Australia’s largest financial institutions have been working together to build a new infrastructure for real-time payments; an innovative platform designed to revolutionise payments in Australia for everyone, from innovative fintechs to everyday families.

Known as the New Payments Platform, the technology shares its name with the organisation tasked with managing it and driving its adoption. Now that the technical build is complete, driving adoption is the key focus and the New Payments Platform needed to develop a brand strategy and brand identity to demonstrate its utility and value.

The New Payments Platform exists to help governments, corporations and fintechs create possibilities as yet unimagined in an increasingly digital economy. Looking beyond category conventions allowed us to focus on the platform’s ability to connect people, ideas and technology and to open doors to possibilities limited only by the imagination. But how do you ground the notion of what’s possible in something easy to understand and value?

We developed the brand idea ‘Open for Progress’ and expressed it with a brand identity underpinned by simplicity and neutrality – two principles that were grounded in the fact that the platform needed to drive understanding across a range of users and to enable others’ efforts in creating the future. At first glance, the brand appears to be an inconspicuous box, but in fact reveals itself to be a clever system that supports the communication of complex information. The brand opens up to reveal a wealth of information in a staged and structured manner through simple, intuitive iconography and concise messaging that balances social impact with technical proof. The brand further flexes and stretches through a series of animations by which playful storytelling unfolds, complemented by a tone of voice that is visionary yet inviting.