Enra Specialist Finance | Property Finance | United Kingdom | 11-week engagement
Results at a glance
- One workplace across brands and departments: employees moving between teams stay inside a familiar environment
- Document management with version control: one improved library structure supporting compliance and regulatory requirements
- Information people can find: a landing page and navigation organised around what employees come for, on desktop and mobile
- One pattern to learn: departmental spaces follow the same structure across the group
- Less to maintain: fewer places to publish and keep current
- Room to grow: new sites inherit the design and the standards already set
- No new platform: built on the Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online licences Enra already owned
The starting point
An intranet can be accurate, well organised, and looked after, and employees will still be reluctant to use it. When every department builds its space its own way, a colleague arriving there has to work out the layout before finding anything. Multiply that across a few hundred people, and the intranet becomes a place the organisation maintains carefully but visits rarely.
Enra knew the pattern well, with two brands, West One and Aria Finance, and departments spread across both. The intranet was well planned, with a single authoritative home for documents and content written and maintained centrally by the group marketing team. But it was not being visited as often as the work behind it deserved. What was missing was a clear, low-friction path to the right information across departments, and an environment employees wanted to work inside.
The group set four objectives:
- Improve adoption through a clean, intuitive experience
- Make relevant information easy to find
- Simplify document management
- Put in place a structure that could keep evolving
The solution
BindTuning redesigned and restructured Enra's SharePoint intranet on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, starting with the brand, because everything built afterwards would inherit it. Enra's colours, fonts, and visual language were applied to the environment as one design system, so a page serving West One and a page serving Aria Finance read as parts of the same company.
The landing page came next, rebuilt around what employees arrive looking for. Navigation was designed to be scanned in seconds. Behind it, reconfigured SharePoint web parts support the new information architecture and pick up the brand automatically, so nobody has to style a page to make it look correct.
Departmental pages and libraries were then standardised on that same pattern, and document management is where the change landed hardest. Enra has worked from a structured document library with version control since the intranet was first built in 2021. Now, the standardisation in this engagement extended that discipline across departments, so an employee opening a document knows it is the current one and the history behind it is visible to anyone who needs it. For a regulated lending and broking business, that keeps compliance and regulatory record-keeping as a property of the system rather than a periodic exercise. Eleven weeks after the project began, the group had a more efficient intranet built entirely on the SharePoint it was already running.
What made this work
Intranet branding did more work here than a design decision usually gets credit for. An intranet that carries the company's colours, fonts, and visual language stops feeling like a tool the IT department installed and starts feeling like the organisation itself. For a group operating through two distinct brands, that consistency is what turns a collection of sites into one workplace.
Standardisation is what makes it hold. When departmental pages follow the same pattern, employees learn the intranet once and carry that knowledge into every team's space. New sites arrive already looking right, which means the structure survives growth and scales with the organisation. Page standards and governance are built into the design from the start, so nobody in IT is asked to police page quality after launch.
Version control is where standardisation stops being an IT preference and starts being a business asset. One improved library, one current version, one visible history. In a regulated environment that is the difference between a document store and a system people can rely on under scrutiny.
These principles apply to any organisation whose SharePoint content is already good but whose usage numbers still disappoint.
About Enra Specialist Finance
Enra Specialist Finance is one of the UK's leading providers and distributors of specialist property finance. Founded in 2002, the group combines lending and broking through two brands. West One is a multi-product specialist lender covering development finance, bridging loans, commercial mortgages, buy-to-let, and residential first and second charge mortgages. Aria Finance is a specialist distributor of commercial and residential property finance products, working with a range of lenders. Together they serve property investors, developers, landlords, and homeowners.
Enra kept the intranet it already had. No migration, no replacement platform, and the same Microsoft 365 licences now carrying an experience employees use.
