“We’ve been inventing new possibilities in finance for over 12 years, it was time to reinvent ourselves”: Plaid’s Heads of Creative and Design break down the firm’s recent rebrand

Plaid started out with a much narrower product suite and value proposition than they have today. The firm’s growth and maturity had made a brand update necessary – but rebrands are risky, difficult to execute, and easy to get wrong. But with a controlled scope, and a clear execution strategy rebrands can help brands reestablish their identities and drive even deeper brand recognition. With its recent rebrand this is what Plaid has aimed to achieve. 

In today’s story we will discuss Plaid’s new look, the execution plan for its rebrand, and how it is measuring the success of its new efforts. 

Setting goals

Plaid’s technological capabilities, products, and customers have changed dramatically over the years. With its recent rebrand, the firm wanted to signal how its products had grown from just being an account-linking solution to a “data network” according to Plaid’s Heather Mounsey, Head of Creative and Christope Tauziet, Head of Design, who also added further that the new brand needed to communicate Plaid’s work with all kinds businesses, not just fintechs.

Additionally, the brand also wanted to earn trust both up-market and with consumers. Its new identity needed to connect the firm with B2B and B2C customers. 

The design remit

Design identities can go in many different directions. For example, Apple’s brand has always relied on minimalism, while brands like Klarna borrow heavily from maximalism by building bold, colorful, and edgy styles that lend a distinctive personality to the brand.

While the Plaid rebrand is extensive, it’s not an attempt to hollow out all of its assets and build anew. The firm’s rebranding efforts are more of a deep update of the brand’s visuals with a flourish of playfulness. 

Here is how Plaid leverage paper money, a spectrum of colors and historical figures to build out its new look: 

It’s all about color: Financial brands generally stay away from heavy use of color – most never go beyond blue. But the most recognizable brands in the financial industry today are standing out by using color more heavily in their brand identities.  

Plaid’s new identity borrows heavily from the design techniques used in paper money and is reminiscent of a rainbow. Guilloche patterns — detailed engravings with curves and spirals – were first introduced to help reduce the printing of counterfeit money, and the new brand identity borrows from this history as well as the colors seen in the holographic strips in paper money.

Plaid’s new palette utilizes a broad range of colors with a soft but eye-catching green at its helm.

“Mint is our hero color in the palette. It symbolizes the blending of traditional finance (green) with technological opportunity (blue). The vibrancy of our palette signals innovation, while the spectrum itself is adaptable and ever-changing—just like our network and industry,” said Mounsey and Tauziet. 

The colors in Plaid’s palette also have names like Piggy Bank for a vibrant pink and Gold Standard for a sun-like yellow. “Giving our colors names like Piggy Bank and Credit Lime are additional ways we sought to strengthen our ties to finance while showing our unique personality,” said Mounsey and Tauziet. 

Drawing (upon) the greats: Perhaps the most engaging and new part of the rebrand are the illustrations of Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. Both personalities feature heavily in paper money, but Plaid has put a fun twist to these personalities, portraying Franklin holding a peace sign and a smart phone, and Lincoln smirking at a laptop while nursing an energy drink. 

Made by hand and wood cut, these illustrations are an excellent example of how art can bridge two time periods and tell a story of movement and progress, while also anchoring consumers in values like legacy and trust. It’s these kinds of flourishes that really set fintech brands apart from traditional financial institutions.

What didn’t change: One important decision of the Plaid rebrand concerns the firm’s logo. While the firm made changes to most visual touchpoints, the logo stayed the same. 

Plaid’s logo is an important part of its genesis story because the first algorithms its founders created roughly resembled a plaid pattern when drawn out on a whiteboard. 

“With 1 in 2 banked Americans having used Plaid, the most recognizable aspect of our brand today is our logo. The trust and security that symbol represents was something we decided to preserve and take with us into the future. Now, we’re placing even more equity in the symbol itself, which still resonates deeply with loyal customers, users, and institutions across the Plaid Network,” said Mounsey and Tauziet. 

The execution

A firm can build the best design assets, but it’s the implementation stage that can make or break the rebranding process and efforts. 

Having a close collaboration process with Plaid’s leaders, as well as carefully planning out the rebrand roll out stage contributed to making the execution stage successful:

Getting executive buy-in: “The strength of our new brand comes from its foundation in strategy and our close partnership with our CEO, Zach Perret, and President, Jen Taylor, through every step of its creation. They weren’t stakeholders to be presented to; they were part of the core project team, collaborating closely with our internal brand and product design teams on a weekly basis,” said Mounsey and Tauziet.  

Technological lift : Plaid started working on its rebrand in Q1 of 2024. The turnaround time is relatively short for such an extensive change, especially given the many customers, businesses, financial institutions that the firm touches. 

“While finalizing the brand system’s core assets, we also performed extensive content audits of our digital and physical collateral to gauge the lift required to “flip” our brand surfaces and made prioritized plans for creation and dedicating the necessary internal resources to make launch a success on an accelerated timeline,” said Mounsey and Tauziet, adding further that teams across all time zones were made to prioritize the rebranding efforts with the executives, diverting resources when necessary. 

The team also expects to put this design to work in the real world, featuring it in the firm’s tradeshow appearances and in Plaid’s annual customer conference, Effects. 

Measuring success

To ensure that the rebrand achieves its goals, the firm is monitoring marketing-related KPIs across its digital footprint and campaigns. But the firm also plans on tracking employer brand metrics like applicant volumes and employee engagement data points, as well as “qualitative and qualitative data from our in-person experiences, selling journey, and direct customer feedback. And of course, we’ll be performing regular brand health studies to keep the pulse on brand perception shifts and brand awareness lift,” said Mounsey and Tauziet. 

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