PostFinance’s Office, Bern

This innovative retail bank wanted to take a step forward by creating a new concept of corpo-satellite workspaces open to staff, collaborators and partners in order to promote faster collaboration and agile working. SpeedUp Space is a future-oriented network of collaboration hubs spread over different cities encouraging interaction between diverse teams, in line with PostFinance’s values and emerging hybrid work modalities. Studio Banana not only led the successful transformation of the pilot site at Bern Central Station, but also a second one at Oerlikon´s innovative district, in Zürich.

Through a co-design method of discovery including staff interviews and workshops, Studio Banana detected that the new space had to be flexible and inclusive enough to meet the needs of a wide range of use cases, from product launches, occasional coworking or project acceleration workshops to training sessions and digital bootcamps.

Achieving a high degree of functional versatility and executing the pilot scheme with a moderate investment became clear priorities, while creating an inspiring environment that would naturally attract the staff’s curiosity and attention. The SpeedUp Space network of corporate satellite hubs is based on a series of functional modules and a common design language that can be combined and adapted to the specific conditions and requirements of each location.

This new multipurpose workplace concept transcends traditional modes of sharing. It includes informal spaces for workshops, meetings and events thought to encourage collaboration between the bank’s staff and partners in an easy and intuitive way.