Sander Viegers
Head of Design at Rabobank
As the Head of Design at Rabobank, Sander Viegers leads the multidisciplinary design organisation of around 100+ designers and researchers, shaping end‑to‑end service experiences for both customers and employees across Rabobank’s consumer, business, and internal channels. He has built and scaled a design culture and governance model that drives design impact across more than 20 cross‑functional business tribes and product teams.
Before joining the Dutch cooperative bank, Sander held leadership roles at Microsoft and Amazon and contributed at Dutch digital marketplace Catawiki, leveraging global tech‑industry best practices to accelerate digital innovation at Rabobank. His international experience spans design strategy, UX leadership, and organisational design within both digital native ecosystems and enterprise settings.
He holds a master’s degree in industrial design engineering from Delft University of Technology, and is named inventor on multiple design patents developed at Microsoft, including granted patents for iconography and animated interface designs.
Sander Viegers
Head of Design at Rabobank
As the Head of Design at Rabobank, Sander Viegers leads the multidisciplinary design organisation of around 100+ designers and researchers, shaping end‑to‑end service experiences for both customers and employees across Rabobank’s consumer, business, and internal channels. He has built and scaled a design culture and governance model that drives design impact across more than 20 cross‑functional business tribes and product teams.
Before joining the Dutch cooperative bank, Sander held leadership roles at Microsoft and Amazon and contributed at Dutch digital marketplace Catawiki, leveraging global tech‑industry best practices to accelerate digital innovation at Rabobank. His international experience spans design strategy, UX leadership, and organisational design within both digital native ecosystems and enterprise settings.
He holds a master’s degree in industrial design engineering from Delft University of Technology, and is named inventor on multiple design patents developed at Microsoft, including granted patents for iconography and animated interface designs.
Sessions
Designing expertise at scale: building strategic influence at Rabobank
How do you scale design in a legacy-heavy, highly regulated environment, and move from delivering solutions to shaping strategy? At Rabobank, we’ve grown a design team of over 100 professionals and built design maturity not as a destination, but as a continuous journey. This case study talk shares how we’re embedding service design across the organisation, not just as a practice but as a mindset; transforming how teams collaborate, how policies are shaped, and how human complexity is addressed through systems thinking. From employee experience to backend tooling, we show how a journey-first approach is helping us reimagine the inner workings of the bank.
We’ll also share how we work with product teams to shift from product thinking to lifecycle thinking; supporting farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers through services that meet real human needs. Through real-world case studies, you’ll hear what it takes to drive customer-centricity in large-scale financial services, influence across silos, and make design matter in places where regulation, risk, and legacy systems are the norm. This session is for designers, strategists, and design leaders working in complex or regulated settings—anyone curious about building strategic design capability that scales, sticks, and transforms.
Design leadership
Journeys & ecosystems