neobt
A new digital experience from Banca Transilvania
By 2019 the terms of banking had been rewritten by the challengers. Fintech apps and neobanks had set a new standard for what a bank should feel like on a phone — fast, effortless, designed around the customer rather than the branch — and next to them, the online banking of incumbent institutions felt slow and dated. For Banca Transilvania, Romania’s largest bank, the risk was concrete: the customers most worth keeping were the ones most easily tempted by an app that simply worked better. Bolting features onto legacy online banking would not close that gap. BT engaged Brandient to create a genuinely new digital brand and experience — one that could stand comparison with the fintech challengers on their own terms.
The strategic questions came before the design. What should this new digital offer be called, what should it promise, and where should it sit within the bank’s portfolio — a distinct brand, yet unmistakably an expression of BT’s scale and trust rather than a start-up pretending not to be a bank? Brandient answered them together: the name NeoBT — Neo for the new generation, BT for the institution behind it — positioned the platform as the next generation of banking from a bank customers already trusted, borrowing the challengers’ energy without borrowing their fragility.
From there the experience was rebuilt from the ground up. The whole interface was rethought and redesigned from scratch to match the ease and immediacy people had come to expect from the best fintech apps, and the brand was carried right into the interaction itself through branded gestures — the motions of using the app treated as brand properties, so that the moments of banking that carry the most feeling, moving money, checking a balance, are moments the brand shapes rather than leaves to a generic interface.
NeoBT gave an incumbent leader a digital-native brand and experience it could take to the customers the challengers were courting — proof that scale and modern experience need not be a trade-off.
Client:
Banca Transilvania
Industry:
Banking, Financial Services and Fintech
Project type:
New brand creation
Date:
2019
Services:
Brand Positioning, Brand Name, Narratives and Voice, Logo and Visual Identity Program, Digital Design, Brand Guidelines
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