OpenFin Branding & Website
Client
OpenFin
Deliverables
- – Brand Development
- – Creative Direction
- – Copywriting
- – Website
A FinTech Startup Defeating the Wolves of Wall Street
Bloomberg Terminal is the de facto tool of the Wall Street trader. In the financial ecosystem, this wolf had little competition.
Until OpenFin moved into the neighborhood. As FinTech’s insurgent alternative to the legacy beasts of the financial kingdom, this little pig was building with brick.
OpenFin’s plug-n-play platform enables corps to customize and package workplace desktops and dashboards that can instantly integrate legacy tools with unbundled apps, onboard new software within days instead of months, maintain ultrastrong security, and do it all at a fraction of Bloomberg’s cost.
Working directly with CEO Mazy Dar, I positioned the brand as a classic Davey-vs-Goliath story that immediately raised OpenFin’s public profile and helped secure millions of dollars in new rounds of investor financing. From an initial client base of 35 banks, hedge funds and trading operations, OpenFin is now used to deploy thousands of industry apps to over 1500 sell-side and buy-side firms.
Meanwhile, as Bloomberg’s market share has fallen, its narrative is encapsulated in articles and white papers with titles like ‘The Twilight of the Terminal.’ Through careful strategy, simple design and a brand voice that is both accessible and technical, I helped OpenFin create a success story that is much more than a fairy tale.
OpenFin came to the fight armed with a disruptive product that held significant technical advantages over its competition. We isolated and leveraged those advantages, building them into pillars that addressed both IT stakeholders and the internal partners who rely on their expertise. We leaned into three areas of concern for decision-makers — power, flexibility and security — which just happened to coincide directly with OpenFin product benefits.
OpenFin’s brand proposition was challenging to articulate because it had three primary audiences:
– industry execs who might be technologically illiterate;
– CTOs and IT decision-makers who expected a deeper dive;
– developers whose enthusiasm was cultivated in order to attract hires.
With those varying audiences in mind, we crafted language that was simple at the top and more complicated as content areas progressed. Virtually anyone could visit OpenFin’s site or read their blog to get a grasp of the product’s value proposition. Then, as visitors drilled down, they found more detailed and technical content tailored to satisfy deeper researchers.
From simple…
To complex…
Visually, we employed simple ‘90s-style graphics using dots to represent information and connected ‘blobjects’ as cooperating tools and apps.
The OpenFin logo itself is a representation of both the viral, interconnected nature of information and the way that OpenFin partitions each element of its ecosystem for security. The shape is simultaneously organic and orderly, with an opening that indicates future connections and the literal ‘openness’ of the product’s open-source framework.
