At Interpolitan Money we have had another successful year and we are look forward to closing the year on a high! One of the more visible and significant projects we have delivered from a marketing perspective in this period has been our rebrand, which we launched in April 2022.
We kicked off the process in October 2021, when it was decided the project was to be a full rebrand, creating a new visual, rather than just a refresh of certain design elements.
The brief was to bring to life the Interpolitan brand narrative, positioning and creative alignment with customer feedback and the ever-changing ecosystem we operate in. The aim was to cut through the noise in the financial services space, which has exploded globally with various Fintech companies.
The world is rapidly evolving and what our customers need and want are changing along with their ever-growing international footprint. Our brand needs to represent a focus on delivering a great international service and a quality product by delivering our "Why".
In this article:
Why Interpolitan
The idea behind Interpolitan was born from the recurring problems our clients were having with access to global banking and local accounts.
These operational and commercial changes to the business were also central to the rebranding project brief while addressing our growth aspirations as Interpolitan.
This presented a great opportunity and timing to combine the natural development and evolution of Interpolitan and our vision and mission.
Our service and products are filling voids left by traditional banks where we are seeing clients with an ever-increasing requirement for global accounts without barriers. We deal with more and more complex corporate structures and companies with international aspirations, that want to operate and transact like a local, anywhere in the world, but have issue with banking.
Banking applications are taking longer, requiring larger portfolios and moving further away from non-residential elements. The Interpolitan "Why" became paramount to our brand brief.
First impression of a brand
People quickly form an impression of a company or its products from the name. It's usually the first part of a brand they will encounter. Numerous reports and research suggest you have anything from 0.05 seconds to 7 seconds for someone to form an opinion of your company name and brand.
Our name Interpolitan derives from the amalgamation of the words “International” and “Cosmopolitan”. The very DNA of our clients. Therefore, Interpolitan by definition means “between cities”.
We wanted to bring the brand name to life, so we identify our brand drivers and developed the narrative that the rebrand needed to deliver, giving us the opportunity to build our story, tell it to customers, deliver an experience and evoke feelings to make Interpolitan unique. A brand isn’t built overnight, it takes time, therefore we identified 3 objectives in our brief:
Authenticity, we’re in the age of authenticity. Consumers want brands they can trust and be honest with. Being authentic in the way we present ourselves and how we carry out our business.
Trust, consumers do business based on trust. Building trust is building awareness and gaining attention. Authenticity and trust together build a trust-based relationship, a key catalysis in driving word of mouth and the referral new business. In our industry, we effectively trade in the confidence to “deliver”.
Quality. As discussed earlier, visually we needed the brand to land instantly, having a signature colour palette to increase recognition to reflect a quality assurance of our brand, to a global audience.
Alongside our 3 core objectives, we also briefed on 5 key elements that needed addressing:
Our global client base
Our professional services partners
Our office locations in London, Dubai and Mumbai
Our international expansion roadmap
Our product development roadmap
The rebranding
"Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room."
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon
After several workshop sessions and some concept testing, we evaluated, who we are, what we believe, our audience data, our culture and what we stand for. Overlapping our Context, Culture and Company, gave us our Opportunity, which we identified as: The Space Between.
The Space Between Cities
The Space Between Countries
The Space Between People
This is a great segway to introduce our Vision:
To connect a global community through our alternative banking solutions.
And our Mission:
To be the space between countries and cities, businesses and people, empowering financial ambitions with our unique services.
With our vision, mission and brand drivers in place, we took delivery of our new logo, icon, and initial brand palette in early 2022.
Our new sleeker icon represents the idea of “connectivity”, “global” and the “world”, to sit with a refined elegant logo-type font. The new logo encompasses everything that we wanted to communicate and what we’re about as a company.
We had reached the phase of identifying a new visual representation with our imagery, design, and photography to supplement our new brand palette. After our initial research, with our new Head of Design, we landed on introducing our brand animal totem the Peacock, a symbol of our identity and values.
We needed an element of texture, elegance, and colour to complement our darker tones, a conscious decision considering the many overly white and generic iconography based fintech sites.
The peacock is the national bird of India, one of our many core markets and its symbolic of re-growth, rejuvenation, respect, honour, and integrity. Many traits aligned closely with our values.
We have since introduced our own brand Peacock Principals to underpin our core company values:
Brand Peacock Principal values:
Vision | Growth | Resilience | Pride | Teamwork
Our Company values:
Inspirational - and insightful
Integrity - at the core
Interactive - strategy, services & solutions
Infinite - vision for future growth
Innovative - entrepreneurial mindset
Informative - for our clients, partners & employees
We see our brand values as an internal guide when working on the brand strategy. We believe it gives some depth and context to what we are building. A solid and unique identity can help a brand gain international renown and acceptance.
The use of the peacock has been introduced lightly and is instantly recognisable, complementing our brand palette.
The brand launch
We launched our rebrand in April 2022 alongside our CMS migration, a project we completed in under 3-months to support the rebrand. We also had an unusually hard stop target date to aim for, which was the start of the English cricket season due to our new sponsorship with Surrey Country Cricket Club and The Kia Oval. A sponsorship that culminated in the Surrey Men’s team winning the LV= Insurance County Championship, 2022.
April 2022 was also a significant month for Interpolitan as it also coincided with our first anniversary trading as Interpolitan Money. The stars were aligning.
Now, seven months post-launch of the brand, we’ve had some great feedback from clients, especially new clients who have specifically recalled our navy and gold branding at events like Global Fintech Festival and our signage at The Kia Oval.
As a business and as a marketing team there is something rewarding when a client takes a moment to stop and reference their approval of the brand unsolicited.
However, as most will know the launching of a new brand, a rebrand or even a refresh is only just the beginning of an almost daily iterative process of evolving the brand and becoming a brand guardian. This role may sit and be managed by the marketing team, but it’s also the responsibility of each employee.
Brand consistency is imperative, research suggests it can have as much as a 33%* increase in revenue. Traditional banks are notorious for consistency with their branding and collateral while introducing layers of localisations. Think of your favourite international brands or the latest fintech “unicorns”, brand consistency has been front and centre throughout their growth.
Brand vs Marketing
They say everyone is a marketer and I believe that Sales is a part of marketing, a view often not held at other organisations. To put it simply it’s our every day-to-day interaction with clients, partners, suppliers, candidates, and stakeholders. Front Office to Back Office we all play our part in delivering the brand.
Further to this, marketing peers often debate what is brand and what is marketing. I see it as a balancing of long and short-term objectives for sustained success and growth.
As Marketing Week columnist, Mark Ritson suggests, “the theory of long and short is one of the most important for all marketing leaders. The “short” in this scenario is performance marketing, which produces an immediate impact caused by a specific investment. The “long” is brand building, which tends to be slower moving but is key for solid gradual growth”.
Considering both our long and short-term objectives and the stage we are at in our lifecycle at Interpolitan, we are creating a brand aimed at addressing an audience to communicate the “The unknown, unknown”.
Things “we” understand but are not aware of. (Interpolitan’s solutions).
Things “we” are neither aware of nor understand. (Alternative Banking solutions + Interpolitan’s solutions)
We are on our journey to deliver an alternative banking solution to an international audience. An audience who have varying levels of understanding and needs in Cross Border Transactions | Global Business Expansion | Cross Border Investments | Global Funds Formation, Setup & Administration | Global Investment Solutions | Family Office Structures | Offshore Banking | Cross-Border Escrow | Asset Manager/Fund Manager solutions | Custodian Services | Offshore Asset Securitisations - Bonds/SPVs | Company Setups and formation | Corporate Services Providers | International Directors/Agents solutions | Trusts Setup & Trustee Services and the list goes on.
Our clients have access to multiple markets allowing them to transact globally on a platform built with ubiquity at heart. Transacting like a local allows ambition for growth and international investment.
By building our awareness and delivering our why, we aim to shape a new era of finance, connecting people globally to achieve their financial goals.
We’re proud of the new branding, but the proof will be with our new client interactions.
If this is your first visit, welcome to Interpolitan. If you haven’t already, check us out for further information on our service and solutions.
A truly global alternative banking solution
At Interpolitan we offer a comprehensive alternative banking solution, utilising cutting-edge technology to handle multi-currency accounts from beginning to end, allowing our clients to pay, collect and hold funds in 55+ currencies from 160+ countries.
Accelerate your international growth with named local accounts, and virtual IBANS and access our FX risk management solutions.
Client funds are held in designated, safeguarded bank accounts, with our tier 1 banking partners.
We aim to open client accounts within 7- 10 working days.
Connect and watch this space for more news and updates from Interpolitan.
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(*Lucidpress, 2019).
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