From brand strategy to product UI: how FinTech teams approach a rebrand

In this interview, we speak with Artem Sydorenko, Head of Marketing at Formula Spin and former Head of Marketing at Exactly. We discuss why payment companies can outgrow their brand, where brand consistency stops being useful in product UI, and why marketers need a business case when they bring agency work to senior decision-makers.

Why payment companies outgrow their brand

Diana: What does the product context look like from a payments perspective?

Artem: Exactly is a payment system working with card payments and alternative payment methods. Cards remain one of the core parts of the market, together with services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, but merchants increasingly need other ways for customers to pay.

Those alternative methods vary by market. MB Way in Portugal is one example. In some cases, they can also work better for the merchant or the customer than a standard card flow, including on fees or the way the payment itself works.

Around those core payment methods, merchants also need services such as payment links, recurring payments and subscriptions. So even before you get to marketing, there is already a fairly broad product story to explain.

That matters for brand and communication because a payments company is rarely selling one simple function.

Diana: What usually triggers a payment company to reconsider its brand?

Artem: For us, the starting point was looking at the market and then looking back at ourselves.

A company can work for years, build a stable product and keep adding services, while the way it presents itself changes more slowly. At some point, the visual language, website or messaging may stop matching the clients the business wants to reach.

The audience already has expectations shaped by other products they use. They have seen certain standards in payments, e-commerce and financial services. When they come to your website or product, they compare the experience with that reference point, even if they never say it directly.

So the question becomes: does the way we present the company help the client understand us and see us as relevant to the market they already know?

Brand as a system, not a marketing layer

Diana: Do you see brand as a marketing layer, or something broader?

Artem: For me, marketing works when the parts connect.

A LinkedIn post, a website and the system a client uses every day should feel like they come from the same company. That does not mean they should look identical. It means the client should recognise the same company across the experience.

If the public-facing brand says one thing and the product feels unrelated, you create a break between what the client sees before buying and what they experience afterwards.

That is why I think about identity, brand philosophy and design code across touchpoints rather than as a logo or website project.

Diana: Where does strategy enter that process?

Artem: The business direction comes first.

The company decides where it sees an opportunity, which products make sense and which clients it wants to work with. Marketing then has to understand what those clients expect and how to present the offer to them.

So the sequence goes back and forth between market, product and marketing. You look at what the market needs, decide what the company can offer, and then work out how to explain and present it.

That is also why brand work cannot sit separately from business direction. If the company changes who it wants to reach, the existing positioning or presentation may stop doing the job.

Building the brand platform before the visuals

Diana: You initially looked at brand identity. Why did the work move deeper than visual design?

Artem: Because design is a reflection of something.

When you start discussing colours, typography or a new website, you quickly reach more basic questions. What are we trying to communicate? How do we want to sound? What is our value? What should make us different from another provider?

We started by thinking about visual identity and then realised we needed to work on the brand platform first: positioning, values, tone of voice and the way we want the company to be perceived.

I think of design as the clothes. You still need to form the person wearing them.

This is also not a one-day decision. Once you choose a direction like this, you may live with it for years. That makes the thinking before design more important.

Diana: Had you worked on brand identity before, and what changed in your approach this time?

Artem: We had worked on it before, but the process was more visual and less structured.

Like many growing products, we tried different elements, saw what worked for us and gradually settled on a style. Then we documented the rules around what had already emerged.

This time, I would reverse that order.

We first need to define what the company wants to mean to clients, how the team sees the business, what the priorities are and where the difference from other providers comes from. Then the visual system has something to build on.

The old process was closer to: make something, see whether we like it, and then write the design code. Now the goal is to understand the core first and let the design express it.

Working with an external brand team

Diana: Why bring in an external team if you already have designers internally?

Artem: A fresh eye was one of the main reasons.

When people work with the same product for 2 or 3 years, they get used to their own solutions. They remember why a decision was made, they know the history behind it, and that makes it harder to question.

There is also an attachment to previous work. It is hard to throw away something you spent time building, so people naturally return to familiar ideas.

An external team does not carry the same history. They can look at the company from another angle and point out something the internal team no longer sees.

Internal designers still know the product better. The value of the external team is the different perspective and, ideally, a system the internal team can continue using.

Diana: What does a good handover from an external brand team look like?

Artem: In an ideal case, you receive a working system rather than a set of finished pictures.

The external team defines the principles, visual language and rules. The internal team can then apply them to new materials, pages and product needs.

In practice, it does not always stay exactly as it was designed. Internal designers want to add their own ideas, and sometimes a rule that looked right in the concept does not work in every context.

So the system needs enough structure to keep the original logic, but it also has to survive contact with real work.

Where brand consistency stops in product UI

Diana: Can the same brand system simply be applied to the product UI?

Artem: Not always.

The product has functional meaning that marketing surfaces do not have.

We had a visual element built around a red dot. On LinkedIn or a website, a red dot can attract attention and become part of the identity. Inside a payment system, the same red dot can look like a notification, warning or error.

The element has not changed. Its meaning has.

That is why product designers need to test how brand elements behave inside the interface. Their job is not to copy the marketing identity screen by screen. Their job is to make the product feel connected to the brand without confusing the client.

Some things can be consistent. Others need to be adapted to the function.

How FinTech companies choose an agency

Diana: What makes FinTech experience important when you choose an external team?

Artem: Payments take time to understand.

A designer can be strong visually and still need a long onboarding period to understand the difference between payment products, acquiring and alternative payment methods, or why one service matters to a merchant and another does not.

You cannot solve that learning curve with one Google search.

When we spoke with teams from outside the industry, quite a few struggled with those distinctions. That makes the conversation harder because before you discuss positioning or design, you first have to teach the category.

Relevant cases reduce that risk. When I see that a company has already worked with payment businesses or adjacent FinTech products, I trust that they have at least dealt with the language and the product logic before.

Diana: How do you actually find and shortlist external teams?

Artem: The search starts broadly.

We looked at companies through Google and tried to understand who was working in this space. We also looked at work done for businesses we knew in the market and, where possible, who had designed those products or websites.

Recommendations matter too. If a colleague has worked with a team, that gives you another reason to look at them.

Then there is the agency's own presence. I look at the website, the work they show and how they present themselves. Later, a LinkedIn contact can turn that initial awareness into a conversation.

Usually it is not one channel that makes the decision. You see a company somewhere, hear about it from someone else, look through the cases, and then the direct contact arrives at the right moment.

Diana: Does an agency's own website matter when you are buying design?

Artem: Yes.

There is the old idea of the shoemaker with no shoes, but if you sell design, your own website is still evidence.

When I look at an agency website and like the visual decisions, it gives me more confidence that the team can make good decisions for a client too.

It is not a guarantee. An agency may spend far more time on client work than on its own site. But when you are comparing several teams, their own presentation becomes one more signal.

Outsourcing vs. keeping work in-house

Diana: When do you outsource a project instead of using the internal team?

Artem: Capacity is a major reason.

An internal team may have the skills, but those people already have priorities. We have used external teams for project-based work such as landing pages or campaign materials because the internal designers were focused elsewhere.

The other reason is the fresh-eye problem we discussed. Some tasks benefit from someone coming in without the same assumptions as the existing team.

So outsourcing is not always about missing capability. Sometimes you have the capability but not the time, or you deliberately want a perspective your current team cannot easily give itself.

Diana: Would you also outsource website development after a rebrand?

Artem: I would separate design from long-term ownership.

A website keeps changing. Teams add pages, update existing ones and respond to new product or marketing needs. Someone has to maintain that work after the initial project is finished.

That is why I tend to prefer internal development when the company has the people and capacity. They understand what they are working with every day and can keep changing it.

An external partner can still design the website and provide the documentation and recommendations the internal team needs to implement it.

If internal priorities make that impossible, external development can still make sense. The decision is about resources as much as capability.

Why marketers need a business case, not a portfolio

Diana: What do external teams often underestimate when selling brand work into a FinTech company?

Artem: The marketer may understand the value before the rest of the decision group does.

People in marketing understand what brand strategy, identity and tone of voice are supposed to do. The people approving the spend may ask a different question: why should the company pay for this now?

A beautiful portfolio does not answer that.

In a business like ours, a larger decision usually goes through several people. Cost matters, but so do the size of the engagement, whether the company has worked with the supplier before and whether this is a one-off project or an ongoing relationship.

That means the marketer often has to take the agency's proposal into another conversation and explain why this team or this approach is worth choosing.

Diana: What kind of evidence makes that internal case easier?

Artem: I want to see what changed beyond the visuals.

Maybe a user needed 3 steps to reach an action before and now needs 1. Maybe people reach the right information faster. Maybe a website or flow performs better after the work.

I understand that this is difficult for a design company to collect. Attribution is difficult and clients do not always share their numbers.

But some evidence is still better than a gallery of screens.

If the agency can explain the problem, the decision it made, what changed and what the client observed afterwards, I have something I can take into an internal discussion.

Diana: Does price become the deciding factor when several agencies look similar?

Artem: It can.

If 2 suppliers appear to offer the same thing, the cheaper one becomes very easy to defend. A CFO or another decision-maker can reasonably ask why the company should pay more for what looks like the same identity project.

The marketer then has to explain the difference.

Maybe one team understands payments already. Maybe its process saves internal time. Maybe it has evidence from similar work. Maybe it can connect positioning, identity and website design rather than delivering one isolated piece.

The agency should help make those differences visible.

Diana: What should an agency understand about the person buying its work?

Artem: The buyer inside the company is often also selling the decision internally.

That changes what useful agency communication looks like.

It is not enough to convince the marketing lead that the work looks good. Give that person the reasoning they can take into the next meeting. Explain what problem you are solving, why your experience matters for this business and what should be different after the work.

For me, one of the interesting questions is how a marketer chooses which supplier to defend internally when they have 5 or 10 options in front of them.

The stronger an agency makes that argument before I have to build it myself, the easier the decision becomes.

‍