REBRANDING
fidelity service bureau
Summary
The Fidelity brand is very strong. From the green, to the iconic pyramid, to the Fidelity font, the company takes very seriously how its brand is used.
On the other hand, institutional traders generally don't care about branding. What specific shade of green should be used in their power points isn't high on their list of priorities. Which is probably why no one had updated the design of the reports we were sending to our clients in many, many years. They were badly out of date with our current brand standards, with our compliance and legal groups, and many of them had no branding at all. Our invoices were built by hand every month and it was difficult to tell what company they were from. As the only designer in the group, it fell to me to update the branding of the reports coming out of the platform I was responsible for, and to create a entirely new brand for the offshoot company (Fidelity Service Bureau) who's reports also came out of Products Portal.
Creating a brand for an offshoot entity is challenging. There are many Fidelity rules and guidelines, of course, and incorporating some of the elements of the Fidelity brand is important. You don't want to squander 80 years of trust and expertise. However, it's important to be distinct as well. I tried to balance a modern and eye-catching design with remaining true to the spirit of Fidelity's relatively minimalist approach.
From old...
Our offshoot company (FGBG) is prominently displayed, while the actual name of the technology platform (Fidelity Service Bureau) that we market to clients is not even on here. The iconic pyramid is very prominent as well, but is cut off arbitrarily, which is a major violation of Fidelity brand standards. The blue is fine, but the orange and crimson highlights in the top right are also very far from the normal Fidelity brand and aren't even acceptable accent colors. Overall, it's very busy, the spacing is very poor, and isn't a good representation of Fidelity's usual attention to detail.
...to new
"Fidelity Service Bureau" is prominent, and has lots of room to breathe. The spacing issues are resolved, and we added the client name to the report, so we can more easily standardize report titles. We added how often the report comes out as well, after getting feedback from users. we added necessary disclosures and updated the font to the Fidelity Font from Arial.
The modern aesthetic comes from the slight blue-to-dark blue horizontal gradient. It draws the eye to the "Fidelity Service Bureau" logo without being garish. We implemented that slight gradient across the platform as way to bind the design together.
From basic...
This is an example of a hand created invoice we were sending our broker clients. I know that huge institutions don't even look at the branding on an invoice, but the people who work there do. At some basic level, having professionally designed invoices instills a level of trust in the counterparty that is absolutely necessary in today's relationship-driven environment. Being proud of the communications you deliver to your clients, knowing they are intentional and professional, allows you to focus on building that relationship instead of apologizing for how things look.
...to professional
Because "Fidelity Service Bureau" is a technology platform and not a broker-dealer, it can't directly invoice it's own clients. We created an entity to do that, called "Fidelity Prime Financing", which also needed its own branding. As the third entity I created branding for, this one much more closely matches the Fidelity Institutional trading styles and the 3-color bar in the middle of the page was a Fidelity Capital Markets hallmark for 10 years.