Exploring the Finix Redesign

Finix is an ambitious company with a clear mission: create the most accessible financial services ecosystem in history, starting with payments. In pursuit of this mission, we've developed an award-winning and highly reliable (99.999% uptime) payments platform that moves billions of dollars a year! At the core of our mission are the 12,000+ gyms, field service providers, restaurants, schools, places of worship, etc that rely on our payments infrastructure each day. We've done a good job of ensuring our product represents our mission and values, but until recently, our brand lacked the humanity, ambition, and innovation the rest of Finix conveys.

So, in late 2021 we embarked on our rebrand journey. By May 2022, we introduced our reenvisioned brand identity to the world. This blog explains the methodology behind our redesign decisions and how they represent Finix's overall mission and core values.

When you hear from multiple business prospects and career candidates that, even after visiting your website, they have no idea what your company does, it’s time to reevaluate your brand and messaging strategy.

That’s exactly what happened at Finix.

We were so focused on building our technology that we unintentionally neglected our brand identity. By early 2021, we could no longer ignore the issue. It was time to admit we had a messaging problem—and to do something about it.

Our first shot at fixing our messaging was to introduce a new tagline for our homepage along with revised website copy to better convey our products. But after doing some research and finding that 94% of people leave a website with poor graphic design, and that a cohesive brand identity can raise sales by as much as 33%, we knew we couldn’t stop there. We needed a full-scale redesign of the entire Finix brand.

Ask any Finixian what’s the most exciting thing about building Finix, and they’ll tell you it’s that the more problems we solve, the more problems we get to solve. Rebranding our company fit this philosophy perfectly.

With our Senior Brand Designer Kyle Light leading the charge, we began the process, starting with internal conversations on what our team felt was the best direction for Finix. It was easy to come to a consensus. We all felt we needed a bolder, more ambitious image that wasn’t like any other payments company out there. We also felt we needed to make our brand more human to reflect our customer-first approach to our products.

Considerations

To keep us from going too deep down the design rabbit hole (because it’s really easy to get lost in there), we set some ground rules for what any element of the rebrand should include or represent. To ensure everything was cohesive with our branding mission it had to:

• Align with our product and company messaging

• Distinguish the Finix brand from the competition

• Have a visual identity that matched our technological ambitions

• Convey a sense of movement and progression

• Allow for brand extension

• Be simple, yet sophisticated

• Be inclusive and reflect diversity

After agreeing upon the tone of our visual identity, we set to work on conceptualizing a new logomark and logotype. Starting with the logo was important as it would serve as the foundation for all other graphic elements across Finix channels. The biggest design consideration was to create a sense of simplicity, fluidity, and movement with each.

Each logomark and logotype variation was purposefully designed in black and white first to ensure they were judged neutrally and not by a color, which tends to evoke strong emotions.

We also built a Logo Construction Set for Finix, which was inspired by Apple’s original calculator app design story. This allowed the logo creation to be collaborative and made it easy to see how each logo variation looked in different color and font combinations. Our construction kit proved instrumental in choosing the final design and color combinations.

To achieve brand extension we settled on working with two primary shapes for simplicity and consistency: a circle and a stadium (like a Tic tac). What was particularly alluring to us about our shape selection was that they resembled code (lines and dots). As coding and building tech is a core part of what we do at Finix, the circle and stadium was fully embraced across the board.

These shapes are highly flexible and can be used in a variety of ways, such as framing images and unique design opportunities like creating repetition through texture and puzzle pieces through illustrations. A cool example of this is how we were able to fuse both of our primary logo shapes together to form a unique brand pattern.

To achieve a sense of movement in our logomark, we decided to tilt it at a 45-degree angle. This worked so well that we used this same angle as a staple in other Finix designs as well, as it depicts progress and motion.

We also wanted our logotype to convey movement and align with our logomark requirements. We explored a library of fonts with lowercase and uppercase versions. We were specifically looking at the shapes of letters and how they flowed with one another. We didn’t find anything that quite fit our vision, so we ended up designing our own custom typeface to best pair with the logomark.

Our logomark and logotype exploration yielded 100 unique logos, 37 logotype variations, and 20 possible treatments to choose from. This gave us a total of 3,700 unique logo combinations and 74,000 unique brand combinations.

Ultimately, we chose the logo we did because it was the perfect representation of Finix as a brand. It was also the logo that the entire team fell in love with as it best matched our company culture and spoke to our core values—particularly “eagerness to evolve” and “always hungry & hustling”—which just so happens to align with our movement/progress theme.

Color selection is a critical component of the brand process. As much as 85% of consumers claim color influences their decision to buy a product or service and it’s been found to increase brand recognition by 80%. But choosing new colors for our brand identity also gave us another opportunity to stand out from our competitors and promote the desired feeling we wanted people to experience when interacting with Finix.

Deciding on a palette was challenging at first because all the popular primary colors were already being used by other payments companies. This led us to do a deeper exploration of the color wheel and color psychology.

Our goal was to create a unique palette that allowed us to pair multiple colors together. We wanted Finix to use color in braver and larger ways to evoke different emotions, but didn’t want our brand to look intimidating. We also wanted a modern, clean look without overusing white space.

We needed to make sure our color selections worked well for print and digital assets. To get the best results for digital assets, we collaborated with website design agency Haus, who we commissioned to build our new website (more on that later).

Finix color palette result

After a lot of internal discussion, tinkering, and collaboration in the Finix logo construction kit, we decided that our primary color palette would consist of white, midnight blue, and yellow.

Primary colors

This palette is 100% unique to Finix and allows us to evoke a sense of timelessness and modernity (white), stability and trust (midnight blue), and optimism and creativity (yellow). The key to making this palette work was to put constraints on the color yellow. This way, yellow would make the Finix brand easily recognizable and memorable without being overwhelming.

Secondary colors

Before our redesign, our colors and brand image were very masculine and cold. As inclusivity is extremely important to our company, we wanted our brand identity to reflect this. We also didn’t want to limit ourselves to three colors, so we created a secondary color palette to complement our primary one.

We decided on soft, pastel colors as they helped give Finix a more welcoming and fun, yet neutral feel, while also expanding our design options. As seen below, one of our secondary colors is pink—definitely not a common color in the fintech world (especially in B2B products)!

The inspiration behind this color choice came from our co-founder and CEO Richie Serna, who was inspired by a gorgeous Hawaiian sunset he once photographed there. In fact, our entire rebrand consisted of a combination of personal and professional considerations across the company—making the redesign a true team effort and representation of the people driving Finix forward.

Once we had our logomark, logotype, and initial color palettes nailed down, we started focusing on redesigning our website and implementing our new branding into it. To do this, we collaborated with Haus, an external website design agency. Working with Haus proved to be remarkably beneficial as they helped us take our rebranding elements to an even higher level. In fact, the contributions Haus added to our rebranding efforts have since led to a near-infinite amount of design possibilities.

First, we collaborated with them on our secondary color palette to ensure our colors were digital-friendly. What we didn’t expect was how much more this would expand our design opportunities—and has since inspired artwork creation across digital and print channels.

When it came to the actual website design, Kyle provided the design “ingredients” and stipulations (movement and simple shapes). Haus took those ingredients and added some spice to the recipe.

This is where things really got exciting.

Previously, our website was completely static. Haus introduced animations through UI elements and illustrations that breathed new life into the Finix brand. Now when scrolling our website, there’s subtle and strategic movement that utilizes shapes, images, and text. Essentially, Haus created a visual version of our new tagline “move money, make money”—as you scroll through the website the ‘moves’ you take ‘make’ the site respond in different ways.

Illustration and design expansion

It was also important to us not to be limited to creating digital assets. Our old brand identity didn’t afford a lot of options to get creative and didn’t show well in print. To be honest, this was really giving us a case of FOMO!

With our new branding, we’ve been able to promote Finix in so many new and exciting ways—from branded swag to direct mailers to signage and more—the sky is the limit. Needless to say, Kyle (our senior brand designer) has been like a kid in a candy store!

When doing a large-scale rebrand like this, it’s always interesting to see how users respond. We have anecdotal evidence that our new brand has been well-received, as many of our customers have asked us who we worked with to design it. Job candidates have even told us that our branding pushed them toward applying. Our investors and partners have also commented on how impressed they are with the transformation.

But the data is even more telling...

In the 7 months since the website launch we’ve seen:

• Users spend about 16% more time on our homepage

• Our bounce rate across the site decrease by 13%

• Our average pages per session increase by 22%

• Our lead conversion rate increase by 76% from all traffic channels, with our conversion rate from organic traffic increasing by 197%

• Our average session duration from all channels combined is 115% higher than industry benchmarks*, an increase of 44% from pre-rebrand

• Our average session duration from organic search alone is 232% higher than industry benchmarks*, an increase of 23% from pre-rebrand

• The number of new users that we attract from social channels (Twitter and Linkedin in our case) is 145% higher than industry benchmarks*, an increase of 258.57% from pre-rebrand

From these statistics, we can see that users enjoy the new brand and website more than before. Our website visitors hang around longer, having an easier time finding the information they seek, and we’re gaining more traction on social media. Better yet, people are more interested in discussing our products and mission.

*We are benchmarking against businesses in the Business Finance category tracked by Google

As mentioned earlier, one of our company values is “eagerness to evolve.” Once we began the rebranding process, it became clear to everyone how much of a difference design can make when it comes to building trust, personal connections, and attracting customers to our company. It was exciting and rejuvenating for the entire team to see the look of our company evolve and become more alive.

Since the rebrand and website redesign, we’ve produced some incredible “Finix art.” We’ve ventured into direct mailing programs and printed brochures, signage and wall art for our San Francisco headquarters, blog images and diagrams, swag, sales/marketing collateral, event displays, and so much more.

To view the entire collection of Finix branding and get a full sense of what we’ve been up to visually, visit our Behance page.