Pacific Western Bank

Pacific Western Bank is a commercial bank with over $40 billion in assets headquartered in Los Angeles, with 69 full-service branches across California. The bank serves established middle-market businesses through asset-based, equipment, and real estate lending, and also operates venture banking offices in key US innovation hubs to support startup and private equity clients.

The Challenge

A bank of this scale needs a public-facing website that does more than display information — it needs to guide a wide range of customers through complex product catalogues and allow them to initiate services without branch visits. The existing digital presence wasn’t meeting that standard: navigation was unclear, product pages were disconnected from actionable next steps, and the site wasn’t structured for the bank’s scale of operation.

Our Approach

We built the new Pacific Western Bank website on Drupal, selected for its content modelling flexibility and enterprise-grade permission architecture. The frontend was implemented using BEM methodology — a discipline that kept the codebase modular and maintainable across a large template library, and made ongoing development by multiple engineers consistent.

Technical Delivery

The site integrates with several external API protocols, connecting the Drupal layer to the bank’s backend systems and third-party financial services infrastructure. This required careful authentication handling, error-tolerant API client implementation, and thorough QA to ensure that data flows were reliable across all user-facing touchpoints.

Custom Drupal modules handled the service selection and consultation request workflows — so visitors could navigate from interest to action without friction. The responsive frontend ensured the experience held up across devices, which matters for customers checking rates or initiating requests from a mobile phone.

QA & Delivery

Quality assurance was conducted across browsers and devices, covering both functional correctness and performance under realistic load conditions. The project was delivered with CI/CD pipeline support through GitLab, giving the bank’s internal team a clear path for ongoing maintenance and feature deployment.