  London

Lead a 70-person UX organisation spanning UX, UI, Research, Design Systems, and DesignOps across three sites, covering the company's three core product lines. Report into the Chief Design Officer and deputise on selected executive responsibilities.

• Scaled the London studio from 5 to 40 designers, hiring and developing a full management layer, with 93% team retention across the scale-up years.
• Work daily with the founder and CEO in strategy and design workshops for the company's key product line; hold design sign-off and carry decisions across product lines for consistency.
• Raised organisational UX maturity by a full level on the Nielsen Norman Group scale, through defined governance, embedded research, and clear design ownership and sign-off across product lines.
• Founded the Design Systems team and led the migration to a new design system, reducing fragmentation and design rework across products.
• Author and lead the design organisation's AI integration strategy: pilot programme, tooling rollout and licensing across the team, and adoption scorecards covering design systems, accessibility, and AI usage.
• Partner with Product and Engineering leadership on roadmap priorities and strategic direction; presented the organisation's product development approach to C-suite stakeholders.
• Redesigned hiring and performance frameworks, raising the consistency and quality of senior design hires across sites.
• Co-inventor on a gesture-based system for searching electronic records; US Patent Application 2024/0143598 A1, assigned to Global Relay Communications Inc.

London  ·  promoted from Digital Product UX & Design Lead

Led design of HSBC Kinetic, HSBC's mobile-first commercial banking platform, from concept to market launch across iOS, Android, and Web.

• Built, grew, and led a multidisciplinary team of 20–25 UX and visual designers, copywriters, and researchers; several have gone on to lead their own teams.
• Kinetic launched to a 4.8/5.0 App Store rating from 22,000+ reviews and won Best Mobile Initiative for Business at the Banking Tech Awards.
• As Digital Product UX & Design Lead, owned end-to-end experience and service design for international customer onboarding and account opening across Web and iOS, establishing the research operating model and information architecture while managing senior business and digital stakeholders.

London

• Led experience design for the Eikon trading platform's core, most-used applications, including the redesign of its flagship app.
• Established responsive design standards for the platform, driven by analytics and behavioural data.

London

• Led UX engagements across finance, government, and energy for high-profile enterprise clients; scoped, pitched, and won seven-figure programmes.

London

• Joined NICE Actimize through the RedKite acquisition as part of the product leadership team; led UX for the flagship compliance case-management platform and embedded user-centred design in the development process.