Rapyd’s New Global Fintech Brand

Just about 4 years ago I joined Rapyd, then a fledgling fintech startup. I always joke that I came into the company when we were not “3 people and a dog, but more like 30 people and a dog” - meaning the company was at a point where it needed to come out and show itself to the world. When I was interviewing for the job of CMO, I told our company founder and CEO Arik Shtilman that the single most important contribution marketing could make to the company was to build a recognizable global brand, something that we’ve worked very hard to achieve since 2018.?

Rapyd is a very unusual and special company. It is not a typical startup because we have been working on solving a truly massive challenge: unifying the world’s local payment infrastructures to simplify business expansion in order to make the global economic pie bigger. We do this by eliminating the friction of enabling payments infrastructure into any market and for any business, regardless of its size or its growth ambitions.? The term “Fintech as a Service” embodies this concept and it is an underlying infrastructure concept that operationalizes embedded financial services.?

Companies anywhere and of any size are looking to have a closer financial relationship with their customers. Whether that be a business owner looking to accept payments online in a local market, a scale-up growth business expanding to multiple countries to accept or send payments based on locally preferred methods, or a multinational global enterprise running operations in dozens of countries, each with unique payment requirements, localization needs and regulatory issues - the issue is still the same: maintaining a financially oriented customer relationship has tremendous value.

We Build Bold

Typically, most tech startups pick a single geographic market, like the US, launch a product, get some traction, and improve it while the growth curve goes up and to the right. At some point, a senior executive or board member says something like “you should go international” which means expanding to Canada or the UK. In Rapyd’s case, it’s the antithesis of that as a startup. We brought a global fintech platform online to manage the complexity of local payments essentially at one time, across a huge number of countries - no easy feat. In a word, our approach was BOLD.

And, just like Rapyd, we realized that regardless of ambition or size, every company wrestles with taking bold steps. The business owner looking to go into a new market outside of the home country, or the multinational tech platform expanding globally to meet the consumer where they are from a financial transaction perspective, both are bold decisions. It just depends on your orientation and scale ambitions.?

Every day Rapyd is building solutions to help our clients overcome hurdles that help them succeed and grow their businesses.? At the same time, our comprehensive platform enables businesses to build their own solutions. It is the insight that informed our brand idea.

“Build Bold” is Rapyd’s brand idea. A brand idea is a cornerstone of how the full brand is developed. Usually, the brand idea is for internal use, it's not meant to be public facing. But, it has resonated so much with our company’s identity and has become our rallying cry because it reflects how our customers are thinking.

Stated simply Rapyd is allowing companies everywhere across the globe, of any size to Build Bold.

On a Mission to Liberate Global Commerce

As we developed the brand idea and the evolved Rapyd brand, we knew we had to address multiple audiences but do it in a way that would connect for them and make sense to them for our mission to resonate. That audience is vast and includes large-scale enterprises, growth businesses, small business owners and “prosumers”, software developers, ISV, ISO, and other payments and software partners, employees, and investors, among others. And, it reaches across borders, literally. In just four years Rapyd has grown to serve businesses on a global scale covering Asia-Pacific, throughout Europe and the Middle East, and across the Americas.

In parallel, we looked at the sheer market size and opportunity that our global fintech platform unleashes. Rapyd helps more businesses get into more markets across the globe whether that be a B2B platform, a marketplace, solopreneurs and digital content creators, retail, or other categories and verticals we are removing the complexity and friction of local payments to enable more efficient transactions and cross-border payment flows. I refer to this as solving the “last mile” of commerce-enabling payments that meet the needs of local customs and regulatory requirements in a seamless and effortless way. This is what “making the economic pie bigger” means.

Rapyd is enabling entrepreneurism regardless of a company’s size or the ambitions of any of the audiences I mentioned above. After all, being an entrepreneur is about taking risks. We often think being entrepreneurial is the software developer in the basement coding the next great app or building the next great product, like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And that’s true. But, every person and every business can be entrepreneurial regardless of their ambition and size. We spent the last several years really thinking about what Rapyd stands for.?

Rapyd’s mission is very simple and it is this: Liberate Global Commerce.??

“Rapyd lets you build bold. Liberate global commerce with all the tools your business needs to create payment, payout and fintech experiences everywhere.”

A Different and Highly Effective Take on Company Values

Working in global business has revealed many things over my career, whether that is working in a UK-based company, alongside Pakistanis, or with colleagues in Israel. Everyone likes to think that just because someone is from a different country or culture what they think and how they act may be different from you. And while there is some truth to that the reality is that most of us value many of the same things. Doing work that is meaningful, helping others, achieving professional and personal success, etc…

Rapyd is a type of “melting pot” of cultures, countries, and customs reflected by our global team based in London, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Singapore, Mexico City, Hong Kong, Iceland, Dubai, and several other countries. And, while people generally want many of the same things, not everyone sees how to get there the same way. At Rapyd we hold certain values that are “more pronounced” perhaps than other companies.

It takes a certain type of person and personality to succeed but we have found that regardless of where that person is located, you have to have the right DNA to be successful in a fast-moving and high-intensity culture like Rapyd.?

So, as part of our global re-brand, we developed company values, which are similar (but not the same) as employee values. These values are the pillars that support our brand promise and motivate us to succeed in the global fintech market.

A Brand That Is The DNA of Rapyd

And, so today I am very excited, in the truest sense of the word, to show off Rapyd’s new brand. The brand is bold, edgy, and direct. It’s electrifying in its look, yet understandable and approachable, with a bit of irreverence in its tone. I asked the team to really push it to the edge in terms of creativity while not losing sight of our core purpose and vision. I think it has succeeded.

I despise bad stock photography.

We launched our bold new website last week. This week we’re showing off the new brand in concert with the team at Money2020 USA. It’s becoming a bit of a tradition as the last time I rolled out Rapyd’s brand it happened at this same event in 2019. And, next week we will continue the rollout at two of the world’s largest fintech and technology events - Singapore Fintech Festival and WebSummit in Lisbon. A lot goes into the making of a brand. This project took well over a year to complete. And, there are many people to thank. First, and foremost it is very lucky when you are a CMO and you work with a CEO like Arik Shtilman who “gets” marketing. It was nice not to have to have the “logo” discussion when convincing him we needed to update the brand, because it isn’t about that. (Hint: it's about demand generation). He was extremely supportive and very involved in the new brand, and I am grateful for his support.

I also have to thank the uber-talented Francine Harris, our Head of Global Communications and Brand who led the project and had unwavering faith in the vision I asked her to deliver. I told her this would not be a success if we were not clear in our intentions, or could define who we are. And, most importantly, I wanted edge. Not for the sake of it, but because what Rapyd does is truly differentiated. We have innovated the Fintech as a Service and Embedded Fintech category. We are not a legacy player that is slapping the “fintech” moniker on what we are doing, nor are we an upstart trying to copy someone else. Rapyd is a genuine company and the new brand totally reflects who we are.

Along with Francine, there are so many people involved at Rapyd and I hope I don’t miss anyone but some of the key players who were critical in getting the new brand and website off the ground form part of an incredible team I get to work with every day including Mark, Brendan, Brian, Amy, Kelsey, Omri, Nofar, Vanessa, Nicole, Dean, Jesse, Brian, and many others.

And, finally, I really want to thank the team at Known, the agency we worked with to create and launch this new and electrifying brand. When we first approached Ross Martin, the agency’s founder he wasn’t sure he wanted to work with us. But, we put those Rapyd values into action and convinced him we were worth his time. It turned out to be a great partnership as the Known team also helped us produce Hack the Galaxy, our global fintech developer initiative. Lots of people were involved, and I will miss some but I have to thank Schutz, Jay, Kayla, Aya, Elisabeth, Paul, Soren, Rovner, David, Kirsten and so many others involved on their end.

I’ll see you around the world over the next few weeks so let me know what you think, or drop me a note in the comments.

And remember to BUILD BOLD!