For international payments provider Worldpay, connecting with stakeholders was reliant upon a better understanding of the complexities of payment services. Hassan Butt explores how animation saved the day

The world’s first recorded monetary transactions took place in Mesopotamia where the Sumerians and Akkadians engaged in an early incarnation of modern commerce. The ancestry of everyday transactions – deposits, loans and receipts – took the primordial shape of clay tablets, centuries before the discovery of paper. Today’s financial structure has come a long way since, both physically and conceptually. The modern payment plateau has a global reach that is ever expanding, and yet fast shrinking into a cashless matrix readily accessible at the swipe of a screen.

Last year, as an example, China’s volume of mobile payments reached £6.5tn, dwarfing most of the world’s economies. In India this year, Google launched Tez, mirroring popular Chinese social media apps WeChat and Alipay and backed by the government-issued Unified Payment System (UPI) initiative announced in 2016. With a developing ecosystem of smart devices and connected technologies, such as in-app purchases and Amazon Echo Dot’s voice-driven model, the payment category is now overflowing with debate on accurate authentication and data security.

However, there are few organisations that are willing and able to develop end-to-end solutions on the global stage. One of them is Worldpay.

Payment processor Worldpay’s operations are stunningly complex. The company has traditionally worked with small businesses and retail owners. In 2013, the company introduced Worldpay Zinc, a mobile payment terminal that enables smartphone connection, manifesting a committed awareness to the changing technologies surrounding payments. Today, it covers 99% of global GDP, spanning 126 currencies across 146 countries.

Worldpay was launched in 1989 as Streamline, a subsidiary of National Westminster Bank. In 2002, when NatWest was acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS), Streamline became RBS Worldpay and over the years, largely through an M&A strategy, RBS added numerous payment solutions to Worldpay’s portfolio. In 2010, the company was sold to Advent International and Bain Capital for £2bn as an EU condition of the bank’s financial crisis bailout, and in July this year, US-based payment processing provider Vantiv purchased Worldpay for £9.3bn.

Yet throughout the vast scale of the company’s offering, the complexities that often shroud the payment journey can become difficult to grasp. With over 300 different payment types ranging from debit and credit to Apple Pay, the organisation’s core focus in facilitating customers across various payment procedures are often drowned out by the numerous steps that make up Worldpay’s service.

Through a communications methodology that involved interviewing as many as 200 clients, qualitative research indicated that a missing component across the Worldpay business was a compelling narrative around the payment journey. “We spoke to customers at length and they told us that they don’t actually get what Worldpay does,” says Javier Nieto, vice president of global marketing, e-commerce at Wordplay. “We decided to put together a story that explains very clearly, in very simple terms, what we do from the beginning to the end.”

That story, crafted in collaboration with film production company, Gorilla Gorilla, became Worldpay’s most successful digital marketing campaign to date. With a nostalgic nod to the sci-fi genre of the 1960s, ‘The Fantastic Journey’ translates the core of the business offering into a short, animated video that brings to life ‘the hidden aspects of digital payments.’ The film captures – using a diverse collection of characters and genre-related concepts – the myriad possibilities available through Worldpay’s ‘largest offering of alternative payment methods.’

With a collection of animated metaphors that envelop service localisation, security and data protection, the payment flow departs from the previously mundane aspects of its brand narrative, taking on new forms and shapes, ‘The Fantastic Journey’ translates esoteric terminology and a business-centric strategy into communications collateral that can resonate to a wider audience.

The challenge, Nieto says, was around improving understanding. “We felt that we were assuming a lot of customer knowledge that they didn’t actually have, that led us to believe that we needed to explain the company at the very minimum exponent,” he says. “What’s the easiest that we can explain it to someone who might ask, at a dinner party for example, ‘What does Worldpay do?’”

For Dean Beswick, creative partner at Gorilla Gorilla, the project’s challenges were manifold. “The complexity of information, and the fact that we were essentially representing something that was ones and zeros, was a tough challenge. Worldpay has a very good handle on its audience, but I think the company was beginning to consider changing the way it talks, and its use of language. Part of that is that it simply felt it had become boring – everything Worldpay had done had been reduced to PowerPoint slides and hackneyed acronyms.”

The film not only balances both the atavistic narrative of the ‘new frontier’ sci-fi genre with the often-labyrinthine procedures of Worldpay’s service, it also makes a creative leap to a largely developing genre. “We started the project with a blank piece of paper, even though Javier [Nieto] and Alex Smith [Worldpay’s brand manager] knew where they wanted this to go, the brief was incredibly open,” says Beswick. The agency’s annual ‘Awesome Animation’ research study into the status of animation across 220 of the UK’s biggest brands aided in the development of a fully animated ‘The Fantastic Journey.’

“We started the animation because we thought, ‘How else can you stand out in this market?’ Particularly if you’re a business like Worldpay that doesn’t have some super exciting human story to tell. Animation is a fantastic way to do that – wonderful illustration allows you to grab people’s attention with imagery that really sticks out, in addition to animation being a largely flexible tool,” says Beswick.”

The campaign’s development contributed to a seismic change in engagement figures, generating traffic on both social media channels and the Worldpay website. The film broke all Worldpay’s metrics on social, Nieto says, adding, “The less tangible KPI’s also proved noteworthy, the campaign showed that B2B doesn’t need to be boring. We created a sci-fi story that had a hook, and delivering our message in a compelling way was, for me, the most interesting part,” says Nieto.

For Worldpay, stepping outside the boundaries of its comfort zone signified a new chapter for the brand’s marketing and communications. In doing so, Worldpay reached a new frontier – translating the complex details of its service in an engaging and playful way. As the company continues to rebuild the global narrative surrounding the payment category, its current approach can only work in its favour.