Owning the Brand of Love
How a bold Caribbean financial institution turned love into its most powerful competitive advantage and built a digital presence worthy of it.
Client: JMMB Group
Regions: Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Dominican Republic, Barbados
Platform: Drupal 10
Most financial institutions lead with rates, products, and services. While that is still a focus, JMMB leads with love. That’s not a metaphor or a marketing line, it’s the institutional core of one of the Caribbean’s most respected financial groups, captured in a mission statement that is as unusual as it is powerful: A Vision of Love.
Love of people. Love of country. Love of the communities across Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, and Barbados that JMMB has served for years.
When a brand has that kind of differentiator baked into its identity, the website must carry it forward. And that is exactly the challenge Adventure House helped solve for JMMB.
The original jmmb.com was last updated in 2016. At the time, it was a strong site: information-forward, professionally designed, and built around guiding visitors toward in-branch conversations. It did exactly what a website needed to do in 2016.
But the world moved forward. Customer expectations have shifted. Digital banking has evolved from a convenience to an expectation. AI exploded. And JMMB grew, adding Barbados as a new region, along with country-specific sites for Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and four distinct Dominican Republic sites serving different financial verticals: investing, mutual funds, banking, and pension administration.
The site grew to be a 1,000-plus-page ecosystem spanning seven distinct presences, all anchored by a main portal page where visitors select their country. Ten years in, it needed more than a fresh coat of paint. It needed to evolve.
With the breadth of site-wide updates, the first phase included the main portal and all seven country home pages to reflect where JMMB is today, with an eye firmly on where it is heading.
JMMB Jamiaca’s old hompage
Before a single wireframe was sketched, Adventure House sat down with JMMB’s senior leadership team to get inside the business.
We reviewed site analytics, the highest-traffic pages, their conversion paths, and worked through the strategic marketing and business priorities that JMMB had set for the coming years. What products and services needed to be front and center? Which pages were working hard and which were coasting? Where was the site falling short in the digital-first era?
Before design, there is information architecture. We developed detailed sitemaps that mapped out the logic of the entire site, defining how information would flow, where critical links to transactional platforms would live, and how the overall journey would guide a visitor from awareness to action. Those sitemaps then informed a full set of wireframes.
For a site of this scale, building a logical, adaptable grid system was foundational. The grid had to work fluidly across all responsive states, from desktop to mobile, and be structured to make future updates manageable.
As part of this engagement, Adventure House completed a full migration from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 across all JMMB sites. Drupal 9 had reached its end of life, and the migration to Drupal 10 future-proofed the platform with enhanced security, improved performance, and long-term support.
Here is where things get interesting. Love is an emotion. It is felt, not seen. So how do you visualize it authentically for a financial institution operating across four countries, serving customers with different cultures, landscapes, and lives?
That was the central creative challenge. The answer was to build a custom visual toolkit.
The heart is universal. It transcends language and culture, which made it the perfect structural element for a brand serving Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Dominican Republic, and Barbados. The goal was to integrate the heart form into the visual language deliberately to reinforce the brand’s mission.
Photography connected to the brand
When images are customized, stock photography becomes unique to the brand. Integrating the heart form directly into visuals creates emotional resonance and brand reinforcement throughout. Subjects were curated to celebrate the diverse landscapes and cultures of the regions JMMB serves.
In addition, the large-scale hero imagery on the home pages presented a specific design challenge: the content panels that overlay the photography needed to remain flexible. Depending on the image, the direction a person is facing and where the action is, the panel position is flexible to keep subjects clear and content unobscured.
Utilizing Illustration as a design layer
A custom illustrative heart system strategically applied throughout the site in multiple ways ties the visual experience together across pages. The heart never competes with the content, it frames it.
A custom icon set
Key icons across the site were purpose-designed with heart geometry integrated into their structure, so the brand language extends into functional moments throughout the site. A fun touch included using a heart symbol in place of the conventional arrow for the button UI elements.
Dollars & Good Sense blog identity
JMMB’s financial education blog received its own distinct brand identity, with a logo and iconography that bridges the editorial and commercial, sitting within the broader visual system.
Design gets the attention, but the content needs to resonate. Adventure House didn’t just redesign the pages, we took a fresh approach to the messaging and content. Every headline, every product description, every call to action was written from scratch.
The new content is built around what customers need. Static descriptions became action-oriented. Sections like “For Individuals: Smart personal banking solutions” and “For Businesses and Corporates: Your banking partner” set a clear, direct tone that speaks to customers, not at them.
Every page now has a clear purpose: inform, engage, and move the customer towards an action.
Moneyline is JMMB’s online banking portal, and in Phase 1 we reworked how customers get there. The previous experience had grown complex. The new design is not.
Customers now get an immediate choice: Personal or Business. From there, logging in, opening an account, and scheduling an appointment are each one click away. The same thinking carries into the main navigation, where Login, Sign Up, and Open an Account are surfaced immediately under a clean Personal/Business tab structure.
Financial services is a crowded, commoditized space. In the Caribbean markets that JMMB serves, competition includes large global commercial banks with massive budgets, regional players with established trust, and the growing pressure of fintech alternatives that promise speed and simplicity.
Most financial institutions choose sameness: similar visuals, predictable UX, product-forward pages, etc. JMMB chose a different path.
Their advantage has always been humanity and a genuine desire to help customers reach their financial goals. Being cared for by your financial institution is rare. That is what love looks like in practice.
Adventure House made that differentiation visible. Visual warmth, cultural representation, the consistency of the heart form, and content written around customer needs. Every decision points back to the same promise.
Behind every finished site is a clear process. Here is how this one moved from concept to launch:
01
Discovery and Analytics Review
Stakeholder sessions, analytics deep dives, competitive audit, and strategic priority setting.
02
Information Architecture and Wireframes
Full sitemap and wireframe development for the portal and all seven country home pages, mapping user flows and content hierarchy.
03
Visual Language Development
Creation of the heart-led visual toolkit: composite imagery direction, illustration system, custom icon set, and Dollars & Good Sense blog identity.
04
Design and Content
Full design of the portal page and seven country home pages across all responsive states, plus fresh copywriting for every page: new headlines, simplified messaging, and action-oriented content built around customer needs.
05
Drupal 10 Migration and Build
Full multi-site Drupal 10 migration covering all JMMB properties, plus front-end build, QA, and stakeholder review.
06
Launch and Handover
Site launch with full admin-level CMS handover so the JMMB team owns and controls their platform going forward.
This was Phase 1. It was always designed to be the foundation, not the finish line.
The refreshed portal and country home pages set the visual and strategic course. They establish the brand expression, the content strategy, the grid logic, and the Drupal 10 infrastructure that Phase 2 will build on. The next phase is where the site begins its real evolution: from information destination to digital transaction platform, including the opportunity for AI and automation to help customers find, access, and interact with JMMB’s services.
The brand will never lose sight of the humanity of it all. Technology is the vehicle. Love is the destination.
Whether you are looking at a full site refresh, a phased modernization strategy, or CMS migration, Adventure House brings the same approach to every engagement: deep listening, smart architecture, and design that means something.