Redefining career readiness for the future of finance

The Situation

For over 50 years, the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI) has delivered financial education professionals across Canada, with its legacy Canadian Securities Course CSC® earning longstanding industry recognition. Following a major regulatory shift, CSI needed to communicate the program’s evolving role and value within a changing financial services landscape.

CSI recognized a critical strategic pivot: repositioning the CSC® beyond its traditional regulatory role as a career-readiness program for modern financial services. The program was expanded to cover both foundational technical knowledge and future-ready capabilities, including AI fluency, client ready skills, and critical thinking.

CSI’s existing web presence was heavily content-dense, institutional, and catalog-led. Built on rigid, hardcoded WordPress templates, minor styling adjustments required extensive developer intervention. Navigation was spread across six tabs, giving greater prominence to course details than to the program’s value and relevance to prospective career goals for today’s learner.

To compound the challenge, paid media, email campaigns, and PR activity were being coordinated around the launch. CSI needed a completely reimagined product page designed, built, and tested within a compressed timeframe, and ready for its internal team to integrate and launch without disrupting backend e-commerce and Salesforce pipelines.

The Goal

CSI needed more than a single page update; they needed a repeatable digital framework for their next chapter.

Success meant:

• Repositioning the CSC®: Connecting the program’s longstanding industry recognition with its evolving focus on career readiness, helping professionals perform, adapt, and lead.
• Streamlining UX & Information Architecture: Collapsing dense content into an intuitive, scannable product marketing layout designed around real learner questions.
• Building a Scalable Design System: Creating a modular WordPress architecture using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) so CSI’s internal team can independently roll out the template across other courses and credentials.
• Accelerated Execution: Delivering UX/UI design, custom front-end development, and QA within an accelerated project schedule, with a coordinated handoff to support CSI’s internal integration and launch.
• Seamless Ecosystem Integration: Connecting embedded Salesforce lead capture forms, e-commerce registration flows, and WPML translation structures without technical friction.

The Approach

Designing around learner questions, not internal catalogs

Working closely with the CSI marketing team, we took their updated positioning strategy and messaging brief and translated it into a clear digital layout. Moving beyond the existing course catalogue format, we structured the provided copy to lead with key learner questions: Why the CSC? Why now? Who is it for? What will I gain? We organized the dense product details into scannable feature blocks, visual proof points, and interactive curriculum accordions that clearly present the program’s two core pillars: CSC1: Core Readiness and CSC2: Future Readiness.

Agile technical delivery under tight deadlines

Because the site operated behind strict corporate VPN and Git repository environments across merged entity servers, we established a frictionless workflow. Baytek built and tested the solution in an isolated sandbox, delivering clean theme file diffs and database migration scripts. Working side-by-side with internal development and IT teams, we ensured seamless deployment into staging and production with zero downtime for existing user databases.

The Outcome

Baytek delivered a fully responsive product page designed to support lead generation and conversion, with a reusable design system on schedule for CSI’s nationwide campaign launch.

The new product page:

• Replaces dense, tabbed navigation with a scannable narrative that immediately communicates career relevance.
• Clearly articulates the value of both technical knowledge and future-focused capabilities, including AI fluency and strategic reasoning
• Supports a streamlined lead capture experience through integrated Salesforce campaign forms.
• Empowers the internal CSI web team to launch future product pages independently using the modular component library.

“Baytek brought so much care, creativity and a real sense of partnership to this project. They took the time to understand what the CSC® means to this next chapter of CSI’s legacy, and helped us express the evolving value of our reimagined legacy product through a thoughtfully designed, modern digital experience. Seeing the depth of what we offer reflected in a way that feels relevant to where we’re going is a meaningful step forward for CSI.

I’m deeply appreciative of the team’s collective talent and collaborative approach, but what stayed with me most was how personally invested they were in doing this well for us.“

Radyah Khan
Associate Director of Marketing, CSI