White-Labelling at Scale: The Challenge Behind the BenPal Portal

One of the most technically rewarding challenges I faced at JLT Development was architecting support for white-labelling within the BenPal portal—a platform used by companies to manage employee benefits and pensions. On the surface, white-labelling might sound straightforward: swap out logos and colours to match a client’s brand. But the reality is far more complex, especially at scale.

BenPal wasn’t a toy app. It was a large, enterprise-grade system that needed to offer deep customisation without compromising maintainability or performance. We weren’t just changing CSS—we were conditionally altering workflows, features, and document content depending on the client configuration. Each client had slightly different requirements, branding, and legal content, and the platform had to flex accordingly.

From a development perspective, this required a thoughtful architecture. We implemented layered configuration strategies that could cascade global settings, client defaults, and per-user overrides. We treated client identities as first-class citizens within the domain, with their own rules, preferences, and access behaviours.

UI components had to be modular and brand-aware. Services needed to account for client-specific logic without introducing brittle conditionals throughout the codebase. Testing became even more critical. SpecFlow scenarios were written to validate that different configurations would behave as expected, giving us confidence that our flexibility wouldn’t become fragility.

Performance also had to be considered. Dynamic branding decisions couldn’t slow down the application, especially during peak usage periods like annual enrolment windows. We cached branding metadata and structured content delivery pipelines to efficiently serve the right experience to the right user.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, though, was cultural. White-labelling demands empathy. You’re building a product that looks like someone else’s. You need to care about their brand guidelines, legal obligations, and user expectations as much as your own. That mindset shift, from ownership to enablement, was one of the most valuable things I learned.

Looking back, enabling white-labelling at scale was not just an architectural exercise—it was a lesson in adaptability, respect, and systems thinking. It pushed me to think beyond feature delivery and start viewing software as a platform for others to express their business identity.

If you're building for multiple clients, consider white-labelling early. Build with extension in mind. And remember that flexibility isn't just a feature—it's a design principle. One that, when done well, can turn a good product into an invaluable one.