Mobile-first banking startup showcases fresh brand identity

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Just weeks after revealing plans to launch its new mobile-first, customer-led banking offering to Australian consumers later this year, newly established 86 400 has taken the wrappers off its visual brand identity.

The bank, which is backed by payments solutions provider, Cuscal, and the brainchild of four founders - former UK neobank veteran, Anthony Thomson, ex-ANZ Japan CEO, Robert Bell, and ex-Cuscal CIO, Brian Parker - will launch in beta towards the end of 2018 and has been two years in the making, building a suite of proprietary technologies to support its aims.

Initially, it’s planning to offer transaction and savings accounts to the public from early 2019, via a mobile app, with financial products to be added over time. The group has also recruited former Westpac digital leader, Tyler Travis, as its inaugural chief marketing and product officer.

This week, the startup’s brand agency, Hulsbosch, debuted the visual identity it has created for 86 400 in line with the latter’s ambition to be a new type of financial institution. The name, 86 400, comes from the number of seconds in a day and is designed to reflect the real-time services mantra behind the Aussie business.

Hulsbosch and 86 400 said they jointly undertook a research program and strategic exercise to understand what today’s customers wanted and needed from a next-generation bank. The subsequent brand design aims to highlight this relevant digital-digital experience, as well as position 86 400 as a trusted provider of financial services.  Hulsbosch has been tasked with the full suite of brand applications for internal and external use.

“Underpinned by the latest digital capabilities available, 86 400 is set to challenge and reinvent the customer banking experience,” Hulsbosch director, Jaid Hulsbosch, said. “Our role was to support this, to create a brand identity that was unlike anything in category and fulfilled the brand’s customer promise.

“We developed a bold masterbrand strategy that reflected the idea of ‘value every second’- the promise and proposition to customers. This concept set the tone for a beautiful, succinct visual language which all anchors back to this idea – that 86 400 delivers value every second, of every minute, or every day – all eight-six four hundred of them.”

The logo, for example, is designed as an evolving logo based on the second as an increment of time, and uses a punctuation mark, colon icon and extensive colour palette, Hulsbosch said.

Thomson, 86 400’s incoming chairman and co-founder, said the customer is at the heart of the new business.

“We are creating the digital bank of the future, unencumbered by legacy, and obsessed with giving customers what they need to maximise their value,” he said.

The new branding and supporting guidelines will start rolling out in coming months and will be supported by a national multi-channel launch campaign.

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