Design-Driven Transformation in Finance

Meylin Bayryamali at UXDX Community: Mastering Design and Market Dynamics. Video: https://youtu.be/YtZfCMWUe5k

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Wise, and why we took on a rebrand

[00:00:00] Welcome everyone. I'm Meylin, design lead at Wise, currently based in New York, so if you're ever around in New York just hit me up for coffee. I'm always happy to chat to fellow designers. For anyone who hasn't heard of Wise: we're trying to revolutionize the way we manage international money, and we help customers manage their money globally much more easily, at low fees, and with as much transparency as possible.

[00:00:30] Today I will talk a little bit about our rebrand, which we did a year ago. I decided to take this topic because brand is a scary word for a lot of tech companies, and every company I've been with thinks about brand in different ways. I want to unpack today how we thought about it at Wise and what we achieved with it. The focus is really how we took something looking like that to something like this: a little bit more energetic, lively and reflective of our customer needs.

[00:01:09] When we started this rebrand project we set ourselves to solve one of the biggest problems we faced at Wise. When the company began we were all about transfers, hence the name TransferWise, so moving money from A to B. Over time the product evolved. It started with a sending proposition, and customers who like to send obviously like to spend and receive and grow their money, and by 2021 we could see that more of our customers were using us as an account rather than just a transfer tool.

[00:01:48] So TransferWise became Wise. Obvious update, just remove the name Transfer, everything's going to be super clear. But a name change alone can't change perception of the company. It actually created a little bit more confusion. People were like, so you're not transfers anymore, or are you still transfers? For us that meant one big thing: we needed to take a big, scary leap of trust and believe in the power of design and brand to accelerate this transition from TransferWise to Wise in a true form of change.

[00:02:27] And become the Wise account, truly. It's used daily, it's used by millions of customers all over the world. We had become part of our customers' lives, building meaningful relationships. The experience, the design, the brand mattered to our customers more than ever, and especially more than what we had before. Sending money was a once in a while transaction, while moving money and managing your money was every day.

[00:03:01] And we didn't launch this quietly. Many companies go for this soft launch, a hesitant check that everything works, doesn't get too much rarer. But we actually chose to go for a big bang across three platforms in 170 countries, in the hands of 16 million customers. It wasn't easy, but we had faith in our design teams and our new brand system. We knew it would work, and it did.

[00:03:30] I'll talk through three quick points: why we did it, and how did we convince everyone to do it. As I mentioned, I often hear the word rebrand as a dirty word, and it's often perceived as coming at the cost of shipping other valuable products to our customers. For example, why would a team spend on changing the UI of an existing feature if they can ship new features? I'm sure some of you have faced those challenges as part of those conversations.

[00:04:04] But what I wanted to emphasize is that this was never about the brand itself. It was always about our mission as a company. Wise believes in solving customer problems and we believe in a fairer world, and we do things differently. It's not a brand, it's a mission that drives us. When you talk to our customers, they describe Wise as the world's most international account. Wise's ultimate shift from transferring money to managing money has changed how the old banking world works.

[00:04:39] We were seeing this in our data as well. We were seeing a big uptick in our strategic direction and where we wanted to focus. We saw customer bases changing, from once in a while caring about price, speed and transfer, to somewhat more of a relationship, everyday usage.

We said we were different, but we looked the same

[00:05:03] So we were different. But were we, though? Who can spot Wise within seconds in here? Who can spot what we deliberately were standing differently for? We were a disruptive company. Internally we were talking about ourselves like that, our customers and our media were seeing us like that, but why was that not reflected in how we stand out? We had not updated a single component for the last 10 years, even if our product was growing. Blue, blue, blue. We say we are different from banks, but we just look the same.

[00:05:40] Usually when I get to this slide I note that in the category, no one seems to stand out, or lose out, resulting really in a bunch of mediocre brand experiences that look like one another. And we had an average logo as well. In isolation, our name, our logo, was not necessarily standing out either. Our average illustration styles, where you couldn't recognize which one was reflective of the Wise customers versus other banking-experienced customers. Average messaging, checked, we were there.

[00:06:19] Yet when we were doing things, the mission and the people that were building this product believed we were doing it differently. We were never hiding from our customers. We've always been very transparent in how we talk about our fees. We've been encouraging banks to change the way they talk about their fees, and we have nothing to hide, so we decided that we need to show less.

[00:06:42] Our customers also didn't identify Wise as blue, which was really, really interesting. Once we spoke to our customers, green was a word that kept coming, and the old blue was standing out for legacy of our older features at Wise. And we were so much more than transfer now. We were doing more, serving more people, being in more places.

Reflecting our mission rather than rebranding

[00:07:13] We used this momentum to accelerate our mission, not to rebrand but to help our mission and communicate with our customers. Hence why I call it "remiss": reflecting our mission, rather than rebranding.

[00:07:30] So what did we do? It took six weeks to get to concepts. The normal design cycle process, where we did discovery work, shipped our strategy and developed some concepts. The initial concepts were a good start but nowhere near where we wanted to go and what we have today. They had a lot of potential though, and design is always about looking at potential and not perfection. We leaned into our customer perception, they were describing us as green, so we decided to start narrowing down some of the high confidence areas we had for ourselves.

[00:08:09] These are all the ideas where we started from. Let's be honest, they were not nearly as great as they could be. There were a lot of ideas, and we decided to start categorizing them and thinking how we can start investigating some of the potential ideas we really like. One of those is what we call tapestries: distinguishable, playful textures that can be used across multiple services.

[00:08:40] This one looks like jungle, it's not really representative of anything, but there are some details that build out this individual customer experience. For example, this one has the Sydney Opera House. Each tapestry is actually a reference to our customers' movements, because our mission was about international money movement, and everyone's quite unique in how they organize their money. We wanted that reflected in everything we do in our design experiences.

[00:09:13] So we reference borders, photography, colors, iconography, to create a lot of individual patterns that represent different behavior. Unique beings, just like me, just like each one of you on this call. They're all different, just like our product as well, and like all our customers. You can stare at them time and time again and always spot something new. That's what's really exciting about them. A Yorkshire sheep, Japanese lanterns, the Brooklyn Bridge. These tapestries are really a celebration of people, places and culture. It's a true snapshot of everywhere money goes.

[00:09:54] And they work on so many surfaces, which is what's great about them. Tested all over and over again before they go into product. We worked through every detail. As I mentioned, a tapestry, typography, buttons, alerts, critical concepts, everything got its own focus and its own level of detail required. We had concepts, we had billboards, we had ideas down on paper. That's the easy part, in a way, that's the concept thing, but it's quite hard to get from billboards to things looking great in customers' hands. What customers really care about is not a massive billboard of what the company stands for, it's actually experiencing those rebrand elements in the way they interact with our product.

Getting it into the product: the foundational phase

[00:10:44] So how did we make it happen, how did we bring all this into product? It took six weeks to concept and eight months to make this into a reality. The question we asked ourselves is, how do we translate this into product, and how do we take these concepts into something that has been built by 50 product teams measuring single metrics individually, with so much complexity and legacy, and convince them that we have to make those changes to reflect what we stand for?

[00:11:22] We had so many ideas in our Figma files that were ready to be translated into product, so that we can turn it into looking like something like that. The short answer is there's no recipe for awesome work. I don't think I can give any particular tips, as every company culture, as well as work and product, is different. I do however have two phases in which we thought about this. Phase number one we called the foundational phase, and phase number two was more about elevating and deciding where design can spend more time crafting better experiences.

[00:12:06] Phase number one was all about the design system, and using the system to do a lot of the heavy lifting so that it's just a matter of flipping a switch from old blue colorways, inaccessible fonts and outdated illustrations, and creating a world of possibilities for our new tone of voice, illustrations and tapestries to live in customers' hands.

[00:12:30] Bringing our system to the center of attention as a first phase of this project was critical. It was the most important and challenging task we undertook. We had to review each component meticulously, and each piece individually. We used Figma to reskin everything, see how it looks, see how it breaks, before anything goes to engineering. We ensure that we understand the risks and the challenges of every individual piece and component. The way we did that was dividing everything into digestible format, from fla[?] to grammar, icons to typography. Every component got the level of attention it required. We were transparent with what we were working on and where our attention goes.

Phase two: being safe is risky

[00:13:19] We used the design system to give us that foundational approach to changing the experience, and we had to take it further, and that's what I call phase two. Now we had something that worked, but was it enough? I wanted to highlight for this section this quote: being safe is risky. This was said by Seth Godin, a marketing guru, highlighting the paradox at the heart of modern product development.

[00:13:54] There is a lot of chatter about needing to be bold in a lot of companies, and standing out, but inevitably the conversation turns into something less risky and best-practice driven. For instance, the prevalence of minimalist design inspired by tech giants like Apple and Google has led to this sea of indistinguishable websites and apps all looking the same, just like Wise as well. And don't get me wrong, we don't want everything to become exciting. Sometimes a seamless checkout experience or a card review is just fine for what we need. But we would want to find moments in which we can return to the excitement and energy and bring that to the next level.

[00:14:45] This is what we were on the lookout for at Wise. We didn't want to change what worked perfectly, but we started looking at experiences we can elevate. What were the moments in product that we can transform and excite, without actually annoying our customers, without creating extra load and new mental models just for the sake of it? We identified a few impactful surfaces. This is our success screen: the card has been ordered, it's a happy moment, we can go a little bit bolder and bring some joy. Our intro screens: it's the first thing that our customers see when they download our app, and we use that to inspire and give them a glimpse of what they could be getting out of the product.

[00:15:29] We started taking complete screens that look like that, with incredible cross-platform inconsistencies actually, and bespoke patterns everywhere, and transforming them into clear and easy to use experiences. We didn't change any feature set or our offering. It was a mere UI flip from our design system components, and some extra love on top of the screens that mattered, and suddenly we had much clearer and actually more usable experiences for our customers.

[00:16:02] We looked at old, cluttered legacy screens our engineers were hungry for cleaning up. They were full of technical debt. We found so many unnecessary states that just didn't live up to our standards of quality, and iteration upon iteration, to the extent that tiny little problems were not solving the holistic better experience for customers.

[00:16:27] We decided that it's time to simplify. We knew our customer base, so why were we beating around the bush around what content we should show them? We used our rebrand to make our product much, much, much better, easier to use, easier to maintain by our engineers, and set for the scale of our future. That allowed us to go from what you see on the left to the right in just six months, and we kept on improving and improving until things started looking more like the one on the right than what's in the middle. The bespoke patterns were killing us, and our system patterns were not providing the holistic experience out of the box. Again, in this phase we didn't just leave it to the design system, we actually decided to go a step further and make it even better, until things started looking more consistent end to end with minimal effort. All this while teams were continuously working on new features and shipping the work that they needed in their teams.

Pushing the details

[00:17:34] So that we can become truly the world's money, and start looking more like the product that our customers deserve. These are some of the surfaces we identified. We used motion where we could go further, and experimented with anything from details that excite to details that provide clarity and ease of use, such as a faster transaction experience.

[00:18:01] For example, we took what we had with those Doom more[?] cards, mapped them out, looked where we can push: do we want more promotional or functional, put them in situation, such as at the bottom of the page, prototype, test it, looked at it for a few days, and finally made a decision. That's how we took every single element and tried to understand how far we want to push it and where we want to draw it back.

[00:18:29] We experimented with a lot of movement, surfaces in the product that no one was thinking of, like the refresh. We saw an opportunity moment where we can bring a little bit more joy and excitement around refreshing your experience and also experiencing the Wise brand. Every little detail, until we had it pixel perfect in Figma, in our hands, in prototypes, until it goes to engineering and finally gets into our customers' hands.

[00:19:00] So the big question probably is, was it successful? We say yes, because it worked for our customers, and they told us about it. There was a lot of love, and it was beautifully received across the design community too, which can be tough sometimes on different rebrands. So yeah, there is plenty more to come from Wise. Onwards, and thanks.

Q&A

[00:19:32] Rory: Awesome, that was really interesting, kind of looking behind the scenes of particularly, I guess, the iterations that you were going through as well. Thank you for sharing, it was really interesting. If anybody has any questions out there, please do share them and I will put them forward to Meylin. But while we're waiting for people, because it's always kind of jarring, nobody knows when the talk is about to end so they don't have their questions ready, I've got a few that I want to jump in with. One of the challenges — and I'm sure there's plenty of designers out there who are jealous at the kind of rein that you got there to work with, particularly as you were saying at the end where you were going into those moments of delight and the moments of surprise — is that a lot of people are struggling to get any form of budget to try that. Okay, maybe even if it's with a rebrand, it's let's just get the bare minimum in, let's update the colors, refresh it, rather than moving forward. So how did you go about getting such buy-in and such budget behind this fairly large-scale effort?

[00:20:42] Meylin: Yeah, so it's fair to say there is a combination of efforts here, like within our design community at Wise, which is fairly strong and has a lot of talented designers. I think what really picked up momentum was when we shifted our conversation from this is not a change of color, it is actually reflecting our mission, and putting our leadership and the people building the product and the teams into that thinking position: are we really reflecting who our customers are, are we speaking their voice?

[00:21:24] Meylin: Especially, there were anything from big strategic leaps to small efforts that we could be doing. It was time to change our font, for example, it was completely inaccessible in a lot of languages. It was time to change our tone of voice. So we took each element and communicated it very meticulously over week one, week two, so different people had buy-in across different elements they cared about. You would have engineers and a certain type of leadership caring about the accessibility of the font, and some other type of leadership would care more about the strategic leap. But just making sure that you're transparent with your design process and you openly communicate where you see the gaps as a designer, most of the time people are like, yeah, that's so obvious, we should just go and fix that.

[00:22:21] Rory: Yeah, and as you were saying that, I've worked in organizations when they were doing a rebrand, and that is the scary thing for the people signing off. It's like, okay, well, let's just focus on — oh no, wait, now we have to do the font, now we have to do — and it just kind of, the scale keeps increasing. So what did you do to make sure that it didn't become what I've seen in other organizations, where it just becomes almost too large and that slows down all progress of moving forward?

[00:22:47] Meylin: Yeah, we decided what are the big focus areas. My advice is have a game plan always. It's a marathon, not a sprint. If people think they can execute a rebrand in one quarter, I would really like to see that done successfully. It's never one quarter. But also it's important to find what the business cares about at the end of the day. Wise cared about being deliberately different, but that was not reflected, and not every company is ready for a rebrand, I guess, from another standpoint as well.

[00:23:28] Meylin: But definitely we focused on the areas where we could have impact and momentum. For example, we launched one year ago and recently just updated our typography again. These are some of the wins we decided to park for the big launch, and we continue working on them, as we had some adjustments we wanted to make but they were not that necessary for the big launch. So yeah, we just took it as a marathon, and we still continue improving our rebrand. That's absolutely — we're not done. A rebrand never stops.

[00:24:06] Rory: Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting, your collage of all the different blue financial organizations. Was there a pushback? Is there safety in that, that that breeds, like you were saying, with the kind of — people are familiar with certain patterns, so law firms always kind of look the same, and financial firms, they always like to project this image of the old school bank that's got the big vault down in the bottom. So was there any pushback of, will we lose customer trust, will they think we're just a small startup on the internet versus a really established financial institution?

[00:24:53] Meylin: Yeah, that's a great question, for sure. I definitely think more and more customers are accustomed to the internet now, right? Financial products that are not high street banks are dominating the market at the moment, so I wouldn't underestimate the power of customers seeing through those colors and typography, and what was perceived as safe perhaps is not always perceived as the future.

[00:25:27] Meylin: We at Wise, we always did things differently, so we never wanted to actually look like a bank, and behave like one either. I'm not sure why we went for the blue colorway. I'm sure it was a customer that said that we were blue at some point, as Wise is incredibly customer-driven. But again, once customers start describing you as green and not as blue, you have to tune in your ears and start listening to that, and that was the key momentum we caught up on, and it just rolled from there.

[00:26:08] Rory: That's interesting. And do you have any examples where — because I guess there is the risk of going risky that it backfires as well, it's that kind of high-risk, high-reward situation. Do you have any examples during your rebrand where you tried something risky and then realized maybe that was a step too far?

[00:26:32] Meylin: I'm not sure whether it was risky, it was more time-based perhaps, it was not the right time. We have adjacent products like Wise Business and Wise Platform as well, so we've been thinking how we also help differentiate those, but essentially create a bigger brand piece around Wise itself as a company. There was definitely some consideration of how we want to go about the different product offerings. Different companies obviously try to differentiate the brands of the platforms they use as well. We felt that that was probably not the right call at that moment, but we are still keeping it in the books and still thinking through those details. I'd say anything that felt like a challenge or a risk, we decided to deprioritize it and prioritize the high confidence areas, and that's how we kept this momentum going.

[00:27:34] Rory: Nice, nice. So I guess we'll be looking forward to some Wise Business rebranding in the future then.

[00:27:41] Meylin: That's still unsure, but I'm sure some of our customers would love it as well.

[00:27:49] Rory: Yeah. And I guess there's people out there who are in a similar situation to what you described at the start, where all your marketing is saying, oh, we're different, or that kind of thing, but when you look at the design and the assets and all that, you're very much ordinary and in with the rest of the pack. So if there's some designers listening, what advice would you give them, because often it can feel like, I don't have the power to influence or the power to control this situation. Do you have any advice that you could give to people in that situation?

[00:28:25] Meylin: Yeah, I think there's two things. Again, I would repeat myself, but it is important to communicate the business value of this change, which is essentially reflecting a mission. It's not a rebrand for changing skin, like UI skin and aesthetics. The mistake I've seen, and I've certainly done it in my past, is talk about rebrand as this big word, and a lot of people in leadership and the tech world don't really understand it. As designers we get it, but you also need to shift your language and just explain it to them in what it is they care about. At Wise we cared about reflecting who we are with the new features we were offering, and that is the talk. Other companies perhaps care about growth, retention, whatever the metric is. Just find what the business cares about and go from there.

[00:29:28] Meylin: And the second thing is experiment as much as possible in Figma. Show the possibilities, inspire. Figma is, for us, pushing pixels is much cheaper than just bringing stuff into engineering. Once a concept goes into engineering it's impossible to revert back or change your mind. You can always use the power of design to communicate your ideas, show what it could look like, and I'm sure if there is momentum within the company that you could feel it, and there will be support.

[00:30:02] Rory: Excellent. Well, that actually brings us to time, so thank you once again, Meylin, for sharing that story of the Wise rebrand. I found it really interesting, I hope everybody out there did as well.

[00:30:10] Meylin: Thanks, Rory.