MUFG is one of the world's largest financial institutions. Its research division - MUFG Research - publishes economic analysis, market commentary, and thought leadership for institutional clients, regulators, and senior decision-makers across global markets. The quality and timeliness of that content is central to its reputation.
The platform underpinning MUFG Research had not kept pace with those expectations. A heavily customised legacy CMS - maintained by a third-party vendor with a long lead time for any change - meant editorial teams were spending more time waiting for developer support than publishing. Content workflows required multiple manual handoffs. Page templates were rigid, which created inconsistency across different content types. And the cost of the existing licensing arrangement was rising year on year with no clear return on that increase.
There was a deeper concern too. For a regulated financial institution, reliance on a third-party SaaS platform raised legitimate questions about data governance, audit trails, and control over content infrastructure. The CTO wanted a platform the bank owned and controlled - one that could meet internal security requirements without requiring workarounds.
The brief was clear: replace the legacy platform with a modern, cloud-native CMS that gave editorial teams independence, developers a clean architecture to work with, and the compliance team the governance controls they needed.
"The previous platform was costing us money we could not justify and creating delays we could not afford. The migration gave us a platform we actually control - one that our editors can use without filing a support ticket and our compliance team can stand behind. The results have been clearer and faster than we anticipated."
We started with a 14-day assessment. Two senior consultants reviewed the existing platform - content models, publishing workflows, asset management, localisation requirements, and the integration points connecting the CMS to MUFG Research's distribution and analytics systems. We also ran structured interviews with editorial, IT, and compliance stakeholders to understand where the current platform was creating friction and what success looked like for each team.
The assessment identified the core issues quickly. The content model had accumulated years of technical debt - there were 14 content types in use, of which six were redundant or overlapping. The publishing workflow required four manual steps where two would do. And the existing integrations had been built on custom middleware that was expensive to maintain and difficult to test.
We recommended Umbraco Cloud as the target platform. The decision was grounded in the specific requirements: Umbraco's open-source architecture meant no per-seat licensing costs and full control over hosting within MUFG's secure cloud environment. Its structured content model and flexible templating gave editors and developers what they each needed without compromise. And its audit logging capabilities were straightforward to configure against MUFG's internal compliance requirements.
The migration was delivered in three sprints. The first sprint focused on content architecture - rationalising the content model from 14 types to eight, designing the editorial workflows in Umbraco, and building the integration layer with MUFG's distribution and CRM systems. The second sprint built the frontend: a clean, responsive design optimised for long-form research content, with structured templates for different publication types - market commentary, economic analysis, sector reports, and event coverage.
The third sprint executed the migration itself. Every piece of content was mapped, migrated, and validated. Redirects were put in place for all legacy URLs. The cutover was planned and rehearsed in a staging environment before going live during a low-traffic window with intensive monitoring in the hours that followed. There was no downtime and no data loss.
Annual CMS licensing costs dropped by more than 65%, replacing a growing SaaS contract with predictable infrastructure spend that MUFG controls directly. The editorial team reported that publishing time for a standard research note dropped from over three hours - including developer involvement - to under one. The backlog of content waiting for developer support cleared within two weeks of launch.
The compliance team confirmed that the new platform met all internal governance requirements from day one. Audit logs fed directly into MUFG's existing compliance systems with no additional configuration needed post-launch. The security review that had taken three months with the previous platform was completed in under four weeks.
Content consistency improved significantly. The structured templates eliminated the formatting variations that had previously required manual correction before publication. Editors described the new system as the first CMS they had used at the firm that felt designed for their workflow rather than against it.
Three months after launch, MUFG Research expanded the platform scope to include a new sector coverage area - something that would have required a separate contract and a four-week development lead time under the previous arrangement. With Umbraco Cloud, the editorial team stood up the new section independently in a day.
