Payment services provider WorldPay sends money around the world in a flash, its brand, however, was almost nonexistent until SomeOne came along. Brittany Golob reports

It operates in over 40 countries, serving thousands of business and processing millions of payments in over 120 currencies every day. It was, until February, the invisible force keeping businesses around the world running.

Despite its countless pieces of collateral, including receipt paper, payment processing terminals, digital and printed media and much more, Streamline was a brand flying definitively under the radar. The WorldPay Group even more so. The company was the first to process online payments and has been around since 1989. Yet a series of changes in the business, including the 2002 acquisition by RBS and the subsequent divorce that compelled RBS to sell WorldPay off as a contingent of its government aid scheme in 2009, had forced WorldPay to reconsider its positioning in the market. The company had also grown by acquisition, folding an SME offer and advanced e-commerce technology into its portfolio.

The years of change led WorldPay to reevaluate its brand in 2013. Simon Manchipp, founder of Londonbased brand consultancy SomeOne, says, “It was a large group of sub-brands, endorsed brands and products that had evolved, rather than been designed. Time had come to unite the many. It was time to create a symbol of change for the organisation, not just a change of symbol.”

SomeOne’s approach to rebranding always looks at the company in question’s positioning in the market or the changes to be made to that positioning. While design is important, it is not the driving force behind the rebrand. The WorldPay project is no different. The rebrand has been noted for the unveiling of a new brand icon, the loxodrome, a 3D-like metalliclooking globe. The mark was accompanied by a suite of iconography designed to help the company communicate to audiences across the countries in which it operates.

Behind that, though, is a company that is at once successful yet unknown. “The brand’s opinion is that the organisations that place modern money at the heart of their business will win,” Manchipp says. “More agile, more useful, more empowering. WorldPay makes the complex and emotive world of payments simple.”

The modern money concept is one that drives the new positioning and inspires the rebrand. “Modern money surrounds the planet with its constant movement,” Manchipp adds. This movement was translated into the motion of light around a sphere, to reflect the effortlessness and rapidity with which WorldPay’s systems operate. The loxodrome, at the heart of the rebrand, is the virtual and physical manifestation of this idea. “Light is fast!” Manchipp says. “So we used the medium of light to help get the idea across to new and existing audiences.”

SomeOne had previously worked on WorldPay’s UK-focused online payment app, WorldPay Zinc. That application focused on speed and simplicity through the use of bright colours and high-speed paint-based photography.

Though the loxodrome has come to symbolise the project and the company, it also symbolises the ways in which WorldPay has evolved. With hundreds of services and products on offer to clients both tiny and gigantic, WorldPay had a huge stable of sub-brands to try and corral.

In response to this obstacle, SomeOne wanted to go beyond the standard logo, typeface, colour formula that oft characterises rebrands these days, Manchipp says. The brand, or BrandWorld, as SomeOne calls it, is based in connections within the business. It allows every part of the organisation to interact with its audiences and with its cohorts inside the company.

Lead designer Thomas Dabner says, “Because Worldpay operate on such a large scale it was important from the beginning to develop a core idea which would tell their whole story through their branding. Yes, they process transactions and provide payment solutions, but what they really do is connect people. They enable buyers and sellers to interact with one another from anywhere in the world, seamlessly and with ease.”

In practice, the words and symbols that comprise the brand were custom-designed and all relate back to the loxodrome. Letters, numbers and symbols are drawn from seven intersecting lines that reflect the loxodrome’s lines of latitude. The red and chrome application lends a sleek, yet assertive feel to the brand language. The iconographs are particularly interesting visually and include a deck of cards, a petrol pump and one of the few female lavatory indicators in which the symbol is not wearing a dress.

The other benefit to a brand language based in icons is the relative ease with which WorldPay can communicate with its clients across it’s 40-country operation base. Rounding out the alignment of subbrands, WorldPay’s new website integrates its previously disparate services, products and acquisitions under the same banner – literally. The online hub, designed by DigitasLBi, simplifies navigation between products, but also directs SMEs and large businesses to separate areas within the website, better catering to the needs of these different organisations.

These developments have created not just a lexicon of icons for which WorldPay can use in its communications, but a visual language, deriving from the latitudinal lines of the loxodrome, and carrying through the rebrand, that unites the company, subbrands, acquisitions and all. This is a brand without any ugly stepchildren.

Accompanying the new website and rebrand was the commissioning of a photo library for use across the company. “Every photo is designed to cover various territories where modern money plays a significant role; either just prior to a purchase, during a transaction or showing the results of a payment,” says Manchipp.

Photographer Simon Warren led the photoshoots from the London stock markets to the horse races of Miami and back again to develop WorldPay’s massive photo library. Every photo included something red – to represent WorldPay’s iconic colour – and had to represent something that might be purchased.

Beyond that, SomeOne was responsible for the brand language, signage, iconography and imagery. The rebrand eschewed the traditional blue hues of the financial services sector – often associated with comfort and authority – for a nice, bright red, accented by grey. Patti Newcomer, CMO of Worldpay U.S., says, “Because we are at the heart of global commerce, Worldpay offers a distinctive approach and the power to instantly accept payments across boundaries. Our new brand highlights the worldwide nature of our business and our obsession with delivering outstanding performance to our customers.”

One of the most onerous and final steps of the rebrand process was the implementation of signage and wayfinding materials. With SomeOne’s branding sorted, Absolute SG was charged with creating the signage for WorldPay’s fifteen offices in eight countries. Jonathan Burge, director at the Hertfordshire-based signage and graphics company, says the project was one of the most intensive he’s ever worked on.

Burge says his team was briefed on 5 January and the internal reveal was to take place on 14 February. Accounting for a shipping delay up to 10 days in some places, the Absolute SG team had about three weeks to design and manufacture hundreds of signs and displays. If not, at the speed of light, then definitely unusually quickly. The first step was an audit of WorldPay’s UKbased offices to find out what was needed.

The relatively small outfit of Absolute SG then leveraged international wayfinding and signage trade associations to help attack the monumental task. In Britain, the BSGA (British Signage and Graphics Association) put the word out for local suppliers in Europe and Asia and the Canadian association helped on its side of the Atlantic, among others. With the audits then complete, internationally, this network was able to help with the logistics of the necessary 170 plus hours of development that went into the project.

The work paid off when everything arrived on time and WorldPay’s employees walked into their transformed offices on Valentine’s Day. “It happened instantly, everywhere, all in one night,” Burge says about the reveal, which, due to time differences allowed him to track the project’s progress around the world from Singapore to Amsterdam. “It was easily one of the most satisfying projects ASG has been involved in. We rebranded the National Probation Service, there were 40 of them in two days, but that wasn’t as exciting as the entire world.”

In practice, the external signs are, as a rule, red and grey acrylic bonded directly to the buildings. Internal work – much of it on frosted vinyl bearing a 2D version of the loxodrome and SomeOne iconography – sprawled from reception desk signage to roll-ups to small-scale installations.

Though the project is by all means complete, a rebrand rarely truly ends. “The visual brand identity is a high-profile signal for change,” Manchipp says. “But the real work is going on behind the scenes to make for a smoother, more powerful and useful way for products, services and organisations to take and make payments effortlessly.” The numbers speak for themselves: 450 customers have signed up per day since WorldPay’s rebrand. Over 26m transactions are processed everyday. The company recorded a 9.5% growth in quarter one of this year. 

That’s a mark of success for WorldPay’s business model, but also for the way in which it has been reinterpreted and communicated by SomeOne. The rebrand has put WorldPay’s communications in front of its customers, be that online, in physical technologies or materials or on mobile. If nothing else, customers now know who WorldPay is and when they’re using it and that’s no small thing.

Peer review James Packer, creative director, Industry Partners Limited SomeOne’s take on the loxodrome symbol is elegant, and offers a new twist which really comes alive in 3D. It also echoes calligraphy used on old Bank of England banknotes, a clever nod to the world of finance. But, the challenge with using a globe of any kind is that it may never be quite unique enough to be truly ‘ownable.’

It’s refreshing to see how the loxodrome has been used to inform the secondary elements. The custom alphabet and iconography are unique and attractive. They have great potential to make the brand come alive and give it real personality. It’s also good to see that the symbol is being respected and used sparingly, allowing the other elements to define the brand platform.

It is a shame, however, that the fluidity of the loxodrome is not carried through into the slab serif wordmark – the compound name is fragmented by using two separate colours – it would be more strongly united by a single colour.

Given that this identity will come alive on digital media, the proof of success will of course be how well the delicate form of the loxodrome performs at small scale and on lower resolution screens.