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.
How to counter Wall Street wolves?
Build with bricks.
OpenFin came to the fight armed with a disruptive product that held significant technical advantages over its competition.
I leveraged those advantages, building them into pillars that addressed both IT stakeholders and the internal partners who rely on their expertise.
Instead of competing with emotions and hyperbole that would carry little weight with the finance crowd, we leaned into three areas of concern for decision-makers — power, flexibility and security — which coincided directly with OpenFin product benefits.
How to spread your message?
Keep the story simple.
Language
OpenFin’s brand proposition was challenging to articulate because it had three primary audiences:
- Finance industry execs who might be technologically illiterate.
- CTOs and IT decision-makers who expected a deeper dive into product particulars.
- Developers whose enthusiasm needed to be piqued in order to attract talent.
With those varying audiences in mind, I crafted top-level language that was simple and conversational, framing highly technical concepts in easy-to-digest terms. Anyone could visit OpenFin’s site to get a grasp of their value proposition.
Then, as visitors drilled down into the site, they found more detailed and technical content tailored to satisfy deeper researchers.
From simple…
…to complex.
Visuals
We employed simple ‘90s-style graphics using dots to represent information and interconnected ‘blobjects’ to represent interoperating / cooperating software environments.
The OpenFin logo symbolizes the viral, interconnecting nature of information — and the way OpenFin partitions each element of its ecosystem for security. The shape is both organic and orderly, with a single opening indicating future connections and the literal ‘openness’ of the product’s open-source framework.
