The challenge

As a scrappy consumer-facing fintech startup in the peer-to-peer lending space, GroupLend was ready to pivot into a business-to-business model, working alongside more traditional “big five” banks. Given GroupLend’s original youthful persona – and key messaging that once centered around disrupting traditional banking – the company required an overhaul for brand identity/persona, key messaging, social and traditional media strategy and stakeholder relations. Since the business would be a first-on-the-market banking innovation, GroupLend needed to introduce (and define) not only new messaging, but new industry terminology.

The solution

Switchboard came alongside the company’s senior communications team to provide strategic direction on core branding elements like identity and persona and copywriting for web throughout the rebrand. An in-depth discovery process refined Grow Financial’s platform to appeal to an older, more corporate target audience, and the Grow and Switchboard teams collaborated to promote new industry terminology: “Enterprise Fintech.” Pre-launch, Switchboard worked alongside Grow to put the finishing touches on the website. Post-launch, Switchboard facilitated media training for the leadership team and helped Grow introduce the media to their new brand and terminology. Finally, Switchboard helped the Grow team enforce brand consistency across internally-managed social media channels.

Results

The company was able to reach a radically different target audience after the implementing the re-branding platform and strategies. While the Grouplend brand appealed to young professionals who were comfortable with risk and disenchanted with the services of traditional big banks, the team was quickly able to use messaging and brand persona to appeal to the big banks themselves – businesses which are notoriously slow-moving and risk-averse. Shortly after rebranding, Grow was white-labeled by reputable financial institutions (brands that would have, weeks before, been positioned as businesses that needed disrupting). The new brand was featured on BNN and Bloomberg TV in addition to the Globe and Mail, BC Business, BetaKit, ITWorld Canada and CrunchBase.