Earlier this year, the UK-based Banking-as-a-Service fintech OpenPayd went through a complete rebranding. To find out more about the idea behind OpenPayd’s new brand, we reached out to Michael Treacy, Marketing Lead at OpenPayd, for some first-hand insights.
Founded in 2015 by Dr. Ozan Ozerk, OpenPayd is a fintech provider that is on a mission to disrupt corporate banking and payment provisions through its API-driven technology and global license network.
Its flagship Banking-as-a-Service digital platform enables businesses such as marketplaces, PSPs, FinTech, and FX brokers to deploy core digital banking capabilities like:
● IBANs in multiple currencies,
● access to local and international payment networks,
● FX conversion, and
● card processing.
OpenPayd’s products and services can be integrated seamlessly by organisations of any size, either directly or as a white-label offering to their customers.
Since its launch, the company has grown to over 100 employees and built a solid international license network, with offices across the UK, US, Malta, Turkey and Bulgaria.
Following its great success over the past five years, OpenPayd is now entering the next stage of its growth journey with the launch of a new and completely revamped brand identity. The new brand concept was developed and executed in-house by OpenPayd’s Brand & Design Lead, Diarmid Caffrey, introducing a more distinct, dynamic, modern and confident look and feel for the company’s core communication assets like website, logo, colour palette and typography.
In his official announcement on LinkedIn about the rebranding, Diarmid said:
“I'm very proud to have led the creative rebrand for OpenPayd. It’s now a stronger, more dynamic and confident brand. In an ever-evolving industry, OpenPayd continues to create innovation within the Fintech space. Embedded finance will change so many of the day-to-day products we use for the better and OpenPayd is facilitating that change. Through our reinvigorated branding, we look forward to celebrating the next chapter in the OpenPayd journey.”
To learn more about OpenPayd’s recent rebranding project and its growth plans for the future, we spoke to Michael Treacy, Marketing Lead at OpenPayd. Read Michael’s complete interview below.
What’s the story behind OpenPayd’s rebrand? Why have you decided to rebrand the company in the first place?
OpenPayd is still a very young company, but as any business grows you reach different stages of maturity where you have to take stock and prepare yourself for the next stage of growth. The past 18 months have been extremely exciting for the business from a growth perspective and as we look towards the next 12 months we have an extremely exciting roadmap.
We wanted to give the OpenPayd brand a fresh new look that allows us to stand out across both digital and print whilst giving us the opportunity to experiment more with colours and shapes. We see the recent switch up in our visual identity as ‘phase one’ and as we continue to invest more time and resources into building out a comprehensive content strategy, the brand will continue to evolve with it.
Our Brand and Design Lead, Diarmid Caffrey, spent a tremendous amount of time taking in feedback from our internal and external stakeholders as well as researching the market to bring a wide range of ideas to the table. This hard work, time and effort has really paid off and resulted in some great feedback from our customers, partners and the wider fintech market.
Level up your marketing mojo! Subscribe to the Fintech Marketing Monthly Digest and join our growing community of fintech marketers.
What does OpenPayd stand for? What are the key features of the new “OpenPayd” brand?
At OpenPayd we’re powering the growth of the digital economy by allowing brands to create more value from their existing customers and attract new ones by building better, more friendly customer experiences.
Our new brand gives us a wider scope to get more creative when building out this narrative, from the way we use shapes and colours to our tone of voice and messaging. We will also be experimenting more with video to drive deeper engagements with our audience.
Embedded finance is so much more than a buzzword. It’s an industry shift where the lines between brands and fintechs are becoming more blurred and there’s a large education piece that needs to take place to show brands how they can capitalise on this opportunity. Here’s where we are planning to add value from a content perspective.
Have you faced any challenges during the rebranding process? If yes, what were they and how you tackled them?
When you take on a project like this you realise how far the brand reaches across different channels, both internal and external. It was really important to us that the switch was clean and that we avoided any ‘brand confusion’. This took a lot of time and stakeholders from every part of the business to ensure the team had created all of the new assets that were needed.
One challenge we faced as we drew closer to switching was that we often receive logo requests for industry reports on banking-as-a-service, embedded finance, open banking and more. These reports are annual and we really didn’t want the old logo hanging around for this long. So we took the decision to make a quiet switch to the new branding earlier for these channels only.
How have you communicated the changes with your existing customers and made sure that they’re aligned with your vision?
We wanted to give our customers the first glance at the new brand, to receive early feedback and to ensure we communicated the changes clearly to them. We shared the new logo and branding two weeks before we launched and actually updated the design within our platform around the same time too.
The feedback was great and the fact that we had their support before launch gave us great confidence when we finally shared our new look with the wider industry.
What’s your number one marketing priority at the moment?
To educate brands on how they can capitalise on the embedded finance opportunity.
We interviewed 150 technology senior executives across Europe (download full report here) and 92% of respondents said that they planned to launch an embedded finance solution in the next 5 years - yet only 91% of them when first asked only partially understand what it means.
That’s the role we have to play. To educate and help them realise the opportunity.
What’s next for OpenPayd?
We’re in for a very exciting few months. Our team is growing quickly, we’re serving customers in more markets and we’re expanding into new verticals. It’s great to be back at face-to-face events, starting with Money 20/20 last week, and we hope to be out there meeting more partners, customers and prospects in the months to come.
As for the marketing team, we’re looking to keep up the momentum of the past few months and move into the next phase of our growth plan!
If you enjoyed this article, don't forget to share it with your network and subscribe for the Fintech Marketing Monthly Digest!
About Michael Treacy: Michael is the Marketing Lead at OpenPayd - a leading global payment and Banking-as-a-Service platform for the digital economy. He has been working with and leading marketing teams within the financial services and fintech space for the past 7+ years at fast-growing startups and corporations such as Airwallex and Docomo Digital.