New Payments Platform

Australia’s largest financial institutions have been working together behind the scenes to build a technology infrastructure for real-time payments. In doing so, they have created an innovative platform designed to revolutionise payments in Australia for one and all, from innovative fintechs to everyday families.

The platform is known as the New Payments Platform and shares its name with the organisation tasked with managing the infrastructure and driving its adoption. Now that the technical build is complete, driving adoption is the key focus and so the New Payments Platform has been working with FutureBrand to develop the brand strategy and build the brand identity, tools and experience 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, we uncovered the insight that the platform delivered much greater value than faster payments. This insight 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?

In answering this pivotal question, we developed the brand idea ‘Open for Progress’ and expressed it with a brand identity and experience underpinned by simplicity and neutrality – two principles that are grounded in the fact that the platform (and the brand) need to drive understanding across a range of of enterprise users and to enable others’ efforts in creating the future. We expressed this brand idea with what appears at first glance 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.

"FutureBrand worked with the New Payments Platform in a carefully considered way. We’re not a typical organisation, nor is our market offering, but the team at FutureBrand applied a deep level of research and strategic thinking to create a brand identity and narrative that really simplifies the complexity of who we are and what we do."

– Adrian Lovney, CEO NPP

To support the brand’s implementation, we have developed a series of tools to guide the organisation’s efforts in showcasing the New Payments Platform. Together, we have built a brand with a compelling vision for the future and shaped its expression in ways that break the category conventions and offer myriad configurations to match partners of any shape and size. As a result, the New Payments Platform is on track to become not only the future of payments but also a future brand, having hit critical mass with more than 50m accounts, 2.5m transactions per week and nearly 2.1m PayID accounts after only 6 months.

As part of the New Payments Platform, the ‘Addressing Service’ was created, designed to link BSB and account numbers to memorable pieces of information like email addresses and mobile numbers, and make real-time payments easier than ever before

But how do you encourage usage of a service never before seen in a nation, and whose value lay in its technical detail? And how do you create a meaningful brand that comfortably sits within those of large banks?

We placed a focus on ensuring that never before seen technology could still be understood, and valued, by all. We named the service PayID, emphasising payment made direct and personal. Alongside the name was an equally simple messaging system that explained the technical in everyday language, and helped other organisations communicate benefits to their customers. The PayID wordmark has also been designed with partnership and utility as a focus, distinctive even at very small sizes to lend itself to banks’ broader brand experiences.