A shortlist for payments companies, trading apps and digital banks, built on fintech brands you can look up today.
By Renua team · October 16, 2026
Every fintech brand has to answer the same awkward question: how do you look new without looking risky?
Lean too far toward the old banks, with the navy blue, the serif logo and the stock photo of a handshake, and nobody notices you. Lean too far the other way and you look like a game, which is not what people want from the company holding their salary.
The good fintech brands find a narrow path between the two. They feel modern, and they still feel safe to trust with money. Few teams find it alone, and the studio you pick decides which side of it you land on.
We picked five studios with public fintech work you can check yourself. The order is not a quality ranking. A global payments network and a seed-stage trading app need very different partners.
Full disclosure: we’re Renua, and we’ve included ourselves. We’ve held our own entry to the same standard as the others, watch-out included.
The short answer
The top fintech branding agencies in 2026 are Pentagram, Wolff Olins, Koto, Qubstudio and Renua. Pentagram and Wolff Olins suit large, established financial brands. Koto is the strongest choice for venture-backed challengers that want to stand out. Qubstudio fits B2B and infrastructure fintechs that need brand and website together. Renua is the boutique option for fintechs that want brand, product and motion designed as one system.
Key Takeaways
- The best fintech brands balance two signals: new enough to notice, safe enough to trust.
- Distinctiveness compounds. After Pentagram’s work, more than three quarters of people could identify Mastercard from its two circles alone.
- Many challenger brands deliberately reject banking blue. Koto swapped Bolt’s financial-services blue for yellow.
- A fintech rebrand doesn’t end at the logo. The app, the cards and every customer email have to change with it.
- Match the studio to your stage. A global consultancy and a startup-focused studio solve different problems.
The five studios at a glance
| Studio | Best suited for | Public fintech proof point |
|---|---|---|
| Pentagram | Global financial brands with decades of equity | Mastercard |
| Wolff Olins | Repositioning an established fintech | Starling |
| Koto | Venture-backed challengers | Fluz, Noah, Bolt |
| Qubstudio | B2B and infrastructure fintech | Ozone API |
| Renua | Brand, product and motion as one system | Freedom Finance Bank, NVO |
What makes fintech branding different
Branding a coffee shop and branding a payments company use the same tools. The stakes are not the same.
Trust comes before personality. A fintech brand is asking people to hand over money, data and sometimes their salary. Expressive design works only on top of clear signals of reliability: consistent typography, careful tone, nothing that looks improvised.
Most fintech brands live inside a product. For a digital bank or a trading app, customers see the logo for a second and the app for hours. If the identity doesn’t work as an interface, it isn’t really working.
Regulation shapes the brand. Disclosures, risk warnings and legal names all have to sit inside the identity without looking bolted on. A good studio designs for them from the start.
Blending in is a real risk. Financial services have a strong default look, and many startups drift toward it as they grow. Koto has argued that this is counterproductive: brands that tone down their distinctiveness to go mainstream end up looking like the incumbents they set out to challenge.
1. Pentagram
Best for: global financial brands with decades of recognition to protect.
The clearest example of fintech branding at the largest scale is Pentagram’s work for Mastercard. In 2016, partners Michael Bierut and Luke Hayman led Mastercard’s first rebrand in twenty years. They kept the two overlapping circles and made the identity work better on screens.
The restraint was the point. Bierut said the team was smart enough not to throw away what Mastercard already owned. Pentagram then built a full identity system around the mark, covering everything from sponsorships to corporate communications and print campaigns.
The payoff came three years later. Mastercard’s research found that more than three quarters of people could identify the brand from the circles alone, so in 2019 Pentagram removed the name from the logo in many contexts.
For a company with real equity, that is the job: work out which parts of the brand people already recognize, and build on them.
Watch-out: Pentagram is built for brands at this scale and budget. A startup without decades of recognition to protect usually needs something to stand out from, not something to preserve.
2. Wolff Olins
Best for: established fintechs that need a new answer to what the brand stands for.
Starling brought in Wolff Olins, alongside The Sunshine Company, for its 2025 overhaul. A bank that had built its reputation on a well-designed app now wanted to be known for something broader than banking, and the name change from “Starling Bank” to “Starling” signalled exactly that.
The visual change came with a strategic one. The new “Good with money” platform repositions Starling around helping people make money management a daily habit. It’s the kind of shift a consultancy like Wolff Olins is built for: changing what the brand means, then designing around it.
For a deeper look at design partners for digital banks specifically, see our guide to the best design agencies for neobanks.
Watch-out: Wolff Olins works at the top of the market. It’s a fit for a scaled fintech with a strategic question and an in-house product team, not for a company that needs its first identity.
3. Koto
Best for: venture-backed fintech challengers that want to stand out from the category.
Koto is a brand and digital studio with offices in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York and Sydney, and it has one of the deepest fintech portfolios among independent studios.
Its work for Fluz, a cashback and earning app, is a good example of branding for a specific audience. The rebrand was built around a strategic shift toward users aged 18 to 32. Fluz’s founder credited Koto’s work on product positioning for how strongly it resonated with the brand’s Gen Z audience.
For Bolt, a checkout technology company, Koto did something many fintech brands are afraid to do. It replaced Bolt’s friendly financial-services blue with “Lightning Yellow” and built snappy motion around the idea of speed.
For Bolt, a checkout technology company, Koto did something many fintech brands are afraid to do. It replaced Bolt’s friendly financial-services blue with “Lightning Yellow” and built snappy motion around the idea of speed.
Watch-out: Koto’s work is bold by design. If your board or regulators expect a conservative look, make sure the appetite for distinctiveness is shared before the project starts.
4. Qubstudio
Best for: B2B, open banking and infrastructure fintechs that need brand and website done together.
Not every fintech sells to consumers. Infrastructure and B2B companies have a different branding problem: they need to look credible to banks and developers, and explain something complex quickly.
Qubstudio’s work for Ozone API, a UK open banking company, covered a rebrand and a website redesign. The studio reports that website views increased by 260% after the rebrand. Qubstudio also has deep banking product experience, including the app for ila Bank, Bahrain’s first digital-only bank.
That mix is useful for infrastructure fintechs. The brand, the website and the developer-facing product all have to tell the same story to a technical buyer.
Watch-out: Qubstudio’s strongest proof is in product UX and websites. If you need a highly expressive consumer identity, compare its identity portfolio closely with brand-first studios.
5. Renua
Best for: fintechs that want brand identity, product design and motion built as one system.
Renua is a product design and branding studio based in Switzerland and Estonia. Its fintech work sits where brand and product meet, which is where most fintech brands either hold together or fall apart.
For Freedom Finance Bank, Renua designed a scalable system around simplicity, usability and motion, covering product design, brand identity, motion and campaign design. The identity was built to work across interfaces, campaigns and digital communication. Renua also explored how it could extend to physical cards in a bank card series concept.
Cruz, a self-initiated digital banking concept featured on Behance, took the opposite direction from banking convention. With no client brief to follow, the studio explored what a financial product could look like if it felt more accessible, expressive and culturally relevant for a younger audience, combining typography, motion and illustration into one identity.
Renua’s fintech portfolio also includes NVO, a trading experience that combines motion systems, product design and fintech branding, SmartCredit.io, and Ape AI, an AI market companion for investors. Its Web3 finance clients include PancakeSwap and LooksRare.
Watch-out: if you run a global institution with decades of brand equity, Pentagram or Wolff Olins have the track record for that scale, and Renua doesn’t. Renua fits growing fintechs where brand and product have to move in step. Its Clutch reviews include requests for more frequent meetings during early branding, which is easy to fix if you agree a schedule up front.
Rebranding a fintech product, or building one from scratch? See Renua’s fintech work or tell us what you’re building.
Should a fintech look like a bank?
Most fintech branding briefs come back to this, and the five studios above would answer it in different ways.
Pentagram’s Mastercard work shows the case for continuity. When a symbol has fifty years of recognition, the smartest move is to protect it.
Koto’s work shows the case for difference. A new company has no equity to protect, and looking like an incumbent only makes it easier to ignore. Nubank made the same bet with its purple, chosen at founding to reject the blues of traditional finance.
Our view: a new fintech should look different from a bank, and behave more reliably than one. Distinctiveness gets you noticed. Consistency, in every screen and every message, is what makes people stay.
How to choose a fintech branding agency
Match the studio to your stage. A global consultancy will scope your project like a global consultancy. A startup-focused studio will move faster, and may be less experienced with large organizations.
Ask how the brand gets into the product. For most fintechs, the app is where customers meet the brand. If the studio hands over a brand book and leaves, someone else has to translate it into hundreds of screens.
Ask about regulated content. Risk warnings, disclosures and legal names are part of the brand. Ask how the studio has handled them before.
Ask who designs the card. If you issue cards, the card is the brand’s most portable asset. It should be part of the identity work, not an afterthought.
Prepare before you hire. The best briefs come from teams who already know why they’re rebranding and what must survive. Our fintech rebrand checklist covers what to prepare.
FAQ
What does a fintech branding agency do?
It builds the brand strategy, visual identity, tone of voice and often the digital experience for a financial technology company. The best fintech branding agencies understand trust, regulation and how a brand has to work inside an app, not just in marketing.
How long does a fintech rebrand take?
The identity work itself usually takes a few months. The rollout often takes longer, because the app, cards, website, emails and legal documents all have to change. Mastercard’s 2016 rebrand was rolled out gradually across its products and services.
Should a fintech startup hire a big branding agency?
Usually not at first. Large consultancies are built for established brands with significant budgets. Startups tend to get more from studios that work at their speed and can connect brand and product.
Why do so many fintech brands avoid blue?
Blue has been the default colour of banking for decades. Challenger brands like Nubank chose other colours to signal that they were different from traditional banks. Blue still works for some brands, but it makes standing out harder.
What’s the difference between a fintech rebrand and a refresh?
A refresh updates how the brand looks. A rebrand changes what it stands for, and often its name, audience or positioning. Starling’s 2025 work, which changed the name, visual identity and brand platform at once, is a full rebrand.
A brand you can trust with money
Fintech branding is a strange discipline. It has to make people feel something about a product they’d rather not think about too much.
The studios on this list do it in different ways: by protecting fifty years of equity, by rejecting the category’s colours, or by making brand and product move together. The right choice depends less on who’s best and more on what your brand needs to prove next.
Renua designs brands and products for fintech, AI and Web3 companies. If you want brand identity, product and motion designed as one system, see our fintech work or get in touch.