Changing how your financial services brand looks is relatively easy. Changing what people think about it is where the real work begins.
Financial services is changing fast. Established banks and building societies are competing with digital-first challengers, customer expectations are being shaped by experiences far beyond the sector, and new technology is transforming how products are delivered. Trust, relevance and differentiation have never been more important.
For many organisations, that creates a brand challenge: the business may have evolved, but the brand hasn’t evolved with it.
Perhaps customer perceptions no longer reflect the organisation you’ve become. Maybe you’re struggling to engage a younger or different audience. Your proposition could be difficult to distinguish from competitors. Or the business might simply have reached a point where its existing brand can no longer support its ambitions for growth.
That’s when financial services brand repositioning can become a powerful commercial tool. But repositioning isn’t about changing a logo, introducing a new colour palette or finding a different strapline. Done properly, financial services brand work starts much deeper: understanding where you are today, determining where you need to be tomorrow and creating a brand capable of closing the gap.
At Mobas, we use strategic brand thinking to help financial services organisations build stronger, more relevant and more distinctive brands.
While every organisation is different, effective financial services brand repositioning can be considered through five fundamental stages.
Stage one: Discover – understand where your brand really is
Before deciding where your brand needs to go, you need an honest understanding of where it is today. That means looking beyond what the leadership team or marketing department thinks. Effective financial services brand work starts with evidence.
Ask what customers really think about you and why they choose you, or somebody else. Understand what employees believe the organisation stands for, how competitors are positioning themselves and where the genuine opportunities in the market lie. Crucially, identify any gap between the organisation you believe you are and the organisation your audiences actually experience.
Research might include:
- Customer interviews
- Stakeholder workshops
- Employee engagement
- Competitor analysis
- Quantitative research
- Customer data
- A detailed review of the existing customer journey
The objective isn’t to validate what you already believe; it’s to uncover the truth. Successful brand repositioning in financial services needs to be rooted in genuine audience and commercial insight rather than internal assumption.
And there’s an important distinction here. Repositioning a brand is fundamentally different from simply updating its visual identity. As we’ve explored previously in why the BBC ‘rebrand’ isn’t a rebrand, changing a logo, typeface or visual system doesn’t necessarily change the underlying organisation or people’s perception of it.
A genuine rebrand goes much deeper.
Stage two: Define – decide what you want to stand for
Once you understand where the brand is today, you can start defining where it needs to go.
This is the strategic heart of financial services brand repositioning.
What role should the organisation play in people’s lives?
What makes it meaningfully different?
Why should customers choose it?
What does it believe?
What promise can it credibly make?
And how does the brand support the organisation’s long-term commercial strategy?
The answers should inform a clear brand proposition and the strategic foundations beneath it: purpose, positioning, values, personality, audience proposition and messaging.
But differentiation is critical.
Financial services is a category filled with similar language.
Trust, security, expertise, service, people and heritage are all important qualities. But if every competitor is saying essentially the same thing, they aren’t necessarily reasons to choose one organisation over another.
Good brand strategy for financial services finds the space an organisation can genuinely own.
This isn’t difference for difference’s sake. It’s relevant difference: something meaningful to customers, credible for the organisation and difficult for competitors to replicate. That’s where positioning begins to become powerful.
Stage three: Create – turn strategy into a distinctive brand
Only now should creative development really begin.
This is where strategy becomes tangible.
The visual identity. Tone of voice. Messaging. Creative platform. Photography. Typography. Motion. Digital experience. Campaign language.
Every element should help communicate the positioning established during the strategic phase.
The question isn’t:
“What should our new brand look like?”
It’s:
“What do we need people to think, feel and remember about us – and how can creativity make that happen?”
That’s a fundamentally different brief.
For financial services brands in particular, distinctiveness matters.
There’s often a gravitational pull towards category convention: familiar colours, familiar photography, familiar language and familiar claims.
Some of those conventions exist for good reason. Financial services brands need to communicate trust and credibility.
But trust and sameness aren’t the same thing.
A strong financial services branding programme can maintain reassurance and credibility while creating a much more distinctive and memorable presence.
The best creative expression doesn’t decorate the strategy.
It makes the strategy impossible to miss.
Stage four: Activate – make the brand real everywhere
A new brand isn’t launched when the new website goes live.
It’s launched every time somebody experiences it.
That experience spans advertising and social media, branches and websites, apps and emails, customer service and product literature, intermediary communications, recruitment and internal communications – even the way somebody answers the telephone.
For a financial services brand transformation to succeed, the positioning has to move beyond the marketing department and into the wider organisation.
That makes internal engagement particularly important.
Employees need to understand what the new brand means, why the organisation is changing and what that change means for their role.
Because your people don’t simply deliver the brand.
They are part of the brand experience.
This is also where governance matters. In regulated financial services environments, marketing, product, customer experience, compliance and leadership teams all need to understand how the brand should be applied.
The goal is consistency without creating rigidity.
A strong brand framework gives people enough structure to protect the brand and enough freedom to make it live.
Stage five: Develop – measure, learn and keep moving
A successful repositioning isn’t the end of the journey. It’s the beginning of the next one.
Once a repositioned financial services brand enters the market, organisations need to understand whether it’s actually changing the things it was designed to change.
That means asking whether:
- Perceptions are shifting
- Awareness and consideration are increasing
- The right audiences are engaging
- Acquisition patterns are changing
- Employees are more engaged
Ultimately, the question is whether the brand is contributing to commercial growth.
The measures will differ depending on the original objectives, but measurement should be considered at the beginning of the financial services brand work, not added after launch.
Brand isn’t static. Markets, competitors, customers and technology all change. The strongest financial services brands continue to listen, learn and evolve without constantly reinventing themselves.
That’s how a repositioning becomes a platform for long-term growth rather than a one-off marketing project.
Brand repositioning isn’t a marketing exercise
Perhaps the biggest mistake organisations make is thinking a rebrand belongs to marketing. It doesn’t.
A meaningful financial services brand repositioning can influence customer experience, culture, product development, recruitment, digital transformation, communications and ultimately the strategic direction of the organisation.
We’ve seen that first-hand.
Mobas has more than 20 years’ experience working with banks, building societies, insurers, wealth management providers and other financial organisations. Our financial services brand and marketing work has helped organisations reposition themselves, reach new audiences and use brand as a catalyst for wider business transformation.
That’s why our approach to brand strategy starts with the organisation and its audiences rather than its logo.
Because the question isn’t simply:
“What should our brand become?”
The bigger question is:
“What does our organisation want to become – and how can the brand help us get there?”
Answer that properly, and financial services brand work becomes far more than a new identity.
It becomes an engine for change.
Is your financial services brand ready for what’s next?
If your organisation has changed but your brand hasn’t, or your existing positioning is no longer supporting your ambitions, it may be time to look at what needs to change.
Mobas combines research and insight, strategy, brand development, creative and digital expertise to help ambitious financial services organisations build brands capable of driving long-term growth.
From understanding existing perceptions to defining the proposition, creating the brand and activating it across the organisation, we bring strategy and creativity together to create meaningful transformation.
Discover how Mobas helps financial services brands reposition, transform and unlock growth.
