The fintech industry is crowded and trust is at a premium. Getting your financial services branding right will help you stand out and gain the confidence of your target audience, but it’s not easy.
If you’re a fintech owner in this position, you’ve probably felt that:
- You’re not sure what type of financial services branding will help your business get more customers
- You don’t have the time or resources to fully research the best bank branding
- You don’t know whether to change up your branding or stick with what you already have.
However, in a fintech industry with over 30,000 brands, you must look deep into what makes your business stand out. Studying excellent branding case studies can help you with this.
The good news is that you don’t have to be a finance industry giant with a multi-million-dollar budget.
Instead, there are tonnes of cost-efficient but effective branding strategies that can help you boost your company’s profile.
This article examines some of the most effective examples of financial services branding out there to help you fire up your imagination.
Don’t guess your fintech branding and lose out on sales. Book a no-cost consultation with Mint Position, a fintech content marketing agency that knows how to craft your brand identity.
What is branding in financial services?
Financial services branding goes beyond just logo design, which is what many people think a brand entails.
Instead, it’s a strategy using messaging, design, and experience to build a strong brand identity.
This matters. Recent PWC research shows that companies seen as having a strong brand identity outperform their competitors by 25%.
The importance of having a strong brand identity
Source: PWC
This identity should resonate with your target audience (be it millennials, Gen Z, or startups) and differentiate you in the crowded financial industry.
Branding financial services well builds trust, attracts new customers, and prioritizes customer satisfaction, leading to higher retention. But you’ll also need to go further than businesses in other industries.
As Laurie Ehrbar, Head of Digital Growth at investment firm EQT, puts it: “Because a financial services firm manages wealth and financial security in the long term, they need to establish trust with their audience on a much deeper level than an e-commerce business or even another service provider might.”
This means that fintechs and financial institutions with a deep focus on brand values across all touchpoints are the ones that emerge as frontrunners in their industry.
How to brand financial services: 6 examples to inspire you
1. Revolut: Targeting GenZ
Revolut has become a beacon in the financial services industry by not following the traditional route, but carving its own.
Its secret sauce? A laser focus on Gen Z.
Its marketing strategy team has built a brand that resonates deeply with this tech-savvy generation by using these tactics.
Ditching financial jargon
Revolut knows that using terms like ‘Annual Percentage Rate’ is the quickest way to turn off their target audience.
Their “Your Way In” campaign dismantled these barriers, breaking down tricky financial concepts into clear and concise messaging, so that everyone feels included.
Making social media their home
Revolut isn’t just present on social media; it thrives there. Engaging content on TikTok and Instagram, filled with memes and trendy videos, grabs attention and creates a sense of community among a generation raised on online interaction and visual storytelling.
Gamifying the app experience
Financial literacy doesn’t have to be dry, and Revolut gamifies the app experience. It turns everyday tasks like saving or budgeting into a fun challenge with progress bars and other interactive features. This playful approach also keeps Gen Z users engaged and actively using the app.
Our Advice: How you can replicate this
Revolut’s brand is a Gen-Z-first approach that anyone can imitate. How?
Understand your audience, speak their language, avoid jargon, and use clear, concise communication.
Use this to target the right channels, be active on social media platforms your audience frequents, and create content that resonates with their interests.
2. FIDO: Creating a striking brand identity
First, let’s define what a brand identity is, which is its visual personality that helps shape customer perception of you.
FIDO, a rising star in the African fintech market, knows its audience craves something different from the sterile greys of traditional finance. It has created a vibrant identity by partnering with art specialists and using the following techniques.
- A rich color palette that energizes their financial service marketing efforts
- Unique typography, fonts, and playful stickers that add a human touch to their content
- Punchy and engaging visual infographics instead of dry charts and reports
The approach is paying off through FIDO’s rapid expansion through Africa. It recently announced a second funding round, which was thought to be in the tens of millions of US dollars.
Our Advice: How you can replicate this
Your brand can carry out FIDO’s winning formula by understanding the cultural nuances of your target audience, including preferred colors, design styles, and even potential references to local culture.
Balance is key, however: subtle references to local culture strengthen the emotional connection between you and the customer, but overdoing it can make you seem inauthentic.
3. SumZero: Building trust through collaboration
Trust is the golden ticket in the financial services industry and many brands try and earn it through preaching wisdom to their audience. This is effective when done well: customers want their bank to excel at what it does, after all.
SumZero, though, has defied this “one-way street” approach and has instead shaped its brand around the collective knowledge of over 16,000 of its users.
The “wisdom of the crowd” has led them to curate a string of innovative investment ideas via their platform, which is designed to let investment professionals contribute investment research reports. The reports are put through a peer-review process in which other analysts fact-check data.
Customers get a dual benefit: access to a vast pool of vetted research to help with their investment decisions and the chance to build their reputation as financial analysts.
SumZero, meanwhile, stands out in a sea of sameness with crowdsourcing that both value their customer input and makes them a unique source of quality information.
Our Advice: How you can replicate this
You don’t need a huge budget to build a brand around. You can launch your own crowdsourcing campaign by:
- Collecting customer feedback through surveys, polls, and social media engagement
- Hosting contests or challenges that encourage users to share their investment ideas and analysis
- Encouraging user-generated content through your website, social media channels (like LinkedIn), and marketing materials.
All of these will build a sense of community and brand loyalty, while also providing your customers with valuable insights and content.
4. Klarna: Offer a smooth user experience
Simplicity is at the core of great financial branding.
Klarna has made the BNPL tactic its own with its super-simple “Four Installments’ model which has become synonymous with its brand image.
Customers can quickly get to grips with this easy payment concept and its interest-free premise is a great way to seal the deal.
Klarna’s distinctive purple color, availability among thousands of retailers, and a frictionless app also help.
Their ‘Smooth’ campaign emphasized this ease of use. It featured Paris Hilton repeatedly using the word ‘smooth’, projecting an image of a quick and slick payment experience.
Our Advice: How you can replicate this
While Klarna has a massive budget, you can still replicate the core principle behind its success: simplifying the customer experience.
- Focus on a single, well-defined value proposition. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Identify a specific pain point your target audience faces (in Klarna’s case, rip-off BNPL providers) and solve it well.
- Make onboarding seamless. Quicken the signup process and be clear about product features.
- Prioritize mobile. Develop a user-friendly mobile app that’s intuitive and efficient.
5. SoFi: Use rewards programs to build loyalty
SoFi, a leading financial services company, has shown the power of a well-designed rewards program in building brand loyalty.
Their program, SoFi Member Rewards, uses a points system that incentivizes desired customer behaviors.
Customers earn points for actions like enrolling, using the SoFi app, referring friends, and spending with their SoFi credit card.
The aim of this, of course, is to get customers to engage frequently, but the real branding power comes via rewarding them for regular interactions that they would probably do for free for other brands.
Rewards can quickly create a snowball effect. The customer acts; they receive their reward and a sense of achievement; they recommend it to their friends (another action); they receive more rewards. A brand image based on reciprocity means more people use it more often.
Our Advice: How you can replicate this
You don’t need to lavish expensive rewards on your customers to make this branding tactic work. Instead, you can look at two key areas and smartly link them together.
- Pinpoint the actions you want to encourage, such as using a mobile app or brand referrals.
- Create simple yet meaningful rewards based on what your customer is looking for.
A younger audience may appreciate a gamified system where points, badges, and leaderboards are all it takes to get them to engage. Older crowds might prefer old-fashioned discounts and freebies for repeat purchases.
You can replicate either idea without breaking the bank.
6. Intuit: Weaving brand magic through storytelling
Customers who feel connected to your brand are 76% more likely to choose you over a competitor and may even stick with you after a bad experience, according to data from social media tool Sprout Social.
The power of customer-brand connection
Source: Sprout Social
Intuit, a financial software company, shows one way of creating this connection: powerful storytelling.
Their 2023 advertisement “A Giant Story” goes beyond a simple product pitch and plays on the human desire to help a friend in need. The ad unfolds as a love story – a talented inventor uses her ingenuity to create a helpful robot, empowering her florist friend to expand his small business.
Beyond the heartwarming tale, the ad subtly sells the perks of using Intuit’s software, including automated tax help (shown via a screen in the robot’s arm).
Intuit’s ad goes beyond traditional features and benefits, instead connecting with viewers emotionally. This emotional connection is a key component of a successful branding strategy.
Our Advice: How you can replicate this
The beauty of storytelling is that it doesn’t require a massive budget.
The key lies, again, in understanding your customer. Are you selling to entrepreneurs under the age of 30? Then they might like an ad based on fast-paced, disruptive innovation that challenges the status quo. Dads over the age of 50? Try looking for something nostalgic that harks back to their younger years.
You can work this storytelling into different content formats like fintech ads, social media posts, or even blog articles to build your brand story.
What makes a great financial brand? The takeaway
If you could distill what makes a great financial brand in a bottle and sell it, you’d make millions.
Yet we’ve taken our best shot at it by looking at the top features that the most successful financial brands have in common and laying them out in this article.
Here’s a takeaway summary.
Target the people that will form your long-term customer base
Short-term gimmicks might get you short-term results, but long-lasting loyalty (and thus growth) comes from having one eye on the future.
Building your brand message around the tech savviness and financial goals of young customers paves the way for life-long advocates of your brand.
A striking brand image
First impressions matter. A strong visual identity across your website, app, and social media, including logo, color palette, and fonts, helps you stick in the minds of your target audience.
Build trust through collaboration
Partnerships with other reputable companies are a powerful way to calm people’s fintech fears, but you can also team up with the customers themselves.
Not only are they much more likely to shop with you, but the insights and knowledge that you tap into (at a very low cost) via user-generated content or, as in the case of SumZero, peer-reviewed research is a big differentiating factor.
Offer a great UX (User Experience)
Your app or website is your digital storefront. A smooth, user-friendly brand experience is critical for navigating financial tasks easily.
Boasting seamless navigation, intuitive design, and clear information architecture builds trust and keeps customers coming back for more.
Reward loyalty
Show your customers you appreciate their business!
Loyalty programs that incentivize repeat usage, referrals, or long-term account holding not only reward your best customers but also create brand advocates who spread the word organically.
Compelling brand narrative and emotional connection
Financial services can feel impersonal, but a compelling brand story that resonates with your target audience‘s values adds a human touch to your brand.
Make your financial services branding work with data-driven fintech content marketing
The fintech market may seem like a battlefield, but your brand’s story is your weapon.
Knowing how to brand financial services will help you cut through the noise and reach your target audience, but it’s extremely difficult to achieve this, especially if you don’t have the expertise to craft high-ranking content that resonates with a financially savvy audience.
This is where Mint Position can help. We’re not just a digital marketing agency, but storytellers, strategists, and data analysts who will help your brand message rank, educate and convert.
We do this by following an SEO gameplan that delivers your brand’s message on the back of data-driven insights. Here’s how.
- Dominate search engine results pages (SERPs) and outrank your competitors. Our SEO strategies focus on optimizing every aspect of your online presence to achieve top rankings and drive organic traffic.
- Target the people who matter. Mint Position uses in-depth audience research to craft content that speaks directly to your target customer.
- Build trust through transparency. We craft educational pieces that demystify fintech jargon and clearly explain fees, processes, and complex financial concepts.
- Offer a stellar UX. We use the latest on-page fintech SEO techniques so that visitors can navigate your website easily, stay engaged for longer, and keep coming back for more.
- Create an emotional connection via brand narratives. We’ll add a human touch to your brand that chimes with your audience’s values and aspirations.
Put all this together and you’ll see some of the striking results that Mint Position can deliver for you.
Fintech branding is too important to get wrong. Get in touch with us and we’ll show you how we’ve helped dozens of fintech businesses mold their brand into a vehicle for long-term customer acquisition.
