In 2017 the New Payment System Operator was formed to create the UK’s leading retail payments authority, delivering best in class infrastructure and standards for the benefit of people everywhere.
Every day, individuals and businesses use their services to get their salaries, pay their bills and make online and mobile banking payments. They move more than £6.7 trillion every year, through Bacs Direct Credit, Direct Debit, Faster Payments, cheques and Paym.
Our task at SomeOne was to bring all these services together under a new master brand for the first time, helping the organisation deliver the New Payments Architecture; a modern, central payments infrastructure for the next generation and the biggest change for payments in the UK since the 1960’s.
The feedback we got from stakeholder research was that a new name had to be ‘short and snappy’, and ‘literally describe what we do’.
With this in mind we renamed the organisation Pay.UK in recognition of its essential national service and digital future.
The future of payments in the UK is in their hands and they needed a name and an identity that reflected their core purpose – to enable a vibrant UK economy by providing an open, resilient and competitive payments infrastructure.
The identity itself had not only to be solid and simple, but also be contemporary enough to attract new fintechs entering the UK market.
We wanted to get across the idea that Pay.UK was constantly ‘in motion’ and not rigid as an institution.
So, to go with the new name we created a continuously moving brand mark, representing the organisation’s ‘gears in motion’ and desire to be the ‘beating heart’ of UK payments.
When seen statically, the mark should never be the same, reflecting the unique payment patterns of every UK individual.
For this to be truly dynamic, the digital team at SomeOne developed a Generative Logo Creator – an application where anyone could create their own version of the Pay.UK symbol.
We were proud to be one of the first successful applications for the EU’s new Motion Trademark (introduced in October 2017), a reform aimed at facilitating the registration of non-traditional trademarks such as sound, colour, pattern, motion, multimedia and hologram marks.
The word mark and brand’s typography all use Source Sans, Adobe’s first open source typeface family, primarily designed for user interfaces. As part of the brand world, this sits alongside a no-nonsense black and white colour palette and photography depicting the ‘real life’ end users – people across the UK benefitting from fast, secure payments.
We developed the brand’s website and user experience as well as the more traditional printed assets and templates.
SomeOne has been a key partner for us on our journey to become the leading retail payments authority, under our new name Pay.UK.
The team really got to the heart of who we are and what we stand for, creating a name and identity that truly reflects our core purpose – to enable a vibrant UK economy.