Launching a bank in the U.S. involves layers of super complex compliance, legal requirements, and auditing. For Nubank, a Brazilian-based digital bank that launched in the U.S. last month under the name Nu, the branding was actually the hardest part.
Building a customer support team or launching a platform for credit cards “are clear, more objective things that we need to do,” cofounder Cristina Junqueira tells Fast Company. “The brand is, in my opinion, the hardest thing that we need to do because there’s no playbook.”
Founded in 2013 with a purple outline logo of mirrored shapes in the form of the letters for nu, Nubank’s customer base grew in just over a decade to more than half of all Brazilian adults. It now has more than 140 million customers in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. Its only major brand refresh came in 2021, when it color-filled the logomark in purple. Now as the company looks ahead to greater international expansion, it wants to modernize its visual brand.
That’s because over time, Nu’s brand attributes were becoming category attributes, according to Junqueira. Its brand color alone is something of an industry standard color, says Arthur Foliard, NYC executive creative director at the creative agency Koto that designed the new visual identity. “Purple is everywhere in fintech,” Foliard says. “You see it more and more.”
So, the bank decided to keep but refine the industry-defining color, and introduced a new secondary color palette that works alongside the new purple. To better distinguish themselves in the market, they evolved other brand elements instead.
A new proprietary typeface called Nu Sans was designed to look friendly and work both as a big, expressive headline font but legible at smaller sizes too, like on an app. Meanwhile, illustrations were designed to look whimsical and optimistic, like one of a figure walking on a path shown on the front of the bank’s welcome kit. The kit, which includes metal credit and debit cards, opens with a magnetic closure and comes with stickers. Motion graphics for assets like kinetic typography and app UX have a sense of bounce and personality.
“It feels fun, it feels colorful, it feels exciting, and maybe that’s where the Brazilian vibe comes from,” Foliard says. They purposefully didn’t try to Americanize the brand at all, and in fact wanted it to look global.
Nubank launched in the U.S. in September through a partner bank model with the Kansas City-based Lead Bank. The bank reached a naming rights deal for Inter Miami’s stadium earlier this year and it’s the official retail bank of the Mercedes F1 team, but Junqueira, the co-founder, says that’s not even their biggest marketing investment.
“Our biggest marketing investments are our product and our customer support. Period,” Junqueira, the co-founder, says. “Because no good marketing can fix a bad product.”
She says the bank believes a company’s brand should be the external face of its internal culture, and that their number one company value is for customers to love them fanatically. With their new rebrand, Nu hopes they’ve built something that earns their customers’ love.